Alpha

Our compounds guard dog.

BBC News: Kicking Yemen's qat habit

Chewing qat leaves is bad for Yemen's economy and public health, says its government. But, as Stephanie Hancock found, curbing this national pastime is an uphill task.

I had only been in the country a few minutes when I noticed a man with a gigantic growth bulging out of his cheek. The swelling was enormous, it was so bulbous it practically had its own heartbeat.

Qat chewing is a national pastime for the people of Yemen

Now I have been brought up not to stare but, feeling slightly guilty, I kept sneaking glances at this unfortunate fellow.

What an awful disease, I thought to myself and how nice that other people are not staring at him, unlike me.

I wondered whether the growth might be a tumour, or perhaps some sort of thyroid problem.

I did not want to seem rude but I quietly asked my guide, Ahmed, if perhaps this man was ill.

Ahmed, in his nonchalant manner, turned to look at the man, and gave a small laugh that suggested I was very stupid.

"Ha! That's qat," he said.

And so it was that I discovered the substance that makes Yemen tick.

Qat is a flowering plant that grows all over the Arabian peninsula, and when you chew the leaves it acts as a mild stimulant. The habit is known as qat chewing, but this is a misnomer as the teeth are not actually really involved.

The aim appears to be to stuff as many leaves as you can possibly fit into one cheek, until you resemble a lop-sided hamster, and then sort of suck on the juices.

After a while a green foamy paste forms at your lips, and at this point, conversation is now impossible. Any important information must be communicated via grunting and pointing.

To say qat is popular in Yemen would be a massive under-statement, practically everybody in this country chews qat, two thirds of men and a third of women.

It is not elitist either, everyone from businessmen to street urchins like to indulge. Apart from a few hard-core fans, most people seem to start up after lunch, and the chewing will often go on late into the night.

Relaxation aid

Some people chew to give them energy to work others use it for relaxation. It is a common sight here to see men flaked out on pavements, gazing absent mindedly into the distance, giving total concentration to the chewing task at hand.

Qat is an integral part of life here in Yemen, but these days the government is becoming concerned about its effects and this week sounded alarm bells about qat's grip on the country.

The man behind the warning is Yemen's planning minister Abdulkarim al-Arhabi. I went to meet him in his office, where he patiently explained all the many ills qat is responsible for.

For starters, there are the health effects such as mouth cancer, he said, which is on the rise because farmers are using more insecticide.

Farmers are also now choosing to grow water-thirsty qat instead of food crops, he said, because it consistently fetches high prices.

Economic drain

The result is a major drain on water in a country suffering drought and a growing reliance on foreign food imports at a time when staple goods are more expensive than ever.

Then there is the effect on productivity, he added, with all those young people sitting around chewing qat when they could be working.

Critics of the government point out that one in three Yemenis is unemployed and chewing qat is a simple way to pass the day and keeps them away from alcohol and harder drugs.

Later I went for a look round Sanaa's lively qat market, and it is amazing to see how much money changes hands, especially for the high quality blends which can cost up to £10 a bag, and that will only last you one afternoon.

It made me realise that qat is a big part of the economy here.

My guide Ahmed, whose mood was always intimately linked to the size of the bulge in his cheek, is suspicious of the government's fighting talk over qat. "The government needs qat," he told me with a mouthful of green leaves. "It says it wants to stop it, but it earns lots of money from all the taxes farmers pay.

"Besides," he added, his voice dropping to a gurgled whisper, "when people are chewing qat, they don't ask awkward questions about where Yemen's oil revenues are going."

Nobody knows what would happen if qat was taken away

And with this he hit the nail firmly on the head. Yemen has recently suffered from riots, when angry young men, unable to find work, rose up against the government.

Poverty and corruption, a faltering economy and unemployment all linked and all related in some way back to qat.

It might be causing problems for this country, but nobody is quite sure what would happen if you took qat away.

As one trader told me as he hawked his goods for sale in the market: "Qat is the key to peace in Yemen. Nobody would be stupid enough to meddle with that."

Link

guardian.co.uk: Illegal filesharing: A suicide note from the music industry

Cory Doctorow wrote in the Guardian about the insanity of the latest record-company salvo in the copyright wars, a cozy deal with British ISPs that will have them spying on and degrading the connections of subscribers accused of infringing downloading:

So no, I don't think this is going to have any appreciable effect on filesharing. However, it will succeed in driving music-swapping even further underground, to encrypted protocols and offline hard-drive parties and private swapping networks. These are every bit as efficient at getting music into the hands of kids, but they're a lot harder to monitor and charge money for.

