Cairo is extremely busy with traffic. Ten years ago, this was only during rush hours but nowadays, the rush hours seem to stretch from dawn to dust. As there is insufficient parking space in the center, the row of cars forms a carrousel, in fruitless search of an empty spot. It is the Egyptian version of the Truman Show, without any escape for its actors. The Ramses Square, where the Egyptian museum is located, has been renovated lately, the enormous Ramses statue has been moved away to the Giza plateau. To no avail, however. Every day over 5 million people use this square and it is a big mess with a mushroom of pollution above it. Crossing this square on foot will lead you to a certain death, but fortunately there are tunnels to get from one side to the other.

Cairo is full of contradictions: old and modern, big and small, rich and poor, all religions are there. The capital has almost 20 million inhabitants and is vast. In Cairo, you will find over 500 mosques. The city is also called "City of the 1,000 minarets"and truly, you see many of them. Obviously, you also hear them, which often means an early wake up. Luckily, this is only short lived, the city usually goes back to sleep and does not really come to life before 10 o'clock in the morning, but then goes on until very late at night. If you are unlucky, you may end up in a traffic jam trying to catch an airplane at 4 AM.

One of the main attractions in the city is the Egyptian Museum. It is located on the busy Tahrir (Liberation) Square. The museum was built in 1902 but after a century of faithful service and millions of tourists visiting it, it will be moved towards the pyramids in 2012. There, it will hopefully survive netter without all the fumes and pollution around it. The museum is enormous and you can easily spend a week in it. There are more than 100,000 items, among which mummies and tomb. Also, you find here the mask of Tutankhamen, the poor man who was pharaoh and died before he even reached twenty. Furthermore, some of the famous Portraits of Fayoum are on display. These portraits date back from the Greco-Roman period (approximately 30 BC-300 AD), when the fashion changed from using mummies to the likeness of people, to painting them on wood. Interestingly, many sites in Egypt show remnants from Pharaonic times as well as Greco-Roman, probably because the latter used the existing well-prepared places.

Many of the restaurants are on the border of the beautiful Nile, as was my hotel, Om Kholtoum, named after the famous lady singer from the mid twentieth century. The Nile dominates the city as it dominates the country. One of the most popular places, the island Zamalek, is in the middle of the Nile, the large 26th of July road cutting it in two. Here you will find restaurants, bars and shops. It is so busy however, that you are quicker on foot than by car. The Egyptians themselves seem to refuse to walk even 100 meter and as a result, enormous lines of cars are on the streets, standing still. As the whole island consists out of one-way streets, many people cannot find their destination, causing them often to spend half an hour in the car for a distance as little as a few hundred meters - that is if they find a parking space.
It is almost always sunny in Egypt, apart from the odd sandstorm. Still, I managed to get caught in the biggest rain ever, which went on from Saturday morning until evening. That gave us a good chance to take a long long look at the inside of the Citadel. And afterwards, you can have your shoes polished for next to nothing.

Om Kolthoum, is an Egyptian lady singer, also called "Kawkab al-Sharq"(Star of the East) who performed in the mid-twentieth century. She died in 1975 but is still regarded as the most famous Egyptian singer ever. The Egyptians call her "the fourth pyramid"but since apparently there are more than ninety pyramids all over Egypt, I am not sure whether that is good or bad. Anyhow, she is still immensely popular and symbolizes the luxurious life of the first half of the twentieth century. She has a hotel named after her on the border of the Nile; her music is for sale everywhere and she is still singing, even though she as if she were still alive. I was able to see her perform in a puppet show, with an orchestra of almost real sized men, her music reaching us with a crackling sound. One of the men, playing the violin, lost his string halfway and looked as if he fell asleep, but we did not follow that example.

Smoking water pipes is extremely popular, and you see many people sitting outside restaurants at every hour of day, enjoying their puff. In the old days, it was the habit of older men from low socio-economic status. Nowadays, everybody does it: students, young women and men, as well as older ones. The Egyptians don't like their women walking around with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, but the waterpipe is fashionable and accepted. As one session of waterpipe, or shisha as they call it in Egypt, exposes you to as much as 1 packet of cigarettes, it is not such a healthy fashion.
Not only do the Egyptians like the waterpipe, they are also fond of partying. There is a lot of night life and also on daytime in the weekend you can find song and dance.