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…

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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…

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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,…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Soul of the city: Alexandria, Egypt

Digging under the surface of Egypt’s famous city    Probably the most important thing about Egypt’s second city according to its residents, is that it certainly isn’t Cairo. In particular they’ll tell you that it’s not as busy, dirty or noisy as the capital, which might come as a bit of a surprise to a westerner arriving in Alexandria who had yet to see Cairo, for by European standards it is all these things, even if it pales in comparison…

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Divided Egypt

Who’s going to put Egypt back together again? “What do you think of President Sisi”, asked one of the charming young ladies who had been helping me buy a train ticket. “Well, er um”, I waffled, trying not to commit myself too much in one direction. We were, after all, standing by a group of people queueing for tickets and the wrong opinion, too firmly expressed has caused some to disappear without trace during his excellency’s reign. “I hate him”, she…

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Egypt’s VIP police taxi service

Taking tourist security to that extra level in Egypt Deep in misty dreams of sumptuous temptations, something knocked on the doors of my subconscious, cruelly beckoning me back to the world of daylight. The unwarranted intrusion into my reverie metamorphosed into the insistent clatter of fist against the shoddy carpentry claiming to be my door. Some words of arabic had little trouble piercing the feeble woodwork, “hokouma” was the only word I needed to understand, government. “Yeah,yeah, yeah”, I grumbled…

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Making friends in Fayoum

The first signs were good: within minutes of getting off the bus somewhere on the outskirts of Fayoum I’d found a motorbike taxi who didn’t make any attempt to rip me off, in fact I couldn’t be sure if he wasnt just some guy who was happy to help out.  Certainly he spent most of the time shouting out to all and sundry as we passed by, something along the lines of, “look look a foreigner has come to visit”!…

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