The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter. After all, they had the fastest-growing technology in the history of the world at their disposal, 70 million internet users in 18 months, and they'd found that the average American user was willing to spend $15 a month for the service. The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead, and out of the ashes of Napster arose dozens of new networking technologies. Each one was more hardened against monitoring and disconnection than the last.

These days, if you wanted to charge a flat fee for access to all music (something that consumers all over the world would be eager to accept), you'd have to do stuff that's a lot more complicated and funky to get anything like the clean reports we'd have gotten off of Napster 1.0.

And yet that's just what we're going to end up doing. It's historically inevitable: whenever technology makes it impossible to police a class of copyright use, we've solved the problem by creating blanket licences.

Link

Ahmos

Our neighbour with his new Volkswagen. Nice car.

The Jerusalem Post: 62% of Egyptian men regularly harass women

Almost two-thirds of Egyptian men harass women and believe their victims bring it on themselves when they wear tight and revealing clothes, according to a study released over the weekend by the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights in Cairo.

The study, titled "Clouds in Egypt's Sky," was released as part of the group's "Making our Streets Safer for Everyone" campaign launched in 2006.

Egypt has yet to initiate a serious legal struggle against sexual violence. Some 20,000 rape cases were reported in 2006, according to a report published by the Egyptian National Center for Criminal and Social Research last year.

Half of local and foreign women surveyed were sexually harassed in some way, according to the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights study. Ninety-eight percent of the foreign women, who visited Egypt for tourist, educational and professional reasons, said they experienced sexual harassment during their stay.

Furthermore, 88% of respondents, women and men, had witnessed an incident involving sexual harassment.

Of the Egyptians men surveyed, 62.4% said they had perpetrated and/or "continue to perpetrate" harassment of women.

The sexual harassment committed by Egyptian men included touching without permission, staring, making insulting sexual comments and exposing their genitals to women.

Fifty-three percent of the male respondents said women were to blame for sexual harassment because they enjoyed it and because they dressed in revealing clothing. Most women who were harassed did not file a complaint with the police and most incidents took place in the street, public transportation or tourist sites.

According to the study, most Egyptians believe sexual harassment is a growing problem due to the deteriorating economy, a lack of awareness and the weakening of religious values.

The Egyptian Center for Women's Rights was founded in 1996 by six women in Cairo's Dar el-Salaam neighborhood to provide poor women with legal aid and to promote women's legal and political rights.

In March, the center launched a "Million Signatures Campaign" in support of strengthened legislation criminalizing sexual harassment.

"The stories we collected from women about their experiences with harassment confirmed our fears that the worsening of this phenomenon has led to psychological effects as well as a decrease in women's willingness to go into the streets and participate in political and public life," the center said in a statement.

Link

It's Mango Season

A couple of pictures of Nabil our gardener picking mangos. Think it's a good time to reread An Embarrassment of Mangoes by Ann Vanderhoof as she has some nice recipes in her book.

Going for a Swim

Today was a holiday here in Egypt so we spent the day in the pool. It's a tough life here in Cairo...

The Dogs

Jinx in his garden and Aliaan 'laying out' by the pool.

New Camera!

I bought a Canon EOS 450D on my way though Schiphol when coming back from Estonia. That is why you will see a spat of pictures on the blog, just having a go with it.

The New York Times: Mideast Facing Choice Between Crops and Water

CAIRO — Global food shortages have placed the Middle East and North Africa in a quandary, as they are forced to choose between growing more crops to feed an expanding population or preserving their already scant supply of water.

For decades nations in this region have drained aquifers, sucked the salt from seawater and diverted the mighty Nile to make the deserts bloom. But those projects were so costly and used so much water that it remained far more practical to import food than to produce it. Today, some countries import 90 percent or more of their staples.

Now, the worldwide food crisis is making many countries in this politically volatile region rethink that math.

The population of the region has more than quadrupled since 1950, to 364 million, and is expected to reach nearly 600 million by 2050. By that time, the amount of fresh water available for each person, already scarce, will be cut in half, and declining resources could inflame political tensions further.

“The countries of the region are caught between the hammer of rising food prices and the anvil of steadily declining water availability per capita,” Alan R. Richards, a professor of economics and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said via e-mail. “There is no simple solution.”

