Cairo 2022

Cairo is full of cars, broken, belching, beeping cars, bumper to bumper – a jumbled slow moving frenzy of we don’t stay in lane traffic.  I don’t remember the traffic from the last two visits four and fifteen years ago.

Cairo 2018 – BORN 59 (hazeldurbridge.com)

It is also full of identical high rise with very little architectural finesse – 10-15 storeys high, blackened by dust and traffic smog.  They are tight together with tiny amounts of green.  It makes you realise the value of planning permission.

I wonder what sort of mad, futuristic, poverty stricken hell it will look like in another 20 years.

The fabric of Alexandria was even worse.  Look down a narrow city street and you see it blocked 4-6 floors up with masonry rubble and garbage.  There must be rats.

One image I will remember from Alexandria was in a market street where they had sheep and goats running free but gathered together and hundreds of birds – chickens and ducks (tied by their legs) and quails (in cages) and tables of rabbits hopping about – a colourful natural world against a  backdrop of dust and grime.

 

I revisited Coptic Cairo, Muslim Cairo and the Giza Pyramids at closing time, when the camels, horses, carts and cars jostle down the hill away from the pyramids and towards the Sphinx.

I also visited the Saqqara Pyramids of Netflix fame, the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation ( which in my opinion is not as beautiful as the old one, stuffed to the rafters with priceless antiquities).

One striking thing about the ancient sites, other than the Saqqara Netflix film which does have an Egyptian team, is the amount of foreign aid that went into preserving sites.  One of our Egyptian guides said that all the Egyptian government spend money on is building bridges and that life was getting progressively worse for ordinary people since the revolution.

The new library at Alexandria is a visionary marvel and it is wonderful to see that they are holding the dream to keep it as the greatest library in the world, but the designer was not Egyptian.

All the guides in Egypt have a degree in Egyptology.  They are very knowledgeable.  Sometimes I didn’t appreciate being pinned to one spot and made to listen, but they did teach me new things.  You needed to move as during this visit it was as cold as the UK.

 

The food was awesome.  We benefitted from family research, but

Estro – a Sicilian rooftop – Restaurant (business.site) beat The Duck & Waffle London EC2N 4AY into the ground.  We also sampled excellent Lebanese and Korean food.

 

I won’t return again as I went to visit family who have enjoyed a great life there for five years.

A big thank you for the welcome of Egyptian people.