A Different Drummer

Classic Egyptian quote: We are running a short news piece on the sale of some state-owned companies here, and I get one of our interns to make some phone calls to each of the companies to ask for their comment, clarify some details etc. Normally I would do this kind of stuff myself, but the state-owned companies aren't known for being very media friendly, particularly to "foreign" press.

So the intern gets through to the managing director of one of the companies in question - conversation goes as follows:

Intern: Is it true that your company is up for sale?

Manager: Of course our company is for sale! All of Egypt is for sale!

Beautiful. We won't run that quote in the magazine, but we should.....

Speaking of for sale, for anyone who ever spent some time in Adelaide and made it to the epic Myrtlewood Estate, home to a ramshackle bunch of visionary geniuses including myself for the best part of three years, get out your checkbooks - Myrtlewood is for sale. Forget all that US subprime mortgage garbage - now is your time to buy into a piece of history. It'll be tourist site one day, a memorial to an epic time and place that will never return, or something like that....

Check it out in all its sanitized, repainted glory....

If you can't get enough Tom from the blog, then check out my articles in this month's Business Today Egypt magazine:

The Rise of the Technopreneurs: Ready to Play Catch Up? - Opener for our cover story package on Egyptian technology entrepreneurs

The Rise of the Technopreneurs: Maxing Out - My half of a two-part cover story package, a profile of an Egyptian tech startup. (here is the other half, if you are interested in this kind of stuff...)

The India of the Middle East? - A look at the Egypt - India trade relationship and what it could mean for Egypt in the future

The Bank We Love To Hate - A profile of the World Bank in Egypt

Three years ago to the day, this blog came to life, with a long-winded post about how awesome Egypt is. Three years later, and I'm posting about how awesome living in Egypt is. But man, the three years in between have been sweet.

I've traveled to just over 20 countries, met more ass kicking people than I could have imagined, experienced the highs and lows of loving and breaking up with one of the worlds most special people, caught and survived a life-threatening tropical disease, said G'Day to Kofi Annan, made the first step toward my dream career, test drove a bunch of BMW's as a professional responsibility, spent five days on a beach in Goa watching Australia lose the Ashes, and made Cairo my second home. I blogged as much of it as I could.

What started out as Shisha and Shawerma became Rotterdam or Anywhere during my 14 months in the Netherlands, and then switched to A Different Drummer once I moved back to Cairo last September. Today isn't exactly my third blogging birthday — I was writing An Irish Experience for my year in Dublin from April 2003 - June 2004, but alas, all my posts save for the last week's worth were lost in the aiesec.ws meltdown. It would be great to try and recover all the stuff that I lost there, but I don't think it's going to happen...

Anyhow, as a random excercise in navel gazing and related narcissism, I went back and read the first month's worth of postings to see how they hold up in the test of time. With no further ado, here are my comments, corrections, clarifications and triumphialist fist-raisings in relation to that fateful September of 2004:

Correction: I referred to Egyptian Shawerma as "the best in the world." Upon further experience with shawerma here, I retract this statement. As anyone with some experience in Egypt knows, the general standard of shawerma here is actually totally shitty. That is, if you walk up to a random shawerma stand anywhere on the street and order one, you are likely to get a pretty average sandwich: dry, low quality meat, stewed on the hotplate with a ton of tomatoes and parsley to cut down on the amount of meat being served, dished up on a fairly stale hot dog bun. Seriously lacklustre.

My Defense For This Seemingly Awful Misjudgement: This was written when I was fairly new to Egypt, and had only experienced shawerma from three amazing shawerma places: the ass-kicking Abu Rames in Cairo, Alexandria's incredible Shawermer (like a Writer, Lawyer or Builder, this guy is a Shawerm'er) and Farah, the shawerma fatta specialist in Cairo. For all I knew, everywhere was that amazing! No, they are not. The Egyptians were just taking me exclusively to incredible shawerma joints. If only the general standard in Cairo was this high. It isn't.

Triumphant fist-pumping: The word "Talentship" has not made it into mainstream business vernacular, and hopefully it never will. I picked that nasty little swine of a word for what it was from Day 1, and thankfully, it seems like even the easily-suckered talent management crowd didn't buy into it.

Comment: I dissed Egyptian bread - more specifically, the lack of good crusty loaves of bread. Although the Egyptian baking tradition indeed does not excel in the white crusty department, I should have given recognition to the powerhouse that is Baladi bread, the kind of bread that would beat the shit out of sliced white bread in a dark alleyway.

Clarification: When I referred to Adam Lemmon as "a fiend and a whore, [who] should be wrapped in barbed wire and shot into the sun," I was simplifying things a bit. He is actually more of a reluctant transsexual - one of those women trapped in mens bodies, with the willpower and resources to have the operation, but who remain stuck in the middle because the confusion helps them avoid terrible realizations....