Losing confidence in world markets, these nations are turning anew to expensive schemes to maintain their food supply.

Djibouti is growing rice in solar-powered greenhouses, fed by groundwater and cooled with seawater, in a project that produces what the World Bank economist Ruslan Yemtsov calls “probably the most expensive rice on earth.”

Several oil-rich nations, including Saudi Arabia, have started searching for farmland in fertile but politically unstable countries like Pakistan and Sudan, with the goal of growing crops to be shipped home.

“These countries have the land and the water,” said Hassan S. Sharaf Al Hussaini, an official in Bahrain’s agriculture ministry. “We have the money.”

In Egypt, where a shortage of subsidized bread led to rioting in April, government officials say they are looking into growing wheat on two million acres straddling the border with Sudan.

Economists and development experts say that nutritional self-sufficiency in this part of the world presents challenges that are not easily overcome. Saudi Arabia tapped aquifers to become self-sufficient in wheat production in the 1980s. By the early 1990s, the kingdom had become a major exporter. This year, however, the Saudis said they would phase out the program because it used too much water.

“You can bring in money and water and you can make the desert green until either the water runs out or the money,” said Elie Elhadj, a Syrian-born author who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the topic.

Egypt, too, has for decades dreamed of converting huge swaths of desert into lush farmland. The most ambitious of these projects is in Toshka, a Sahara Desert oasis in a scorched lunar landscape of sand and rock outcroppings.

When the Toshka farm was started in 1997, the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, compared its ambitions to building the pyramids, involving roughly 500,000 acres of farmland and tens of thousands of residents. But no one has moved there, and only 30,000 acres or so have been planted.

The farm’s manager, Mohamed Nagi Mohamed, says the Sahara is perfect for farming, as long as there is plenty of fertilizer and water. For one thing, the bugs cannot handle the summer heat, so pesticides are not needed.

“You can grow anything on this land,” he said, showing off fields of alfalfa and rows of tomatoes and grapes, shielded from the sun by gauzy white netting. “It’s a very nice project, but it needs a lot of money.”

Mr. Mubarak calls his country’s growing population an “urgent” problem that has exacerbated the food crisis. The population grows about 1.7 percent annually, considerably slower than a generation ago but still fast enough that it is on pace to double by 2050.

Adding 1.3 million Egyptians each year to the 77 million squeezed into an inhabited area roughly the size of Taiwan is a daunting prospect for a country in which 20 percent of citizens already live in poverty.

One recent morning in the Cairo slum of Imbaba, people crammed in front of a weathered green bakery shack for their daily rations of subsidized bread, a pita-like loaf called baladi that sells for less than a penny, so cheap that some Egyptians feed it to their livestock.

The bakery shares the end of a dead-end street with a mountain of garbage, 25 feet by 5 feet, that looks as if it is moving because so many flies swarm over it.

“Most people are really suffering, but what can they do?” asked Mohamed Faruk, a 38-year-old grocery worker who moonlights as a bus inspector, as he carried nine loaves of baladi in newspaper.

Awatef Mahmud, a 53-year-old mother of five who sat on a nearby stoop waiting for her bread to cool, said higher prices had led to dietary changes for her family. “Instead of buying one kilo of meat every week, we buy a half a kilo,” she said. “People used to buy pasta to make for their kids. But now that it’s four and a half pounds,” she said, referring to the currency, “they give them bread instead.”

Economists say that rather than seeking to become self-sufficient with food, countries in this region should grow crops for which they have a competitive advantage, like produce or flowers, which do not require much water and can be exported for top dollar.

For example, Doron Ovits, a confident 39-year-old with sunglasses pushed over his forehead and a deep tan, runs a 150-acre tomato and pepper empire in the Negev Desert of Israel. His plants, grown in greenhouses with elaborate trellises and then exported to Europe, are irrigated with treated sewer water that he says is so pure he has to add minerals back. The water is pumped through drip irrigation lines covered tightly with black plastic to prevent evaporation.

A pumping station outside each greenhouse is equipped with a computer that tracks how much water and fertilizer is used; Mr. Ovits keeps tabs from his desktop computer.

“With drip irrigation, you save money. It’s more precise,” he said. “You can’t run it like a peasant, a farmer. You have to run it like a businessman.”

