First impressions of a city are worth recording because the place will never look the same again. Within a few days, the mind’s blank slate is etched with the patterns of emerging habits, and these will mark all subsequent experiences. What follows is necessarily telegraphic in style, with no pretension to originality. Everyone gets to arrive in Cairo a first time.

Day 1: Thursday, March 1 The flight from Brussels to Cairo is on Alitalia, via Milan. A front-page article in that morning’s Herald Tribune is about how the Egyptian government has let down the people of Cairo, and how Cairo’s poor are managing by themselves in the absence of public infrastructure. Promising. Everyone on the plane seems to be reading it. What’s interesting is that very few of the women travelling to Cairo are wearing headscarves. Does poverty and conservative dress correlate? I presume so, but that’s one presumption I remind myself to check up on in the coming weeks. (By contrast, in the US, moral conservatives are not generally found among the poorest.)

An exceptionally speedy airport arrival process later, I’m in a cab on my way to Cairo, along the airport road. Absolute first impression: Cairo is more normal than I had imagined it, and richer than Pakistan, my last major experience in the Islamic world. The driving is genteel compared to the chaos that was Pakistan.

Along the road, there seems to be a surfeit of pharaonic monumental art, and we pass by several statues of Ramses II, who has a predilection for traffic roundabouts. It’s not warmer than 22 degrees — perfect, especially with rolled-down windows. First datapoint — the nicer the car, the less likely any women in it will have headscarves on.

In fact, the more I look at pedestrians, the more women’s fashion seems polarized — it’s either traditional garb with headscarf, or flashy western. If there is a middle ground, it is lost amid the extremes. (Or maybe it’s just early days.) In subsequent days, I’ve only seen two women in full hijab, though I haven’t gone to the more traditional areas. Headscarves ceased to be a head-turner after day one for me, but I still am curious about the motivation behind wearing them — unlike in Europe, there is no identity politics to play here — or maybe I’m just not privy to it yet.

A roadblock. Some VIP is travelling on the main highway ahead, and so the army closes all the feeder roads to ease his way. Drivers get progressively more annoyed with the lone soldier holding up traffic at the on-ramp, en when the all-clear finally comes, he has to scurry to the sidewalk to avoid being run over. Silver lining: we get to drive on the VIP’s coattails all the way into town.

Somebody is shouting in Arabic on the car radio, for the duration of the trip into town. A demonstration? A political diatribe? Angry extremists? I ask. It’s football, two local teams. I can tell when the goals are made from the tone of the voice, just not which side scored.

The destination is Zamalek, the upscale island in the middle of the Nile, where many of the embassies are. I had had a room lined up in a big shared apartment there, but it fell through. The person who was supposed to be leaving wanted to stay longer, and I was welcome to sleep on the sofa until I found another place. None of that. I booked myself into the Lonely Planet’s favorite mid-level accommodation, Hotel Longchamps, and set to work finding another place to live. It was 4pm.

First, though, I would need a local phone number. I set out in a spiral pattern from my hotel along the streets of Zamalek, and soon enough found a mobile phone store who’d sell me an Egyptian sim card. Here’s my new Egyptian phone number: +20 18 352 7638. I also found some bookshops, some cafés, and internet cafés. Many of these I would visit repeatedly in the coming days. The coffee in Cairo is excellent, I am happy to report.

Cairo has far more high-rises than I imagined — the buildings are sand colored, higher and closer together, and Zamalek is denser than an examination of Google Earth had led me to believe.

Day 2: Friday, March 2 I have work to do. Hotel Longchamps has a wireless internet connection, so I spend the morning on the terrace catching up on work emails. I also email friends of friends that I’ve been told to contact in Cairo. By the afternoon, I’ve been invited to a dinner party that evening. I also manage to get in touch with an old friend and fellow SAIS alumnus from my Bologna days, now working for an NGO in Cairo. He’s travelling all of March, and had offered me his apartment, but I had said no. I now say yes, please. I thus get some breathing room in the apartment hunt.

Before the party, it’s time to get my head shaved at a local barber I had spotted. It’s probably the best shave ever, and it comes with a head massage and then the application of a hot towel. All for a quarter of the price of in Sweden — 25 £E.

The dinner party is great. In attendance are assorted expats working for NGOs in Cairo, or passing through Cairo to and from Darfur. It turns out I had already been in email contact with one of them, a blogger — it’s a small world.

There is something about self-selecting groups that make them so fascinating — what motivates people to move to Cairo? Learning Arabic, Islamic studies, journalism, Egyptology, human rights, documentary photography, development aid… Not the types to settle in the suburbs and get cable TV. This means interesting people with interesting stories.

Day 3: Saturday, March 3 I check out of the Longchamps and head for my friend’s apartment down the road — I don’t have much with me, so it is an easy move. The apartment is huge, with a view of the Nile. Just no internet. That’s fine, as my explorations in the afternoon find several more cafés with internet access, and a proper internet café as well, with mini offices and some serious bandwidth that will set me back €1 per hour. I try Second Life to chat with a person in Sweden, and it works without a hiccup. In other words, the slight gamble has paid off — I’ll be able to work on building Sweden’s virtual embassy in Second Life from Cairo.

In the meantime, an ad for a room posted on a Yahoo group for Cairo scholars leads me to an apartment in central Zamalek. There is a room available, and my roommates would be a Bosnian and an Italian PhD candidate. I could move in by the end of the month. The timing works — I’ll have my friend’s apartment for a few weeks, and then I’ll be in Sweden for a week for meetings at the end of the month.

Day 4: Sunday, March 4 Time for some sightseeing. Pyramids, anyone? In the afternoon, I find a very western-looking supermarket — in fact, both in terms of choice and prices, I feel like I am back in Sweden. I also decide to take the apartment.