The Cairo Dispatches

+ other Egyptian adventures

As I’m pretty sure you all now, I’ve just got back from a week and a half in Egypt - a truly excellent, chaotic, fascinating place. Also an ideal holiday because it involved lots of my favourite things: sun, long distance train travel, history, and some fun new food, plus everyone was extremely friendly and liked to laugh as much as I do (an added bonus). So, you’ve been warned: this is an Egypt-heavy substack.

Books

I devoured Hanya Yanighara’s first novel, The People in the Trees, on the very long journey from London to Luxor. I find her books extremely absorbing - she pulls you completely into the worlds she creates. The People in the Trees is no different, and it might actually be my favourite of her three novels. It follows a fictional world in which a scientist discovers a cure for ageing on a remote Pacific Island, and the devastating consequences this discovery brings. Dark, fantastical and yet utterly believable.

Completely unrelated, I also enjoyed Ha-Joon Chang’s Edible Economics. I went to hear him talk at Backstory a couple of months ago and his passionate belief in economic literacy is inspirational - how can we participate meaningfully in our democracy if we don’t understand the economic concepts which underpin everything about how the world works? In this book, he chooses foodstuffs to explain a variety of economic concepts and quandaries. Yum.

The City of a Thousand Minarets

Greater Cairo is a metropolitan sprawl of 26 million or so people - it’s choking on pollution and every day we were there, a thick layer of smog blanketed the centre of the city. It’s also stuffed full of history and beauty - the rhythms of the street, the chaos of the traffic, the haunting calls to prayer of the muezzin floating through the air, the grandeur of crumbling colonial-era buildings, the smell of freshly baked bread etc.

One of Maurice’s friends from LSE, Nourjihan, is from Cairo and she took us out to her neighbourhood, Heliopolis, for lunch and a wander. It’s impossible not to notice the madcap mansion - Baron Empain’s Palace - on your way into Heliopolis. Édouard Empain was the ‘founder’ of Heliopolis, founding a company which received a concession to develop a new suburb of Cairo from the Egyptian government (which at that time was overseen by Britain, through what’s called a ‘veiled protectorate’). Empain had previously built railways across colonised countries, including Cairo’s electric tramway in the 1890s.

Heliopolis was designed to be a city of ‘leisure and luxury’ and was developed in its own distinct architectural style, interweaving Moorish façades, Egyptian climate adaptation techniques and Euro-Egyptian floor plans to allow for their various traditions of hospitality. Unlike so many colonial developments, Heliopolis had a large proportion of upper-middle class Egyptian residents as well as expats and colonial administrators. This is a great piece looking at the politics of space re architecture & colonialism, featuring Heliopolis if you’re interested.

Empain’s Palace - which is now under the control of the Egyptian Tourism Ministry - is a weird confection of a building. Largely built from reinforced concrete, inspired by Angkor Wat and yet technically Art Deco, and left to ruin after the Revolution, it’s hardly surprising that many believe it to either be haunted or to have been used for nefarious purposes, either by the Baron himself or the state (it’s not far from the Presidential palace).

Heliopolis today is an affluent suburb of the sprawl of Greater Cairo - the air is marginally clearer, the streets cleaner and the shops swisher than downtown Cairo, where we spent most of our time. Maadi and Zamalek were other favourite neighbourhoods to escape the worst of the petrol fumes and dust, which otherwise choked us for the majority of our stay.

We obviously also went to the famous Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which was (I thought) quite a sad experience. First opened well over a century ago (in 1901 - wild), the glass cases were smeared with fingerprints and sarcophagi were thick with dust. There were almost no labels and literally thousands of items were crammed, higgledy-piggeldy, into vintage cases and forgotten corners. The saving grace was Tutankhamun’s innermost coffin, made of 110kg worth of solid gold: truly mind-boggling.

So. Much. Gold.

The much delayed opening of the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza can’t come soon enough - it might have some chance of doing these remarkable collections justice.

Etc

Egyptian food bangs. I will be making a trip to Edgware Road to fill up on koshary and ta’amiya (falafel but made with fava beans) in 2024. A lot of sticky sweet treats were consumed, including industrial quantities of cold rice pudding, which is a favourite Egyptian dessert. The one I enjoyed so much I made us go back for lunch there again was at Zööba, which was topped with angel hair halwa, chopped roasted nuts and orange zest. Actual heaven. I was also *very* into the preserved lemon pickle that seemed to be everywhere. Apologies in advance if I subject you to my experiments to recreate it in my own kitchen in the coming months.

Another memorable aspect was our jaunt(s) on Egyptian Railways. Our train to Aswan was 90 minutes late and pulled in just as we were scoffing sticky Egyptian baklava-esqe pastries smothered in sugar syrup on the station platform in Luxor. I am convinced the carriages were original 1970s rolling stock (a very vintage brown and beige aesthetic), and amidst general chaos, someone had a cardboard box full of ducks on the luggage rack and Maurice gave me a stark warning not to use the loo. We arrived in Aswan an hour late (although I’m not sure we ever actually had a timetable) and reeking of stale cigarette smoke courtesy of being sat near the smoking carriage. A great time had by all. I thought the night train was better, Maurice found it considerably worse. We were both glad we hadn’t read about the terrible safety record of Egyptian Railways until we were safely in Cairo.

I’ve also been listening to a lot of PAUZA, who blend together Cuban music with electronic house. Nice funky vibes, with a good groove to work to.

In summary, a 10/10 holiday. That’s all for now - busy getting heavily into the festive swing of things back in London, mainly fuelled by the boujie brown butter & cognac Waitrose mince pies and listening to Feliz Navidad on repeat. Thanks for sticking with me for the first 3 of these! Happy Christmas!