Israel is as obsessed with water as Mr. Ovits is. It was there, in the 1950s, that an engineer invented modern drip irrigation, which saves water and fertilizer by feeding it, drop by drop, to a plant’s roots. Since then, Israel has become the world’s leader in maximizing agricultural output per drop of water, and many believe that it serves as a viable model for other countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

Already, Tunisia has reinvigorated its agriculture sector by adopting some of the desert farming advances pioneered in Israel, and Egypt’s new desert farms now grow mostly water-sipping plants with drip irrigation.

The Israeli government strictly regulates how much water farmers can use and requires many of them to irrigate with treated sewer water, pumped to farms in purple pipes. It has also begun using a desalination plant to cleanse brackish water for irrigation.

“In the future, another 200 million cubic meters of marginal water are to be recycled, in addition to promoting the establishment of desalination plants,” Shalom Simhon, Israel’s agriculture minister, wrote via e-mail.

Still, four years of drought have created what Mr. Simhon calls “a deep water crisis,” forcing the country to cut farmers’ quotas.

Egypt, at least, has the Nile. Under a 1959 treaty, the country is entitled to a disproportionate share of the river’s water, a point that rankles some of its neighbors. It has built canals to bring Nile water to the Sinai Desert, to desert lands between Cairo and Alexandria and to the vast emptiness of Toshka.

For Saad Nassar, a top adviser in Egypt’s ministry of agriculture and land reclamation, the country has little choice but to try to make the desert bloom, even in unlikely places like Toshka, which it says will eventually succeed: all of Egypt’s farms and population are now crowded onto just 4 percent of its land.

“We don’t have the luxury of choosing this or that,” he said. “We have to work on every acre that is cultivatable.”

Egypt is establishing an estimated 200,000 acres of farmland in the desert each year, even as it loses 60,000 acres of its best farmland to urbanization, said Richard Tutwiler, director of the Desert Development Center at the American University in Cairo. “It’s sand,” he said, referring to the reclaimed desert land. “It’s not the world’s most fertile soil.”

As Cairo’s population has grown — to an estimated 12 million today — hastily constructed apartment buildings have sprouted among the fields. “They sow apartment buildings instead of wheat,” said Gideon Kruseman, a Dutch agriculture economist working with the government to improve farming there.

For more than 5,000 years, farmers have worked the land along the Nile and in the Nile Delta, the lotus-shaped plain north of Cairo where centuries of accumulated silt have produced a deep, rich layer of topsoil. They have endured drought, flood, locust and pestilence.

Now the scourge is development. For farmers like Magdy Abdel-Rahman, the new buildings not only ruin the rural tranquillity of his ancient fields, with the constant hammering and commotion, but they also reduce his yields.

“The shade is not good for the plants,” said Mr. Abdel-Rahman, who farms corn and clover on a half-acre lot 20 miles from downtown Cairo.

Five miles farther out, Talaat Mohamed’s three acres of sweet potatoes are squeezed between four-, five- and seven-story apartment buildings like a jigsaw puzzle. A building recently went up a dozen feet from his field, with steel bars jutting from the foundation and piles of gravel alongside.

Mr. Mohamed, 60, routinely turns down eager land speculators because, he says, he loves working outdoors. But he complains about all the time spent removing urban detritus from his field, which on this day included a maroon brassiere, soda cans, food wrappers, wads of indistinguishable plastic, a Signal toothpaste box and a black flip-flop.

“The Egyptians invented farming,” he said, peering despairingly at a landscape of electric wires and buildings, traffic and trash. “And this is what it has become.”

Link

Greetings From Estonia

Sorry I haven't posted recently but I'm at our cabin in Estonia.

BBC News: Egypt bans 92-year-old's marriage

The Egyptian authorities have banned a 92-year-old man from marrying a 17-year-old girl, the Egyptian al-Akhbar newspaper has reported.

The ministry of justice invoked a law which says the age gap between spouses should not exceed 25 years.

Egypt brought in the law prohibiting the marriage of elderly men to very young girls during the Gulf oil boom.

It was an effort to prevent wealthy men from the Gulf states seeking young poor brides from the Egyptian countryside.

Not much is known about the 92-year-old man who tried to marry an Egyptian girl of 17 except that he is an Arab from the Gulf.

An Egyptian justice official said by refusing to endorse their marriage it would now be impossible for the girl to travel abroad with her husband.