Three years hey. Has my writing gotten any better? Maybe, but my spelling certainly has. Looking back at that first month of posts makes me think that maybe I had a couple of broken fingers? Or a dodgy keyboard? Who knows.

I was talking with someone last night about how blogging, writing, and art on a general level, has an inherently vain and narcissistic element about it. The assumption that somebody else needs or wants to hear you sing, look at a picture you drew, read your thoughts or watch you dance - doesn't it have an undeniable air of "look at me" thinking behind it?

Yep. It does. But then don't we all have something we feel good about sharing with the world, because we know we are good at it and love seeing other people enjoy it? Whether it's a smile, a hug, a compassionate ability to listen, or some kind of watch-the-dancing-monkey performance instinct, we all want to share something.

I guess my point is, thanks for reading this. I am always amazed when even one person tells me that they actually read the stuff I write, let alone like it. Inside my head, I always suspect that deep down, nobody actually does, and that all the stuff I write on my blog and in the magazines just gets skimmed over.

Whenever someone actually tells me that they read something I wrote and liked it, it is like the biggest compliment I have ever received in my entire life, happening for the first time ever. So thanks from the bottom of my heart to my peeps across the world who read this, especially the ones who made it this far into a particularly fluffy post. I'll see you all on the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.

Rising up the "places in the Middle East that I must visit" charts with a bullet is the freaking incredible Shibam in Yemen, "the Manhattan of the Desert". Looks like the average city block to you? It might, until you remember that these buildings are anything from 400-700 years old...

Lots more pics here...

Isn't my new bedroom sweet? I can't help but brag....

Over the weekend we made the big move from Downtown to our new place in Zamalek. The Downtown house was great - aside from being my longest continuous place of residence during my 2+ years in Egypt, I will probably never again live closer to the centre of a city. I'll certainly never be closer to the Arab League headquarters.....

Anyhow, two key pieces of learning regarding living in Cairo for the semi-long-term resident:

1) There is a time in every person's Cairo life when they should live in the middle of Downtown, preferably within 500 metres of Tahrir Square.

2) There is a time in every persons life when they should move to Zamalek

3) Recognizing when each of these times has come is a skill that will bring you great rewards.

Downtown is an awesome place to live: I challenge any place in the world to be as alive, as throbbing with the pulses of millions of human experiences, to be as noisy, bizarre, fun, beautiful and decrepit. Nowhere else in the world is falling to pieces with as much style - and over such a long, dignified trajectory - as Downtown. It's called Wust El-Balad in Arabic, which translates literally to "Center of the Country" - it may very well be the center of the universe for all I know.

Drinking beers in Horreya (the greatest bar on Earth), watching the central security forces surround protesters 5 layers deep in Talaat Harb square, sitting in traffic jams at 2am, feeling the earth roar and rumble under your feet in Ramses square, chilling in the unexpectedly serene Borsa, standing like an ant before the colossal Mugamma - I will never learn as much about the myself and the world as I did in Downtown.

Things change though, and as we all know, sometimes just packing up and getting the fuck out is the best way to say goodbye. There comes a time when getting woken up each morning by 100-decibel traffic loses its novelty, when being permanently covered in a fine layer of exhaust residue and solidified smog gets tiring, when having to explain to someone, anyone, landlord, doorman, neighbour, why a female friend stayed the night or why you came home at 5 in the morning, gets a little frustrating.

This is the time when you move to Zamalek. A quiet, green, tres tres chic island in the Nile, smack in the geographical middle of Cairo but a thousand miles from its aesthetic center of gravity. Zamalek is NOT downtown, but it is only 5 minutes across the bridge...



The hardcore Downtown'er will recoil with shock at the above image, for the following reasons:

1) On a 200-metre stretch of road at least 2 lanes wide, there are only 14 cars, meaning that a car thief must have stolen the other 486.

2) That car thief must also be a dangerous psychopath, because on that same stretch of road, there are only 4 people on the street. The other 1246 must have ran away in fear.

3) A strange green leafy fungus, sprouting from large "trunks" of wood, appears to line the sides of the road. These "trees", as Zamalek residents call them, may have played a role in the exodus of people, who obviously cringe at such revolting visual pollution.

4) The atmosphere is all wrong - too clear and lightweight. The absence of a dense, nutritious soup of smog, exhaust and coal smoke will surely lead to breathing difficulties for children and the elderly.

5) The people there must be very poor, because they can't afford food, newspapers, packaged goods or live animals. This is evidenced by the complete absence of garbage and animal waste lining the streets. Pity these people, for they have nothing.