Sorted...

I’m sitting on my third-floor balcony in a leafy, affluent suburb in Cairo waiting for the ominous sound of the evening prayer call to echo through the crowded street below. A steady stream of beat up Peugeots and Ladas sputter below and the day’s 38 degree heat has barely subsided.

It’s been a crazy few days and the $250 laptop I bought at a gas station in North York seems to be holding up okay.

After two nights in a hostel, I busted my ass and found a place in Zamalek, which is a stylish borough nestled on the beautiful Gezira Island – which sits in the middle of the Nile and is a stone’s throw from downtown. It also boasts the American University in Cairo’s female dorms and at least two overpriced coffee shops formed in the image of Howard Shultz himself. North America doesn’t seem so far away here.

My roommates are a lanky Belgian fond of using superlatives like “beauuuutiful” and “purrrrfect,” and a Palestinian guy who looks -- and acts -- suspiciously like a young Sinbad.



Both are much younger than me and I feel like an old man.

I’ve put in a few days at The Daily Star Egypt (www.dailystaregypt.com) and I have complete freedom to come and go as I please, write whatever I please and generally “be my own boss.” As good as this sounds, being in a new city means that finding story ideas can be a bit of a challenge.

So far, I’ve done pieces on an UN-sponsored Nile River clean up, a tech-story on Cairo’s new airport terminal and a little piece on Kodak’s corporate restructuring in Egypt. While Bill Cosby couldn’t be reached for comment on that last one, doing the story did allow me to dine at the Citadel Restaurant, which overlooks one of Cairo’s few green spaces, as well as the towering mosques of old Islamic Cairo. It was an opulent affair and I ate my own weight in hummus.

Last night I smoked shisha, sipped beer and ate wine leaves at a spotless, Nile-side lounge/resto called Sequoia.

One more thing – some cool shit went down on the bus here yesterday. I was downtown at Midan Tahrir Square when I hopped onto a bus and passed a half pound bill to the driver. He turned around and passed it to the passenger sitting behind him, who then passed it over his shoulder to the person behind him…this continued until my fare reached the money collector at the back of the bus – which brings me to my next point: Cairo, for a city of nearly 20 million people has a remarkably low crime rate.

Allah Akbar.