However, in special cases, the justice ministry does allow foreign men to marry Egyptian women more than 25 years their junior if they deposit a very large sum of money in the name of their wife at the Egyptian National Bank.

Both husband and wife also have to report in person to the ministry which checks their marriage is genuine to prevent any kind of trafficking in women.

According to the al-Akhbar newspaper, 173 such marriages were allowed in the past year after the foreign husband deposited a sum equivalent to about US $8,000 and was screened.

Link

National Geographic: "Lost" Pyramid Found Buried in Egypt

The long-lost foundations of an ancient Egyptian pyramid (pictured) have been found at the royal burial grounds of Saqqara, archaeologists announced on June 5, 2008. Hidden by sand for generations, the newly excavated structure may hold the tomb of a pharaoh, Menkauhor, who ruled more than 4,000 years ago.

The discovery of a ceremonial avenue called the Way of the Sphinxes was also announced.

Link, photos and video.

Goodbyeee ...

The going away party aboard a felucca along the Nile for four of our number. All those leaving are sitting on the left in the picture or on the starboard side of the felucca.

Pictures by Liesbeth and stitching done by Peter.

Newsweek: The Last Egyptian Belly Dancer

Rich Saudis are transforming Cairo's entertainment scene.

Abir Sabri, celebrated for her alabaster skin, ebony hair, pouting lips and full figure, used to star in racy Egyptian TV shows and movies. Then, at the peak of her career a few years ago, she disappeared—at least her face did. She began performing on Saudi-owned religious TV channels, with her face covered, chanting verses from the Qur'an. Conservative Saudi Arabian financiers promised her plenty of work, she says, as long as she cleaned up her act. "It's the Wahhabi investors," she says, referring to the strict form of Sunni Islam prevalent in Saudi Arabia. "Before, they invested in terrorism—and now they put their money in culture and the arts."

Egyptians deplore what they call the Saudization of their culture. Egypt has long dominated the performing arts from Morocco to Iraq, but now petrodollar-flush Saudi investors are buying up the contracts of singers and actors, reshaping the TV and film industries and setting a media agenda rooted more in strict Saudi values than in those of freewheeling Egypt. "As far as I'm concerned, this is the biggest problem in the Middle East right now," says mobile-phone billionaire Naquib Sawiris. "Egypt was always very liberal, very secular and very modern. Now ..." He gestures from the window of his 26th-floor Cairo office: "I'm looking at my country, and it's not my country any longer. I feel like an alien here."

At the Grand Hyatt Cairo, a mile upstream along the Nile, the five-star hotel's Saudi owner banned alcohol as of May 1 and ostentatiously ordered its $1.4 million inventory of booze flushed down the drains. "A hotel in Egypt without alcohol is like a beach without a sea," says Aly Mourad, chairman of Studio Masr, the country's oldest film outfit. He says Saudis—who don't even have movie theaters in their own country—now finance 95 percent of the films made in Egypt. "They say, here, you can have our money, but there are just a few little conditions." More than a few, actually; the 35 Rules, as moviemakers call them, go far beyond predictable bans against on-screen hugging, kissing or drinking. Even to show an empty bed is forbidden, lest it hint that someone might do something on it. Saudi-owned satellite channels are buying up Egyptian film libraries, heavily censoring some old movies while keeping others off the air entirely.

Some Egyptians say the new prudishness isn't entirely the Saudis' fault. "Films are becoming more conservative because the whole society is becoming more conservative," says filmmaker Marianne Khoury, who says Saudi cash has been a lifeline to the 80-year-old industry. From a peak of more than 100 films yearly in the 1960s and '70s, Egyptian studios' output plunged to only a half dozen a year in the '90s. Thanks to Saudi investors, it's now about 40. "If they stopped, there would be no Egyptian films," says Khoury.

At least a few Egyptians say Saudi Arabia is the country that's ultimately going to change. "Egypt will be back to what it used to be," predicts the single-named Dina, one of Egypt's few remaining native-born belly dancers. And it was a Saudi production company that financed a 2006 drama that frankly discusses homosexuality, "The Yacoubian Building." Sawiris has launched a popular satellite-TV channel of his own, showing uncensored American movies. He's determined to win—but he's only one billionaire, and Saudi Arabia is swarming with them.

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Egypte April 2008

This is the video from our April Desert Trip, big thanks to Femke for this.

