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Drinks and schmaltzy jazz with the good looking Norweigans at After 8 :

(Alan and Cecilia, Lisa and me, Cecilia again)

Three of the things you can buy at the very large friday market:

(little pet fish, old broken toys, camel's feet)

Towla at our regular qahwa:

(Liam and Joel; an old man playing next to us)

Flags for Ramadan, in the City of the Dead

This is the Zamalek apartment building where Edward Said lived as a child, on the fifth floor.

This is a more or less typical old, abandoned, crumbling mansion in the quiet streets of Zamalek. One day soon I will buy this building, or one just like it, with purple flowers on the tree and a big wrought iron gate and I will do it up completely and it will have a gallery and studio spaces in it, and a cafe with live music and rooms for rent and a little bookstore, and if you want to join me, you are probably more than welcome.

Joel vs Camel:

Joel has fast become one of my favourite people I have ever met, by the way. In this picture he is wearing his little league baseball shirt from Maadi baseball league, in Cairo, from when he was a little tiger.

balzobt!

a piecemeal picture of my life, this week:

• Joel and I have been recording songs, using my ipod and italk. The songs are all entirely improvised and without any form of planning or rehersal. Some of them are good, some of them are quite bad. Most of them feature Joel playing guitar, and both of us singing. Sometimes I also do things like beatbox or clap or make weird noises or play harmonica. The other night we recorded 21 songs in two hours. We will be recording many more in the coming week, and then will cut them down to one album, which may very well be available for mail-order. Here are some quick descriptions of some of the highlights:

1. Joel plays an up-beat strum and I let loose with a solid beatbox over the top. He then sings the line "animals crying out for their dying young" over and over. The song lasts for one minute and ends with us meowing like sick kittens.
2. Kind of a reggae number, lasting 10 minutes, about how much we like black people, which ends up being effectively a list of every single famous African American we can think of, from P. Diddy to Rosa Parks to Thomas Jefferson's illegitimate wife.
3. A lullaby about engaging in warfare against developing countries, complete with bomb sounds.
4. A country number about Jackson Pete of the rodeo, his trip to Mexico and his adventures with the matadors there.
5. A Modest-Mouse inspired rock song about how hot the room was getting without the air conditioner on, and how nice it became again once I switched it on again, mid-song.

• It's Ramadan, and I'm hungry. Between the hours of sometime-before-I'm-ever-awake and, like, 7 pm, everything is closed, the supermarket, the falafel shop, the swanky cafes... and it seems as though the kushari stores have shut down completely for the month, their windows white-washed and big silver pots gone. I am left to raid my stash of Twinkies, or eat dry pita sold by the lady with one eye who sits on the road outside the house. The weirdest, and coolest thing, is the hour of the iftar, 5.30-6.30pm. The streets of the city, usually clotted and thick with traffic and shouting and smoke and car horns, are suddenly incredibly quiet. You can stand there, and hear no bleating for a full, like, 20 seconds. All across the middle east people are in their houses, breaking bread with their families. It's a beautiful thing, like the eye of a cyclone. Yesterday our house was without food stocks, and our three stomachs were growling in chorus, so Lisa made pancakes which we ate with jam and honey, our own little iftar. And we sang that R Kelly song but changed the words so it went "After the show it's the iftar party," etc, etc, oh the warm feelings of togetherness, etc.
• Yesterday, in order to scare me, a teenager was riding his bike very very fast towards me, as I walked in the otherwise mostly empty streets, and I didn't see him until he was about three metres from me and I looked up, and he quickly shouted "Hiwan!" at me, which means animal, and frightened me very very much and swerved his bike quickly out of the way. Later that night some kids asked Joel and I for money and when we didn't give it to them they threw some broken toy at my head.
• We have a new coffeeshop where we go at night, where the streets are throbbing with people and the soft colours of the Ramadan lanterns. We are still playing backgammon (/towla/sheshbesh/mahbouza) a lot, but have moved onwards, also, to dominoes, which truely is a game of champions. I had always considered it kind of a children's game for some reason, but these men, my god, they count the tiles and they know exactly what you have at all times and they are insanely good. We play on boards carpeted with blue felt, and are slowly learning to hold 7 tiles in one hand. We drink a lot of tea and karkadai, and every night make brand new friends.
• Tomorrow we have no school because it is Army Day. This is what I like to call it (Yaum al-Gaysh) but really it is October 6th, which is the day Egypt finally beat Israel in a war, after, like three attempts over 25 years, and managed to take back Sinai. So, we are all going to celebrate the valiant triumph of their crafty soldiers while simultaneously not eating, drinking water, smoking, or engaging in sexual acts, and we couldn't possibly do all this and have school on the same day.
• Balzobt means 'exactly' in Arabic, and it is my word for the day. When you say it, it actually sounds like Bezzobt. My word for the day yesterday was 'Benifsigi' which means purple.
• Things I saw during a walk in Fustat the other evening (Masr al-Fustat is the old old, mostly Christian city, which used to be a seperate city altogether from the later established Masr al-Qahira, but which today has, of course, been totally enveloped by the the urban sprawl, and is now mostly just called Old Cairo:

