Crying with Obama in Cairo

-
Was lucky enough to spend a few days in Cairo , for a seminar. My third brief visit. I was told that this tower was built by Nasser and funded by an American bribe in return for not building the Aswan Dam, which of course he eventually built anyway. Other than to look attractive (it also lights up at night) it serves no apparent purpose. Early Wednesday morning, this was the view from my hotel window. But most of my attention was on CNN and I found tears running down my cheeks during Obama's victory speech. The Egyptians, like nearly everyone else, were heartened by his victory


There are an estimated 20 million people living in Cairo - a quarter of Egypt's population. 100,000 of them live in the cemetary. Noisy, congested and dangerously polluted, Cairo still has the buzz of a great city. Forget about pedestrian crossings. To cross the road, you have to wade into six lanes of honking old cars and hope for the best.



Food is brought in by employing a variety of integrated transport systems.


Found this beautiful old Pontiac (alongside a Morris Minor and a 1950s Jaguar all well preserved) not far from the hotel.



The Manial Palace (now a museum ) is said to have been built for Prince Mohammad Ali between 1899 and 1929. The palace was given to the Egyptian nation in 1955. Prince Muhammad Ali was the first cousin of King Faruq and the younger brother of Khedive Abbas II Hilmi. So now you know.

Casual conversations in Cairo revealed, worryingly, that Mubarak's regime is disintegrating and no-one knows what's going to happen when he exits the arena. But no-one seemed overly perturbed. The Egyptian people have been around for a long time and stoically and cheerfully survive everything their chaotic country throws at them. As long as the the Nile flows undisturbed through Cairo's heart they will somehow survive this hiccup in their history too.

On my last night in Cairo I went to jazz concert supported by various European embassies. These Nubian frame drummers from Aswan played with a great Cuban band.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Unfinished Apartheid Thriller

-
Image
                 An Israeli Prime Minister as imagined by the DALL-E AI programme     About six months ago, I was revisited by the writing bug and decided to try my hand at fiction  - a "diplomatic thriller" to be more specific. The choice of genre was not dictated by any literary preferences. I'm not a big fan of thrillers. But the idea was to use the thriller as the most suitable vehicle to write about what was really bugging me - Israel's inevitable slide into apartheid.      I also thought that my professional experience might come in handy. For more than two decades I worked as the press officer for the EU Delegation to Israel and followed the sometimes turbulent relations between Israel and the European Union from the vantage point of an Israeli working inside the EU, in other words as someone with a split identity. I believed that this familiarity with the mind-sets and decision making processes of both sides would somehow provide me with the tools to weave a b
Read more

Four Views From the Roof - Introduction

-
Image
  Four Views From the Roof   Introduction      In 1994, against the advice of friends and family, we managed to scrape together the deposit for a dilapidated three room, third floor flat in an old apartment building on Yehuda Halevi Street in south Tel Aviv.  It was all we could afford if we wanted to put down a stake in Tel Aviv.    The building and its environs literally reeked of negligence. The once impressive but now deserted building opposite ours that had once served as a courthouse, was populated by  drunks and junkies. To the west was tumbledown Neve Tzedek just starting to attract artists and students. To the east was a business area heavy on cheap eateries, wholesale textiles and low-end fashion outlets. Old men on tricycles navigated long bales of textiles against the traffic on the narrow streets (and still do). On parallel Lilienblum Street, dubious characters would whisper “Dollar? Dollar?” to passers-by interested in by-passing official restrictions against holding for
Read more