Update: The video below is from the November '07 Desert Trip. Again thanks to Femke and Wouter.

Quickbird: The Pyramids

This is why I've not post anything recently

As well we only have any sort of connect for around 2 hours each day.

I so fucking hate this place.

Karaoke Night In Kairo

The going away party for José.

AFP: Egypt raises fuel and diesel prices amid public anger

CAIRO (AFP) — Egypt's parliament on Monday voted in favour of a set of tax and duty increases including on fuel, diesel and cigarettes amid public anger at price hikes and the state of the economy.

According to the proposal presented by the ruling National Democratic Party, the price of diesel -- used by most public transport -- will rise by 46 percent to reach 1.10 Egyptian pounds (20 US cents) per litre.

Natural gas will go up by 58 percent for heavy industry from 36 piastres (six cents) to 57 piastres (10 cents).

Local cigarettes will increase by no more than 25 piastres while imported cigarettes will go up by 33 percent.

Petrol will go up by between 30 to 40 percent, except for the commonly used 80 octane petrol which will remain subsidised.

Tax breaks will be removed from private schools and educational institutions, while vehicle licence fees will also see a sharp rise especially for large capacity engines.

Around 120 opposition and independent MPs, including those representing the Muslim Brotherhood, voted against the proposal.

Parliament spent Monday discussing the proposal which is aimed at covering the 12.5-billion pound (2.3-billion dollar) cost of a rise in public sector salaries promised by President Hosni Mubarak.

Mubarak vowed last Wednesday to raise public sector salaries by 30 percent to combat rises in food prices.

Speaking to parliament, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif said the new measures were aimed at "taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor."

In recent months, Egypt has seen a number of strikes and demonstrations against low salaries and price rises that have seen the cost of cereals leap by nearly 50 percent over the past year.

The price of cooking oil rose by 45.2 percent, while foodstuffs generally rose by an average of 23.5 percent.

Egypt is also in the grip of a serious bread crisis brought on by a combination of the rising cost of wheat on world markets and sky-rocketing inflation.

The price of bread has increased fivefold in private bakeries, creating panic in state-run bakeries that the staple may run out.

A day of nationwide action called for April 6 saw riots erupt in the Nile Delta industrial city of Mahalla in which three people were killed after demonstrators pulled down posters of Mubarak.

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Dad has been made redundant

Over the years my Dad has kindly sent us 'care packages' of americana junk food that we couldn't find locally, but this isn't something he'll need to do while we're posted here in Cairo. We made a large effort today and hit all the shops in a 25 kilometer radius and we think we've found all the junk one could want, or not want, that is for sale here in Egypt. We even found pool noodles! We are extremely pleased about that as we've been looking for them for a very long time. And if you don't know what they are, well, you're just going to have to come and see for yourself. Now if you will excuse this short post, I don't feel so good and need to find the alka seltzer.

Queens Day

Not the best shot but it's the only one we have.

Los Angeles Times - Babylon & Beyond

EGYPT: Not your '70s movie

Men were humming verses from the Koran, gently moving their heads back and forth. Others were murmuring prayers while fumbling with strands of beads to keep count. The scene in Cairo's metro, on my first ride to the office here, was revelatory of the wave of religious fervor that Egypt has known in the last few years.

The contrast with an Egyptian movie from the 1970s I had seen in Beirut last week was staggering. The film featured women wearing miniskirts and dancing disco extravagantly. It was set at a time when the society in Cairo was embracing modernity and opening up to the West.

But witnessing the crowds of veiled women and bearded men on the metro, that permissive, open Cairo seems a distant recollection. In fact, Cairo does not resemble at all that idyllic image of the glamorous glitzy city we, in the rest of the Arab world, have repeatedly seen on our movie and TV screens.

Another stunning aspect was the characteristic bruise on the forehead of many men here. These marks are supposedly formed by the repeated contact between the forehead and the floor during prayers. These prayer bumps have become like fashion statements and are derisively referred to as "Zebiba," the Arabic word for a raisin.

—Raed Rafei in Cairo

Photo: Man reading the Koran. Credit: AFP

Why I Hate This Place: Reason #64

Of course this is when the internet does work, which isn't all that often.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The Daily Struggle for Food

CRISIS IN EGYPT

Rising global food prices have plunged Egyptians into a desparate daily struggle for survival. Many are unable to feed their families, and the hungry have taken to the streets. Is more violent unrest to come?

Link