Ingmar Bergman led me to Sweden. Today he died, but not until I learned enough Swedish to appreciate his movies without subtitles. I would have liked to have met him, but that was not to be. Swedish public television just finished showing Smultronstället. Adjö, professor, indeed.

Cairo is such a vast, overwhelming place, so full of contrasts, that I’m finding it hard to render the place accurately on this blog. It doesn’t help that work is keeping me very busy — I haven’t even managed to start my Arabic lessons, and in a few days I will again be in Sweden for a week. In other words, Cairo requires that I pay more attention to it before I can start writing engagingly about it.

On Tuesday I experienced my first real sandstorm, Another blogger recounts her experience in the same sandstorm.and it was a good one, the locals agree. It arrived with a gust; the sky turned yellow, the air turned to dust, and within hours everything in this city was covered in a layer of sand. I ventured outside, my eyes blinking with the frequency of windshield wipers in a downpour, and everything around me looked like scenes from a sepia-toned movie. I ended up at the Marriott, where the pool had sandbanks in it. Yes, I went for a swim. No, these photos do not show you what it really was like:

On Sunday I went to Islamic Cairo, the Cairo that incubated Naguib Mahfouz. There are touristy parts, but further out there is that now-familiar juxtaposition of ancient architectural gems swamped by poverty.I mapped out the walk on my Cairo layer for Google Earth. Download it if you don’t already subscribe to it. The streets are dirt-covered, and it was hot today, but I managed to veer my way through the back alleys. I also managed to get some mint tea at Fishawi, Mahfouz’s favorite haunt, so it wasn’t all one continuous effort.

Earlier, I had wandered into the barber shop around the corner from where I live and asked tohave my head shaved — I thought with an electric shaver. The barber had other ideas. For the first time ever, my head got shaved with a switchblade, and I must say that in this weather, having your head lathered with cool shaving cream is quite a luxuriant feeling. I felt like a new person. Total cost, including tea and water: £E 15, or €2.

I think there is a theme developing here in the rhythms of my daily life. There is a lot of venturing out into dusty, busy Cairo, and then there is a lot of cleansing, bathing, rejuvenating — in the Marriott’s pool, in a shower, or with smaller luxuries like that barber. Get dirty. Get clean. Get dirty. Get clean. Have I mentioned that we have a cleaner for our apartment? She comes twice a week. £E 40 (€5.20) per 4-hour session.You pay more attention to the pleasures of cleanliness here.

Okay, so it’s not the best photo ever, but what you’re supposed to see here is plants in the garden of a villa being watered by the condensation runoff of the air conditioners of the apartment building next-door. Those hoses go all the way up to the fourth floor. It’s not pretty, but it is clever.

I went shopping for lightbulbs today, as the light fixture in the dining room kind of “exploded” this morning, and I thought I needed to replace the lightbulbs. I thought wrong. Little flames now come out of the light bulb holes if I try to reset the fuse, and the on/off switch feels a bit, um, molten into the on position. Most likely cause: Old Kingdom era electrical wiring. This means no light in the dining room for now, and also the den, until an electrician comes and fixes it. Today being Friday, it is the weekend, so no fixing of fixtures until Sunday at the earliest. Luckily the two women I share the apartment with speak Arabic, so I’m sure they’ll be able to explain all.

Anyway, the place where I found lightbulbs — a nearby Alpha Market (sellers of Scrabble sets) — also has a section with educational books. I thought this particular juxtaposition was striking:

Not sure if that reflects badly on the book series, Alpha Market, or the state of computing here in Egypt.

Yesterday I had dinner with a What is the correct collective noun here?trove of archaeologists, among them: An expert in It used to be common wisdom that the Sumerians were the first to have developed writing, but now the ancient Egyptians have the best claim, or so says my flatmate. More about this primacy battle in the NYT.early hieroglyphics (who also happens to be my flatmate), an expert in demotic script, an archaeologist excavating Not to be confused with my alma mater.Saïs in the Nile delta, and two German archaeologists excavating Elephantine, and island in the middle of the Nile near Aswan.

I plied them with ignorant questions about archaeology, but learned a great deal. One fascinating historical figure is Akhenaten, To his credit, he insisted we all worship the Sun, which has the advantage of correctly identifying where the real source of life was on Earth.inventor of monotheism. I wondered whether Moses might have picked up on that idea before he was exiled. It turns out that some people even think <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten#Moses_and_Akhenaten" title="Moses was Akhenaten”>Moses was Akhenaten; Freud thought he was one of Akhenaten’s priests, forced to flee when the monotheistic experiment went awry after Akhenaten’s death. The archaeologists dismissed all this as crackpot speculation, but it sure beats the story about receiving tablets on Mount Sinai and fending off burning bushes, no? At least in terms of likelihood.

