Cairo! I don’t really know where to start, for this place is just so… much! It’s enormous (26 millions inhabitants according to the last population sensus), and it’s far too ultra-über-overcrowded. It’s polluted. The traffic is just insane. It’s dirty also, as there is a garbage problem that is going on since the government decided to hire ineffective European companies (FCF, Urbaser and AMA) over the Zabbaleen, or garbage people (زبالين) that used to collect and recycle informally the trash in Cairo. Some call this immensity of a city dehumanizing also. But hey, it’s the Paris of the Nile!

It’s also the Mother of the World, capital of the Arab world. Walking through the streets, observing the architecture, the subway system, one cannot not imagine the past glory of this city.

It’s cosmopolitan also. Living downtown I felt like I was living in Manhattan, although I’ve never been to New York. But Cairo is so big that I feel like anyone can assimilate himself into this immense thing that Cairo is. Overall, I must say it was a fantastic experience. Tiring, exhausting sometimes, but I would definitely do it again, and I will probably be back before long. It is frustrating to live there without speaking arabic properly, for the people of Cairo are much better appreciated if known and talked to; else one tend to experience only rip-offs…

Because Cairo can also be extremely annoying and/or discouraging. First of all there is the omnipotent Islam and its double standards. People would yell at you for showing affection in public to someone of the opposite sex, but they would also be the first to grob a girl’s bottom or give the dirtiest look conceivable.

There is also the overreaching bureaucracy and it’s mighty empire of functionaries that the government is buying off buy employing people to do nothing - literally nothing. But as a result to do anything that has to do with a permit of something alike one requires a lot of patience. A tremendous amount of patience. And money.

Just under, on the left, is the portrait of my bowab (doorman) Abdul; and on the right is the Egyptian parliament, Orwell’s 1984 looking, behind the smog and the jammed traffic on Tahrir Square, downtown Cairo.