No one would have ever, even in their wildest imagination, thought that the web-slinging superhero from New York would be roaming the streets of Cairo trying to get a taste of everyday life.
Hossam Atef has been parading the streets of the Egyptian city dressed as the Marvel comics superhero, Spider Man in an attempt to capture photographs of the daily lives of the residents of the city, reported Al-Arabiya News.
The idea of a man in a superhero costume going around the city was suggested by Hossam Atef, who wanted to project the struggles people endure on a daily basis.
“A normal day for us is not like a normal day for other people. It’s really hard, with the traffic and the noise and everyone is in everybody else’s space,” says Hossam Atef, a 20-year-old photographer, who runs Antikka Photography.
He highlighted several problems people have to endure, such as how the buses don’t stop for passengers, how there are constant power cuts, and thousands of people are made to wait in one metro station.
Hossam, along with his friend Atef, who is a chef by profession donned the superhero costume as they were intrigued by the idea of what would happen “if Spider Man spent a normal day of an Egyptian’s life,” reported the website for Daily News.
Since then, pictures of Spider Man experimenting with the rigours of daily life in Cairo have gone viral on the internet.
“All Egyptians are superheroes for enduring these difficulties every day,” Hossam Atef told the BBC.
The photo shoot though has not been a smooth drive as the men have been stopped countless times by the police who have demanded to see the identification documents of the man behind the mask. Despite that, most people, especially children, were thrilled to see the masked vigilante, wandering the streets, wearing his trademark red and blue suit.
“Children were totally convinced that this was Spider Man, but older men thought he was one of President Sisi’s men who will bring justice to Egypt, and they kept telling him, ‘God bless you’,” Atef told the Al-Watan website.
He also told the website about the excitement of the younger people in the crowd, saying that many of them also wanted to take selfies with the superhero.
According to Al-Arabiya News, news of the two youngsters putting a comic spin on the struggles of life in the Egypt came a year after Cairo was ranked 122nd out of a total of 140 cities around the world in the 2013 Global Livability Ranking conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
Published in The Express Tribune, December 13th, 2014.
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