This past week has also seen new Cairo bars explored. The Google Earth layer has been updated.

I first visited Budapest in the summer of 1990. I was an intrepid backpacker Inter-railing my way to Romania, which just six month earlier had rid itself of Ceauçescu and weeks earlier had opened up to railway travel from the West. My cousin Tom and I had come via Prague, which we loved, but in contrast Budapest seemed a lot rougher — the dilapidation and the poverty was much more in evidence, the attempts at capitalism were tone-deaf and aggressive, and so I came away with a feeling of not having been to a friendly place.

What a difference 17 years makes. I’m in Budapest again, this time at the tail end of a busy week in Stockholm for Second Life-related meetings at the Swedish Institute. The institute’s communications department has now decamped to the Danube on a weekend “retreat”, though it’s definitely less “re” and more “treat”.

This time around, Budapest is bursting with civic pride — the buildings gleam, the streets are washed, the cars are new, the EU flags fly, and there is no garbage anywhere — we’re looking art Barcelona-levels of cleanliness here, in clear contrast to the natty feel of Brussels or Antwerp. Budapest thoroughly impresses.

You can check out all these places in Google Earth here.Quick recommendations: Menza for the food and decor, Spinoza Haz café and performance space for the enlightenment, and Cha Cha Cha for pure post-ironic dancing vibes, mostly to Hungarian Eurovision entries but also to the Rock classics.

Some edges still fray — beggars, mostly roma, are noticeable, and I got accosted by prostitutes on two occasions — once in the rather nice hotel‘s elevator. There is also that Slavic knack for tacky flashiness that afflicts women when they go out — not that there is anything wrong with that:-)

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?

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.

This here on the left is a highly surreptitious photo of Tutankhamun’s gold death mask at the back of the Egyptian Museum. Taking photographs in the museum is not allowed. Not even with mobile phones, as we are told at the ticket booth:

Hmm. I never did find the mobile phone cameras they were referring to, but luckily mine worked.

I have no idea why this might be the case, and I do not have the imagination to concoct a remotely feasible excuse. Forbidding flash photography I can understand, and some of the rooms have precisely this proscription on older signs affixed against the wall — a sure indication that the ban on non-flash photography is a recent contrivance.

And it is not as if anyone alive today can claim ownership over the intellectual property the ancient Egyptians amassed. If anything is old enough to outlast its copyright protection, then it is the stuff in this museum. Nor is the photography ban out of respect of dead pharaohs — there are plenty of photos of mummies in the museum shop.

While I think that the ban is indefensible — also because it is impossible to enforce without separating tens of thousands of mobile phones from their owners every day — at least nobody was trying to enforce it, and I was able to take pictures with impunity… save, of course, for one German tourist who decided to put her hand in front of my phone as I was trying to take that snapshop of Tutankhamun, screeching “it is forbitten, it is forbitten” in a thick Bavarian accent. The guard, meanwhile, was being completely laid-back about it. What a weird impression Egyptians must have of us westerners — especially westerners on package tours who would otherwise never set foot in a museum.

Just as with my visit to the pyramids last week, I wandered around the museum this first time without a specific objective in mind, zooming in on whatever caught my fancy. In this place, more than anywhere else I’ve been, it is impossible not to feel crushed by the weight of history — thirty centuries of unbroken collective purpose expressed through daring architectural feats and meticulous craftsmanship. This is the cultural patrimony of a people giddily sure of themselves; the confidence that these statues exude, in their smiles and in the deft hand of their craftsmen, is complete. Some of the statues I saw are surprisingly modern too, beautiful, erotic even — no fat fertility symbols here, oh no; these women are hot.

All this got me wondering as to how contemporary Egyptians might relate to their ancestors. The ancient Egyptians ran the most successful civilization ever, unmatched in its longevity and in the robustness of its heritage, with a sense of entitlement and superiority that was absolute. And yet now they are gone. Does this generate more confidence in one’s contemporary religious faith, as it is an improvement over previous deluded attempts, or is there an evident cautionary tale to be learnt here?

The Egyptian Museum itself evoked a split response in me. It is an archaic thing, an Indiana Jones studio lot, with wooden cabinets piled one upon the other and with handwritten labels so old that French was still the lingua franca. An army of men and women in blue overalls with dust cloths in hand seems to be perpetually wiping glass cabinets. All this is quite atmospheric, and I really wanted to try to catch that with my camera:

The museum’s collection deserves much better, though. A new modern center is being planned where a much larger portion of the collection can be put on display, with proper climate control.

I walked back to Zamalek along the Corniche, the embankment of the Nile. There were plenty of people strolling with me, and timid young couples were sitting on benches, touching — not quite holding — hands.