1. A boy riding a scrawny donkey with peroxided mane and hitting it hard with a rod to try and make it move. When he could not, he and some men just decided to lift the donkey up and into a cart pulled by another donkey. The peroxided donkey, despite its bruised ribs, looked proud to be transported this way.
2. An old Egyptian Jewish man, one of only 200 or so who remain in Cairo, who thought I was Jewish too, spoke to me in Hebrew and invited me to Rosh Hashana prayers at the old cobwebby synagogue last night. When I explained I was not, in fact, Jewish, he tried to sell me gold Coptic jewellery.
3. The spring where, according to tradition, the baby Moses was found in the bullrushes.
4. Little laneways, decorated with strings of paper flags.
5. The first mosque built in Egypt, although almost all of it has been rebuilt and it's not all that impressive, although it has nice lanterns all around it.
6. The violent red sphere of the sun through the haze.

Peace be upon you all.

Alexandria

in the name of god, the most merciful


Late afternoon, Friday. We rise from wicker chairs to walk along the Alexandria cornish. The sky is clear and smooth, the colour of birds eggs. Young couples stroll. Boys wield huge wooden crucifixes laden with cotton candy, pink and white puffs in plastic pillows. The city wraps itself around the cove, pulled in a tight smile. Fishermen cast long rods into the Mediterranean, rich and blue and stretching proudly towards Greece.

the view from our two-inch deep hotel balcony

We are taken by this city, she whose streets are lined with old pharmacies, whose trams clatter slowly between the horse drawn carriages and the bleating taxis, whose midans are green and dotted with park benches, whose air smells good, whose history is long and bold but almost completely faded from sight. Where once a gigantic lighthouse flashed fire at passing galleys, where traders and merchants pulled ashore for spices and whores, where Cleopatra's palace once stood on a site now well below the waves.

self portrait on the two-inch deep hotel balcony

lisa with joel's sunglasses, coffee shop on the cornish

joel attempting to self-portait on the two-inch deep hotel balcony.

We reach the new library on the coast in the east of the city. Its glass wall slopes away from the sea, a huge clear hill under which people burrow like ants in a colony of desks and and displays and the narrow stacks of books, shelves only slightly filled and yearning for new stock. The interior rises like some pyramid temple, its many levels glowing with a million tiny lights, like fireflies.

all the above: the beautiful alexandria library

Outside there is a concert, an event to oppose violence and terror, with bands bathed in red and yellow light under the blue dome of the planetarium. Lisa befriends a short haired Egyptian girl, independent and brazen and slightly sarcastic. I am taking to Amir, a gentle man who works in a sustainable development NGO. I am talking to Amir, but I am also watching the young Egyptian girls, because they are not only young and attractive, but they are dancing and they are hanging around in groups with boys and they are showing their hair and, perhaps even, a sliver of their stomachs, all things that are rare in Egypt, at least in the places I've been frequenting.

the planetarium and the stage

But here comes little Hamm, the best five year old dancer Egypt has ever seen! His body is wiggling like a worm and then, suddenly he is on the floor and trying his hand at some break moves! He is a sure fire crowd pleaser. We dance together in the crowd, we are the centre of attention, we are a famous team. We can charm anything. But then, when my back is turned, off he goes to entertain none other but the Keri Russell-haired girl I have been watching the most! She laughs so much at him. I am left alone and unnoticed. The little deserter.

hamm

That night there is, on my plate, fish and squid and shrimp the size of small boats. And a whole mine field of mezze. Our strict budget takes a time out for our one night on the coast.

The following day we walk a long distance through the streets of Alex, visit the old Roman catacombs (which were only discovered 100 years ago when a donkey and its cart fell through the earth), drink tangerine beverages, slap palms with a hundred school boys, buy things (me=two posters of female arabic pop stars, one poster of Gamal Abdel Nasser, five stickers of female arabic pop stars, two 1970s arabic body building magazines), ride a tram about 100 metres, and meet up with our new Egyptian friends from the night before. Amir takes us to the train station to get return tickets but we discover that all the trains are booked up for the rest of the night. And, thus, the bus. Our hearts are shattered and broken - we love the train. But Amir knows just how to pick up our spirits: we head out for kushari and fresh sugar cane and date juices. And there's just enough time for a quick visit to the local sporting club, which costs 10,000 euros for a life time membership and is the size of a medium sized village, and where all the rich kids come to hang out and eat ice cream and take cell-phone photos. Lisa is stunned and excited by the concept of an outdoor laps pool ("Wow," she says), and I pick out 16 year old girls for Joel to go talk to. We only end up talking to Amir, some jolly mothers and some special needs kids who are selling wooden flowers they made in craft class.

And then the bus, on which the driver is merciful with the movie volume, but it is dark and I cannot sleep and my ipod is out of batteries. I play 'rotation' on my mobile all the back, back home, to Cairo.

The roman catacombs

My bodybuilding magazines.