When friends and family have come to visit, I didn't really want to take them to the Pyramids and the Sphinx. I wasn't particularly excited about showing them the great mosques and winding streets of medieval Cairo. I didn't think there was much to see in Zamalek, where I live. What I really wanted to show them was Downtown. Downtown is Cairo as far as I'm concerned. Of course in a city of almost 20 million people and dozens of neighborhoods, that's something of a ridiculous statement. Downtown is one of many places, all of them integral to the city's character and identity. But it is my favorite one, by far. In the almost a year that I've been here, I've spent countless nights drinking Stellas in Downtown's dirtiest watering holes. I've passed endless afternoons puffing a shisha in the boursa or other Downtown qahwas. I've met scores of characters—some kind and fun, some unpleasant, most of them eccentric—in these classic Downtown hangouts. Sometimes for the fun of it I take a walk up Talaat Harb Street at midnight just to admire the hordes of people, including—it took me a while to get used to this—families with small children. I buy all of my vegetables at the Bab el-Luq market, even though I live next to a big Western-style supermarket. I love the architecture of the old colonial buildings and the layout of the streets and the midans with their tarboosh-wearing statues. Part of this, I'm a little embarrassed to say, stems from my sense of nostalgia. I've always kind of wished I were living in 1960. I like the fashion and the culture and the history and politics of those years. For better or worse (he had his flaws to be sure) I've always been a bit enamored of Gamal Abdel Nasser. And when I sit in the Greek Club, snacking on mezze, sipping Stella, and discussing imperialism, I can almost ignore the tacky Christmas lights and the polyester tablecloths and imagine myself to be one of the few foreigners hanging around Cairo during the heady days of post-revolutionary Egypt. It's not just imaginary, though. There is also the very real fact that Downtown is, in a way, the heart of this city, even as people with money make the move out to 6th of October City and Sheikh Zayed and other new communities out in the desert. Downtown is where the government is. It's also, in a way, the site of Cairo's transformation from a “modern” city built by Khedive Ismail, to a colonial capital occupied by Britain, to a post-colonial, post-revolutionary cultural and political capital, to… whatever Cairo is now. (We can save that discussion for another day.) I'm not writing this to plug Al-Masry Al-Youm's new Downtown page, although I will say I am very excited about it. I'm writing this because when I go back to the United States and am living in New York or wherever, I'll sit on a plush couch in a coffeeshop with WiFi, sip on my latte, and miss the stained glass windows, the smokey air, the strong tea and the stray cats of Downtown.