Today is the first day since I’ve been here that the city has been under a cloud of Saharan dust. Everything in the distance fades to shades of de-saturated beige. I don’t mind it, actually — it cuts the intensity of the sun, as if the sky comes with sunglasses — but you do get a vague sense that you’re inhaling something. I’ve just remembered where I last had that sensation — Wall Street, in the weeks after 9-11, as I worked two blocks from ground zero during the clean-up. It smelled the same, with a slightly acrid pinch in the back of the roof of the mouth.

As always, all these photos are georeferenced over on Google Earth if you download this file.As has been the case every day for the past week, I ended up swimming in the pool at the Marriott this evening, before writing this up over drinks at their excellent outdoor café.

I’ve updated the KML file for Google Earth. If you’ve previously already opened it in Google Earth, the updates will be there automatically next time you start up the application.Zamalek’s Diwan bookstore has all the ambition to be a mini-Barnes & Noble, but alas far too much of its shelving is taken up with trinkets, pop psychology and Deepak Chopra. Its philosophy section comprises two short shelves at crouching level, with fully one shelf taken up by the Greek philosophers, who are hardly pushing the envelope. Then there’s not one but two copies of Robert M. Pirsig’s Lila — that book being to philosophy what a millstone is to swimming.

But the Islamic studies section is fascinating, and it is the reason why I was back yesterday — looking for some kind of reader on Islam and freedom of expression.

Imagine my surprise to find a thick tome entitled Freedom of Expression in Islam, by Mohammad Hashim Kamali, from the mid-90s. With chapters titled Freedom of Religion, Insult and Blasphemy, this was an obvious purchase. I spent the next hour reading the chapter on freedom of religion on the terrace of the Marriott Garden Café.

What’s immediately clear is that the Italian PhD candidate I talked to a few days ago was right — there is a large body of Islamic thought — a historical majority, even — which maintains that conversion to Islam or even to other religions cannot be coerced or impeded. Chief piece of evidence in favour of this view appears to be that Mohammed himself dealt with serial apostates without punishing them (today they’d be called flip-floppers). As for the oft-quoted passages that appear to condone the killing of apostates, the scholarly majority contends that in context, killing is only ever condoned if the apostasy is part of some larger political or military treason, which are the only instances in which the Koran condones such punishment.

But what about freedom from religion? Unfortunately, the chapter does not make the differentiation, and it leaves me wondering whether disbelief in the notion of God itself was ever even mooted in the seventh century AD, akin to Queen Victoria refusing to believe that there was such a thing as lesbians, and thus not explicitly forbidding homosexual relations between women.

But even if there is no specific injunction against losing your faith in faith per sé, I think there remains the problem of how an atheist might be able to express her sincerely held world view without being seen to insult God. Is expressing the opinion that God does not exist, however politely, automatically an insult? I haven’t read the chapter on insults yet. I’ll let you know.

I had a very interesting conversation with an Italian PhD student a few days ago about the possibility of reconciling Sharia with the western law cannon canon, specifically with the supremacy of the rights of the individual, which sits at the core of liberal democracies. This topic of study is especially relevant given the growing number of Muslims living in western democracies, some of whom have begun lobbying for Sharia be applied to them. The PhD student knew Arabic well and had evidently studied the legal texts extensively in their original form.

One possible accommodation, he maintained, might be for marriage contracts to allow voluntary opt-in add-ons that conform to Sharia notions of what is a legitimate marriage. This is something that I have no problem with. I have long thought that marriage should be privatized, in that it is none of the state’s business how exactly two free individuals engage in a contract that dictates mutual obligations and rights. In the US, this would solve the gay marriage dispute in an instant: The state remains neutral towards all and any contract freely entered into between two (or more) individuals, of whatever sex. If, in addition, people want to marry before their favorite God, they are welcome to it. Want a Sharia pre-nup for how to deal with an eventual divorce? Go for it. It’s your marriage.

Then I asked him about what I consider to be Islam’s Achilles heel — the wholly disproportionate outrage that the Koran reserves for those born Muslim who, for whatever reason, lose their faith. His answer was interesting.

In Islam there is a notion that nobody ever has the last word, he said. The conversation is always ongoing, and there are many schools of thought, with different imams subscribing to different interpretations of what the Koran allows. For example, he said, there are numerous noted scholars who point out to a clause in the Koran that states that a belief in Islam must not be coerced, and interpret this to mean that the Koran prescribes tolerance for the existence of other religions, even tolerance for the conversion from Islam towards those religions. Just find the imam you like most and use his arguments, he said.

Ah, I said, but what about tolerance for those with no faith or religion at all? He smiled and said, yes, this is a problem. But he maintained that even here there is one imam whose interpretation allows the complete loss of faith in a God.

Alas, that is when our conversation was cut short, and I didn’t get the imam’s name. I am now very curious as to who he might be — is he a contemporary? Well-respected?

I’m going to try to find out.