Cairo Post

I started blogging at the Huffington Post a few weeeks ago, leading with this post about the joy of cab rides in Cairo.

But taking a cab is also one of this place’s great daily undertakings, whether through a snarl of laneless evening traffic or an easy drive across the city’s deserted streets on any Friday morning, before the Friday prayers. My older sister, after a visit in November, wished she were out of the East coast and back here just to ride around town again in a Camp David Accords-era Fiat with a driver eager to ask about where you’re from, what you think of Egypt, what you’re doing here — all with the requisite "Welcome to Egypt."

Update:
More posts since, find them all here.

In the book he recounts how he had just completed his Latin final when he meets a friend who announces excitedly that war has broken out and that the Israeli Air Force has already lost 23 planes: "Comments fly around, assured and doubtful. I tighten my right fist on the bottle of Pelican ink that is always with me in exams. Until this day I do not know why with my arm I drew a wide arc in the air and, aiming at the trunk of that palm tree, hurled the bottle of ink with all my strength so that in that midnight-blue collision it burst into fragments of glass that settled on the lawn."

Forty years later, I ask him if he knows why he did it and what he was feeling — excitement, anticipation, uncertainty, fear? Did he ever imagine that what unfolded could have done so?