As I now always do, new locations mentioned in this post are added to my Google Earth network link. Open this link and keep it in your saved places in Google Earth to get automatic updates on where I’ve been.Sorry about not posting earlier, but sometimes the choice is between new experiences and new posts, and Cairo is certainly not lacking in new experiences. Just look at the past few days:
Weekends here start on Thursday evenings — As I work remotely with Europe, my Fridays stay productive, but even the foreigners here have adapted to the time-shifted weekend.Friday and Saturday are the rest days, and Sundays are the first day of the work week. Every Thursday at 6pm, the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo holds a highly regarded lecture on some aspect of Egyptology or Arabic studies. I had agreed to meet up with one of the people working there, we’ll call her the Belgian egyptologist, who had helped me with early advice about Cairo via Cairo Scholars, Surely blogging qualifies as a scholarly pursuit?that Yahoo group for foreign researchers.
The lecture itself was held by the head of the Egyptian Antiquities Information System, and he made copious use of Google Earth to show the villages that have been built wholesale on top of ancient tombs in Luxor, and the effort underway to move the inhabitants. He was surprisingly critical of the whole project, largely because it looks like the structures owned by the poor are the ones that are going to be demolished, whereas those owned by the rich can stay. I had a chat with him afterwards, as there is plenty of opportunity here to put his entire georeferenced catalogue of ancient Egyptian archaeological sites on Google Earth. We’ll see how that pans out.
Then it was time for a mini-reception at the institute, where I met a Belgian arabist and her husband, who works with geographic information systems (GIS) here in Cairo. Another Google Earth user! After the lecture, it was time to hit the gym at the Marriott, and then to meet up with the Belgian egyptologist and some of her friends to go see Wust el balad perform.
Wust el balad, I was informed, is the best band in Egypt. And it turns out that my new friends know the band quite well. The venue was After Eight, a place at the end of a dark alley that in fact feels exactly like a posh New York bar once you’re inside, I’m thinking the back of Time Cafe in late 90s New York. The band trickled in, very friendly, and Mac users to boot, so there was plenty to talk about. The place quickly grew packed with Cairo’s monied twenty-somethings — not a veil in sight, of course; the dress code is wholly western.
And then Wust el balad began to play — two percussionists, a bass guitar and three acoustic guitars, of which two sang. They are indeed very good, and also very versatile — plaintive egyptian classics one minute, flamenco the next, then a popular ballad that has people dancing on the tables if they aren’t video recording the performance with their mobile phones, then some more of their home-grown songs — often, they sounded like a jazzier version of the Gypsy Kings. Great stuff, and they really drive home the fact that Flamenco and modern Arabic music share the same cultural roots.
I had to clock off by 3am, as I was working on Friday, though nobody else seemed in any hurry to leave. Already there were plans for Saturday evening: the band’s guitarist had the previous afternoon seen a performance by Curro and Carlos Piñana, two brothers who are part of a new wave of Spanish flamenco musicians, and he was raving about Carlos’s guitar playing. We could catch them the next day.
And so we did. Together with the Belgian egyptologist and a French French teacher The art of cab taking is one I am now mastering, and which deserves an entire post on its own.we took a cab from Zamalek into Islamic Cairo, where we met up with a Canadian teacher, the Belgian arabist and her GIS husband. The concert was held in the courtyard of an immaculately restored Caravanserai, the Al-Ghuri Wikala. Again, people with mobile phones were recording bits and pieces of the concert. Here is what they sounded like a few days earlier:
The second half of the concert was something of an experiment. The flamenco players had done a workshop with a traditional Egyptian music group — the kind whose music Both Passion and Passion Sources remain some of the most listened-to music in my iTunes collection.Peter Gabriel sampled for the soundtrack of the Last Temptation of Christ, and whose rhythms are very dense and driven. They simply fused the two groups together, so we had flamenco singing with Egyptian rhythms and flamenco guitar with Egyptian voices. The similarities were remarkable, and produced some spine-tingling moments.
Then it was time for a drink — and that’s not something you do in Islamic Cairo, so we took a cab to downtown, Yes, so the band is actually called “Downtown”.or “wust el-balad” in Arabic, to “One of just a handful of traditional cafes offering beer (and the only one to flaunt it), this rundown Cairo landmark is definitely worth a visit. The high ceilings and open-panel windows have great potential, but the management has done little to preserve the 1930s ambiance. The tables are flimsy and the floors are filthy, but the crowd is always interesting. Sober chess players congregate in one corner, while drunken poets, artists and writers talk shop late into the night.”Horreya, an artists’ café that reminds me of a Belgian working class “brown café, with neon lights overhead and a tiled floor that can take the fallen shells of eaten nuts.
Here they served big cold bottles of Stella beer — not the Belgian brand, but Egypt’s own variety, and they went down well. In one corner of the cafe, old-timers play chess, but you can’t take your beers there, as they don’t approve of all this beer drinking by the aging artists over in the other corner. It’s all very amusing.
This is also the moment I discovered that there were willing Scrabble players in the group — English, French or Arabic, I could choose. The only question — where, if at all, do you get a Scrabble set in Cairo? More about my Scrabble quest in a coming post.
Then it was time to go to a party: A Dutch DJ was playing at a student apartment nearby. First, we bought some beers “to go” at Horreya (how civilized!). A short walk later, and then 10 flights of stairs higher in the absence of a functioning elevator, we arrived at a very improbably place indeed — a duplex penthouse with a terrace and views of the Nile to kill for, and yet it was a student apartment, run-down in a way that having 150 guests over didn’t matter all that much. On the top floor, a big lounge with wraparound windows, shisha pipes, lots of cushions and a psychedelic ceiling… and a DJ and people dancing. How very unlike the Cairo I had imagined.
What I have come to expect by now, less than three weeks after having arrived here, is that wherever I go, I will run into somebody I’ve met before, And so it was that the Reuters editor and Arabic student I met at that dinner party in the first days after I arrived were there as well.
And then it was Saturday — time to go to the Marriott and recover a little from Cairo’s pace.