Sunday. For Cairenes, the first day of the work week. My task for the day: Find a Scrabble set.

Where to begin? I reckon that my best chances are at what I’m told is Cairo’s best English-language bookshop — the bookshop on the campus of the American University of Cairo, downtown.

Newly confident in the ways of taxi-taking after a weekend initiation by my new friends, I decide to take one for the short hop across the Nile. Here’s the trick: You can’t ask how much it’s going to be — you have to know already, and you have to have the exact change ready. Ask how much it costs, and the price doubles. Ask for change, and their pockets are mysteriously empty.

So what you do is flag a taxi down, state your destination at the window, and get in. Don’t mention any price; and don’t say much, lest they figure out you’re new and gullible. When you arrive, hand the driver the money and get out in one fluid motion. So how much does a ride cost? For most rides around downtown, I’ll give 5 £E — €0.70. That’s still a 25% premium over what the locals pay, but considering our wage discrepancies, I’m happy to spread the stuff around.

AUC lets me on their campus after I surrender my passport. The bookshop lets me in after I surrender my bag. And then, a wonderful sight: The very first book I see, a staff favorite pick in the very middle of the bookcase facing the entrance, is Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. You know what I think of the book, but this truly is an unexpected minor triumph for free speech in Egypt. I decide I love this bookshop.

They have a real philosophy section here too, populated mainly by Friedrich Nietzsche, as the current term’s course is covering him. I ask for Spinoza’s Ethics, and it’s in stock. I ask for a Scrabble set.

Ah. That’s a bit more difficult. The friendly woman behind the counter thinks I should try Alpha Market, a kind of Egyptian K-Mart, of which there is a branch near the Cairo Zoo. She shows me on a map — it’s on the way to Giza.

I decide i will take the underground metro in the general direction and then walk. The metro is remarkably modern and clean, and costs about €0.10 a ride. A train arrives just as I do so I get on quickly. But there is something strange about this carriage. It takes me a few stops to figure it out: There are no women on board. Correction, there are a few, but 90% are men. I suspect I know why — I read that the first two carriages are for women only. And women prefer those carriages because, well, all the other carriages are full of men.

I get off at the University of Cairo stop — this is the big local university. All the women here wear headscarves. I have a theory as to why: I think the reason women attending university and professional colleges in Cairo tend to dress conservatively (AUC excepted) is that they are signaling to their worried parents that this education won’t be the thin edge of the wedge — first with demands for emancipation and then rampant lesbianism. It’s probably part of some kind of unspoken bargain — the poor have always been conservative in their dress, and what we are seeing now is the first generation of women from such backgrounds entering universities. The headscarf is a security blanket amid change.

I don’t know if women attending the University of Cairo feels social pressure to wear a headscarf. I suspect they do, but it is clear from running around Cairo for three weeks that the absence of a headscarf is not a fashion faux pas. A lot of women don’t wear one.

My plan to walk to Alpha Market through Cairo University Campus is thwarted. Everyone has to show ID at the gate, as do I, but the guard doesn’t understand why I would want to walk across a campus. I’ll just get lost anyway, I’m told. Why don’t I take a taxi around it?

I’m not one to argue, so taxi it is. 5 minutes later, I’m in front of Alpha Market. Except it’s not there anymore. I get told about another one. Another taxi ride.

Finally I’m in Alpha Market. my heart sinks. All I see is food and detergent. Why would they have Scrabble sets here? But then, as I turn to go back out, I see some stairs beckoning in a corner, with a tantalizingly placed badminton racket pointing upwards. Where there is badminton, there might be Scrabble, and so I venture upwards.

Do they have Scrabble? Do they ever! In French, English and Arabic. Normal and Deluxe:

And they’re cheap. I buy one of each language, and the three sets combined come to €20, including a deluxe English set.

And then I take a taxi home. Within 24 hours, I will have beaten the French French teacher at French Scrabble, twice, in Horriya café.

While we’re on the subject of missions accomplished, I’m mildly optimistic that there will be DSL waiting for me in my apartment I’m writing this post from Cairo airport as I wait for my 4.10 am Al Italia flight to Stockholm via Milan.when I come back from Sweden and Budapest in 12 days’ time. The trick here was not to try to get service from the provider, Internet Egypt, via the phone (I had tried twice), but to — you’re getting my drift — hop in a taxi and go to the sales office and personally sit down in front of the sales associate’s desk, joke with him, get his email address and get him to email me back that he has expedited the process. While in the office, I snapped this wonderfully anachronistic advertising poster they had up on the wall:

Looks promising, no?