Middle East/N.Africa Archives - Insideotherplaces

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Why you never have to leave home in Egypt

Back home, convenience shopping means a major supermarket chain has opened up a small version of their corporate behemoths in your area, putting your local shops out of business by pricing them out of the market. But hey! They’ve got some parking spaces, cheap booze and a cash machine so it can’t be all bad! Although big supermarkets have appeared in Egypt they cater more for wealthier citizens with cars, so, for the moment the local shop remains king of…

Bread is life

In Egypt, bread is so much more than something to eat, it is life itself and plays an essential role in Egyptian culture. Most days on Nasr street you can find a few old ladies begging and they are always polite and grateful for whatever modest offering I leave them. One morning recently, I apologized to one lady I’d given to before that I didn’t have any change to offer, but as I was going to the stall at the…

Egyptian construction fails

Over four thousand years ago Egyptians had advanced to the point of being able to produce some of the most iconic structures the world has ever known, some of which are still standing today. So, you would have thought that their ancestors living today should be able to knock up an apartment block without too much trouble. After all, they’ve had four millennia to perfect their craft. Although there are indeed many buildings that would, at least at first glance,…

An English extremist in Egypt

I have to say I was a trifle surprised to learn that our building manager considered me a potential member of Isis. Given that the number of middle aged, white Englishmen who had left our green and pleasant land to wage violent jihad in the Middle East has consistently hovered around the zero mark, at least no one could accuse him of ethnic profiling. Having already passed a pleasant two months in the apartment with my friend Ziad, that had…

The Egyptian Highway Code

Thinking of driving in Egypt? Don’t! Unless you are considering shortening your life span considerably or have an uncontrollable urge to invest in car body repairs. Don’t take this to mean Egyptian drivers are unskilled: it actually takes great skill to avoid getting killed in the malestrom of automotive chaos that is Egyptian traffic. In fact, they have the lowest road death rate in Africa, not far behind the European average. What you need to understand is that they operate…

The dark side of Egyptian sex life online

It’s almost inevitable that the more you get to know a country, especially by making friends there, that you start to come across the darker sides to life, usually hidden from the passing tourist. Our own countries are no exception, as humanity’s baser urges hold little respect for wealth, culture or religion, these factors just influence the style in which these urges express themselves and how they are responded to by society. Almost universally it is women that are on…

The power of the place, in Palestine and beyond.

A look at the power conveyed by places of religious significance You can’t go far in Palestine and the region around it without tripping over a site of great religious and historical significance, particularly for those of us brought up in the Judeo-Christian traditions. So many place names take me back to early school days, when at morning assemblies and the occasional obligatory church service, us numerous unbelievers were subjected to Biblical extracts and the moral lessons they were…

Palestine, what you don’t see

A neat, little village sits atop the gentle, olive shrouded slopes of a rounded hill, the terracotta tiles of the homes’ roofs gleam in the warm, Mediterranean sun. This pleasant, pastoral view could be almost anywhere in southern Europe, where the middle classes from further north come to invest in holiday homes and fatten their bellies on local cuisine. On a neighbouring hill sits another village, a bit older, less ordered, less terracotta, more concrete, but never the less very…

Syria and the confidence crisis

I’ll be honest and declare that this post isn’t really about travel, so you may well be asking yourself what it’s doing on a travel blog. I doubt if my answer will be entirely satisfactory but I think you deserve more than me excusing it by saying, “it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want”. If there is one link to travel it’s that having been twice to Syria in 2005 and 2006, I have many great memories of…

I went to Oman and all I got were these bloody doors and a chicken tikka massala.

I’d love to tell you about Omani culture but after ten days in the country I still hadn’t really seen any. If I was significantly more wealthy I would have done, as I could have hired a car and driver to go and find all the wonderful historical places that are denied the pleasure of public transport. Struggling to find any kind of accommodation under $40 a night didn’t leave much of a budget to do anything else, especially after…

Category: Middle East/N.Africa

Why you never have to leave home in Egypt

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Bread is life

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Egyptian construction fails

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An English extremist in Egypt

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The Egyptian Highway Code

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The power of the place, in Palestine and beyond.

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Palestine, what you don’t see

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Syria and the confidence crisis

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I went to Oman and all I got were these bloody doors and a chicken tikka massala.

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