I did not have much free time in Egypt because I was quite busy with my job. Most of the time I worked through each weekend, but towards the end of my last trip I decided to be more moderate and get some rest. To recuperate I decided to spend some free time in Egypt and see the sights. Being in a hotel right next to the Egyptian museum, I decided to go see it. One of the most famous museums in the world, it contains, among other things, the mummies of the pharaohs and the sarcophagus of king Tutankamun. If these mummies could speak I'm sure they would express their approval of their surroundings, for though it is a museum it certainly has the air quality of a tomb. Never before or since have I felt that faint and achy inside a building, somewhat as if the spirits of those ancients were trying to persuade me to join them.
  I did not see the mummies. The extra cost dissuaded me, and I was already annoyed by the extra admission fee I needed to pay because I was a foreigner and because I was constantly accosted by goons who wanted to be my guide for a fee. (Somehow none of them wore any special clothing that identified them as qualified guides.) I thought that any extra fees would doubtless involve yet more fees on top of those, so I left.
   A world where people try to have fun without sex is a strange one indeed. I stood in Tahrir square when the Egyptians celebrated their victory in the Africa cup. Their celebration was a mixture of wanton negligence with curious restraint. They piled on top of busses and paraded through the streets. They sat in their car windows while driving. They set off home-made fireworks and set canisters of gas on fire. They danced in the streets. They made their cars dance in the streets by swinging wind-shield wipers and rocking their bodies on their chassis by repeatedly pumping and releasing their suspension. But aside from the honking and explosions they did it all quietly, and the only thing dirty about it was literally so.
   Egypt is one of the few places in the world in which staying at home on a Friday night and watching David Letterman does not feel like a wasted opportunity. Any night out is a lot of noise and a bellyache waiting to happen. And besides, Letterman is somehow funnier in Egypt, and watching him is a weird and nonconformist thing to do there.
   Egyptian television is generally an odd thing. Egypt is the Hollywood of the Arab world, and is responsible for producing countless movies, music videos and television programming. One video I saw was a mishmash of sentimental love songs and a fairytale environment inspired by Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, except it somehow seemed to take place after a nuclear war, or maybe that was just my imagination.
  Old Egyptian movies are my favourite. They usually involve the congenial meetings of well-dressed people with saccharine problems. The women usually have a colour of hair that is lighter than normal for Egyptians. In fact, all the actors are on the paler side of the Egyptian spectrum. Are they ashamed of their dark complexion?
The scenery is the movies is beautiful. The cities are quiet, and the roads are populated by nice undamaged classic cars. If I believed any of it I'd look out my hotel window and broodingly ponder, what happened?
  Aside from watching TV, I also travelled. One day, together with my Indian co-worker, we decided to take a day trip to Alexandria. Alexandria is famous for a variety of things. It was founded by Alexander the Great. It housed two wonders of the ancient world: the great library, and the great lighthouse. People who live in Alexandria look down their noses at the inhabitants of Cairo in somewhat the same way that people in Oxford, England look down their noses at people in, say, Manchester. Not only do they think of themselves as more intellectual, but they exhibit an attitude that they are the pall bearers of civilization. As Egyptians, they're responsible for having discovered so much in the ancient world. Mathematics, astronomy, and phonetic writing with an alphabet, to name a few. It's just too bad that the accomplishments virtually stopped coming thousands of years ago.
  Both of its ancient monuments are gone, but modern Alexandria does still have one of the largest libraries in the world: the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a recently realized Norwegian design with heavy financial backing from other countries. It doesn't have anywhere near the largest number of books in the world, and there are surprisingly few people using it. Could it be that the Egyptian education system, infamous for its memorize-and-regurgitate teaching method, finds it difficult to avail of a teaching tool that would require some aspect of intellectual autonomy? Could it be, furthermore, that the same system is responsible for the triple disservice of teaching very little, encouraging adulation of fallible individuals and, worst of all, reinforcing the notion that authority trumps truth? Of course, it could just have been that the students were away for the holidays. I wouldn't know.
   For me personally, the most interesting thing about that library was the exhibit of historical drawings of Alexandria in the museum. Mediaeval Europeans had drawn Alexandria as they thought it would look like in spite of never having been there. The result is a classic example of psychological projection: of extrapolating from the known unto the unknown. These Europeans had foolishly drawn Alexandria as a European city, complete with conical and sloped roofs for clearing snow and Gothic architecture!
  We visited the mosque, and our taxi driver nearly killed several of his countrymen as he staidly took us to Qaitbay Castle, which is supposedly hundreds of years old, but I could swear it was brand new. The castle and mosque were among the most picturesque buildings I'd seen in Egypt. After we left, my friend suggested we also visit a marine museum filled with mock-ups of marine life. Though admission only cost two Egyptian pounds, it was still a waste of money, and the only thing we got out of it was a photo of a fake manatee with a gigantic erect penis.
   Now I should explain for a moment the oddity of the two of us travelling in Egypt. Taxi drivers were usually quite surprised to see a very pale figure get in their vehicles along with a very dark one. In their concept of the world, people of like colours tend to stay together somewhat like socks. But here was a pair in which one half was paler than the average Egyptian and the other darker, almost as if all the pigment had migrated from one to the other.
   One of the things that most rankled my Indian friend was Egyptian food, or rather the lack of it. We frequently went to McDonald's, which is something I would never do in a normal country, but I digress. Egyptians, on the other hand, got their food from clandestine sources the nature of which I only partly unravelled in Cairo. For instance, I discovered a bakery near my place of work. Inside a teenage boy worked some ovens and acted as cashier. He then handled the same unleavened bread he was making with the hands he'd just used to take my filthy Egyptian bank notes. For some reason I also had the impression that the bread smelled like bank notes.
I was unable to find a similar bank note bakery in Alexandria, nor was I able to find a sugar-water and potato chip store, which is what the Egyptians think of as groceries. McDonald's at least offered some consistency and service in English. My friend frequently went to McDonald's too. There he would buy Big Macs and then, because he was a vegetarian, he would discard the meat. We called these "air burgers", and he ate them regularly.
   My Indian friend was so fond of Egypt that I frequently joked he would one day go mad and run into the sea, hoping to swim to a place that wasn't Egypt. His stay in the country was financed not by my company, but by our customer. What's more, for each day that he worked, our company made an additional profit. It was for this reason that we had every incentive to slow his work down as much as possible by refusing to help him when the product malfunctioned, thereby changing his role from that of implementer to customer's punching bag. He also had a lot of incentive to expound to me at length what utter shit our product was. As we rode the train back to Cairo he did exactly that.
   I should explain at this point, that we were both disappointed by the countryside on the way to Alexandria. There isn't really such a thing as rural Egypt. The country is a mess of random buildings of all sorts strewn about amidst farms. To boot, many are apartment buildings, and quite a few of them are never totally finished. If more room is needed they add another floor on top of what is already there. The resulting concrete box is so ugly it defies description. So, as we sat there riding the train we came to the conclusion that in an odd sense our software was suitable for this environment.