Seams from My Father

A bleak department store near my office has much more in the way of window dressing and spiritless employees than actual goods, but don't worry about this slouched mannequin in his oversize suit.


He hasn't given up.

Dream House 2

If I lived here I would paint the ground below this blacony to look like a swimming pool and post a sign on the railing that says "Warning: Cartoon," and then I would have lots of dangerous parties.

Wonders of the Underground World

Cairo is so overflowing with artifacts that even the long hallways of the Sadat metro station have to double as gallery space.

The god of reading the newspaper while waiting for the train to come.

A working payphone.

A: Religious Awakening

Q: What do you call the sound of the dawn call to prayer thundering from a mosque loudspeaker two blocks from your bedroom window?

All the Umbrellas in Cairo

Today it rained unexpectedly, pockmarking this parked car's dust, and the city's.

Sana Sort of Helwa

We celebrated two office birthdays this afternoon with cake. Like most non-Egyptian sweets in Cairo, the cake was both enormous and not very good. If you've ever wiped up spilled chocolate milk with a sponge and then eaten the sponge, you have a pretty good idea of how it tasted. If you've ever had a nightmare in which you're an 18th century French aristocrat fleeing murderous peasants in your elaborate and overgrown garden, you have an idea of what the cake looked like, especially if there's sliced kiwi all over your garden.

For my birthday, I am going to demand something a little more authentic, like the above Sphinx cake.

Dream House

If I lived here I would paint the concrete roof canopy to look like a yin yang or maybe a painter's palette full of really psychedelic colors and then I would have lots of parties.

Wine Some, Lose Some

I don't know much about wine or the complicated systems in place to rate it, but I bet that if you're compelled, when tasting a new bottle, to exclaim, "Gross!," the wine is not very good.

BBQ

I'm a vegetarian so I don't recognize what kind of meat this is, being slow cooked by a twisted florescent bulb, but the butcher yelled at me for taking a photo, so I assume it's people.

Gaze

This is a picture of one of the pyramids of Giza, and it is also a picture of how long my hair is now.

Hurling Dervish

Seeing a whirling dervish perform must be like attending a competitive eating contest--you watch someone do something for a long time that, if you attempted, would certainly make you throw up. I don't know for sure, though, because I've never been to a competitive eating contest.

Terraffic

This brightly-colored license plate looks like it says "I love" in English, and perfectly describes the opposite of the way I feel about Cairo traffic. Of course, it really says, "Suez Customs, 12574."

Poorverbs

Arabs say "To understand a people, acquaint yourself with their proverbs." So I did. My favorite, for its cultural specificity, is the Arab version of overstaying your welcome, "He ate the camel and all it carried." Cute!

I am trying to assimilate, so I made up my own proverb. It means, basically, if you can't distinguish what you want from all that is around you, you'll never find it. But it literally translates as, "These poor expats will never find their puppy because it looks just like all the mangy strays in Maadi that people think it a community service to run over with their cars."