Cairo ...

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time ...

C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992.

These frantic busy days ... they just keep coming at me.  I'm hoping to complete so much in the days ahead, allowing me to concentrate on one or two things instead of juggling 20.

So here I am, taking  a little time out, needing some peace of mind, I was searching for something beautiful to note down, then decided to share old photographs from other adventurous days.

Back in 2008 I found myself in Cairo, working with good people, meeting lovely Egytians, having one of those delicious adventures.

I wrote of arriving in Cairo: I felt an incredible overwhelming of the senses as the taxi flew through the (far too) long underground traffic tunnel taking me to downtown Cairo ... the driver completely ignoring the 50km speed limit, then calmly settling down to wait, windows open, when we were caught in the middle of the tunnel’s 3km length with carbon monoxide choking us.

I noticed that Cairo drivers talk to each other via their car horns ... a gentle reminder they are there, that they want to change lanes, and anything else that needs discussing out there on the road.

I hadn’t known what to expect ... perhaps Istanbul but the only similarity to Istanbul was only that it was so different to most of my everyday life.

Later, I read that Cairo has some 17 million people in the metropolitan area and is the sixteenth most populous metropolitan areas in the world ... a busy city.

It was full of people and pollution and when I looked round, from my 6th floor balcony, I could see this layer sand and desert on rooftops.

The first 48 hours was challenging in almost every way.  Challenging but oh so excellent to be out again.