one year ago today

December 16, 2008… I moved back to Zamalek, four and a half years after leaving the neighborhood.

Obviously, I’m not a suburban sort of person and wasn’t built to live in suburbia even if it weren’t filled with house floods and rabid dogs.

But there are a few things I miss.

*the new AUC campus was, in principle, walkable from my home. It did take 1 hour and 20 minutes to walk it, so it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d do every day. But once every couple of weeks it was a nice little morning walk. By contrast, if I tried to walk to work from Zamalek… I’m not even sure it can be done safely. But if it could, then I would probably be looking at a walk of 7-8 hours each way.

*clean air

*silence

*Birds. To be more specific: hoopoes. I love those birds. And according to every ornithological map I’ve consulted, they simply do not exist in the Western hemisphere, so it’s no wonder I never saw any before moving to Egypt. (I read about them in Aristophanes’s The Birds as an undergrad, but had no idea what they were at the time.) See two or three of these birds feeding in the grass at 6 AM, and it would make your day. They also sing beautifully and mournfully, but to do so they must lower their heads far down, almost between their feet; once in awhile they would sit on my or a friend’s balcony and do that. And those wings look spectacular in flight: almost like a moving optical illusion.