13 Fri. March '09, Cairo

In the Nile Hotel on the east side of the Nile river we are in rooms 708 and 709, Michaela and Jon staying in the latter. We arrived last night, an hour late was the flight, and the impression of Rome I had with the largely male presence in dark suits though they were not well-fitting, the appearance of being out of dress, no long kandouras. In the darkness outside the terminal, after having passed through a long tunnel, the darkness of Rome, two young men dressed in suits get on the bus, sit briefly and get off, one with shiney, pommaded hair, and both with the dusky skin of Africans, though not the clear caramel of Peuhls. Many with the long head and their suits slightly too large on limber frames.

Immigration seemed like being in a narrow tunnel compared to the wide area of Dubai's. A woman darted ahead of me in line and the officer inside the glass box quickly flicked the pages of our passports to find the visa and sign it in a hurried way unlike the leisurely way Emiratees in terminla 3 of Dubai airport.

On the way to the hotel on the bus Jon was fascinated by the traffic pattern which flowed according to its own lines and not the straight lanes of an ordered one. I said, 'what's a lane? It's just one big, wide lane'. The taxis are usually old, navy blue and white, the same size as the small Nissan taxis in Al Ain, and I noticed one with battered rear fender like a wilted MacDonald's frie hanging as if by a thread to the chassis of the car. Traffic police wear hats and white jodpurs and reminded me of Roman traffic policemen.

19 March '09 Al Ain

A trio of English horn, violin, and I can't remember the third, played in front of a very large stone slab carving with a depiction of Ibis on it from the Temple at Karmak in the lobby of the Nile Hotel. The three tour buses our party was in was unloaded and we put the labels we were given in the bus on the bags to identify them so that they could be brought up to our rooms. However, Mary and I decided to take them up ourselves. I tried out my Arabic on one of the hotel personnel, 'lamuakhzah' (excuse me) and he put his face nearer to mine and peered into my eyes while Kheiri, a man on the tour whom I would meet later at lunch in Ghiza, opened wide his sky blue eyes in surprise to hear Arabic from my mouth. I asked him for the elevator in English and he pointed it to me. One unusual thing was the metal detector in the lobby after one came through the revolving door. Two men made sure you put your belongings on the table to the right of the detector before you passed throught it.

We were on the seventh floor and we had a card to open the door, which Michaela that night locked inside her room so that I had to get another one at the reception desk in order to retrieve it. I switched on the TV set and explored the channels, stopping at one where there was a program in progress, two women, and a man who played at a piano, the one skinny woman with bleached blonde hair dressed in tight jeans singing while the pianist accompanied her. Yesterday while I was driving home from Abu Dhabi where I attended a conference put on by the Sorbonne at the Cultural Foundation I turned on the radio and listened to a female American black singer and I noted the same modulation in the stringing out of the notes that is much more prominent in Arabic singing, the voice holding a syllable and playing with it in a tremolo. A lot more musical in a way, and emotional. Another channel had an old fifties Egyptian movie with an actor dressed in a shiney linen suit arriving at home and encountering the maid on a ladder. She was halfway up it to get his suitcase from a shelf in a cabinet. The camera is focused on him almost ingratiating himself to her exposed ankles and calves, preparing to grab them if she were to fall and smiling up at her though her head was off camera and so her buxom ass was more prominent. The next moment they are on the floor almost in each others arms, both of them laughing. The woman had a light shade of hair that was hard to tell the color since it was a black and white film, but the main actress, perhaps the man's wife, had a modern hairdo, short with curls, and had that glow typical of actresses of that time. However, I lost interest since I don't know much Arabic.