*** Monday, 01May06 ***
Another holiday here, Labor Day. But then it's Labor Day in most of the world on May 1st.

*** Tuesday, 02May06 ***
Discovered that the nearest McD's is across the street from the American University bookstore and it has free wireless connection to the Internet!! That reduces my trip for a plain double cheeseburger to about ten minutes.

*** Wednesday, 03May06 ***
I've noticed that high level people here never seem to have a secretary that intercepts their calls to allow for quiet meetings. Indeed, many have two cell phones and more than one land line. This provides ultra-availability but does it really make any sense?

I asked Ahmed where I could find a 0 point Phillips screwdriver. He told me I should go to the El Nekhely store in El Bostan Center on Bab Elouk Street beside American University. Or so I thought and so I went. Actually I turned one street too soon and couldn't find it. When I got to the point that I was about to ask directions I looked beside me and there was a Radio Shack store. So I went in and asked for a Phillips screwdriver. The guys behind the counter didn't know what a Phillips screwdriver was but they did know where the tools were and I soon had a collection of five screwdrivers varying from small to very tiny and all for under three dollars.

I had dinner with Paul and Than at La Bodega in Zamalek. Paul and I walked a good 35 minutes to get there but the fettucini was worth the walk. It was a very pleasant evening.

*** Thursday, 04May06 ***
Went to Dokki to talk to Sebila to be sure my expense statements were correct. On the ride back to MoF, I picked up my visa at the Zambian Embassy. The receipt I got said it cost $25 but I paid 260 EL which converts to $45.21 USD. "Thieves, thieves, they are everywhere!"

The pyramids as seen from the Doqqi office.

My Restart Panic.
I started to notice that my Mac would go through a log-out procedure without my approval in seemingly random ways. This distressed me beyond words because it seemed to suggest that my System was unstable and would likely crash catastrophically in the near future. No one wants to even think this much less experience it but what was I to do?

I posted messages on Apple's Support Groups, asked for help from friends and backed up key data. I got a lot of suggestions and tried to follow them. Still I would return to my Mac after a meeting and find that it had tried to log out on its own. I could only imagine the catastrophe awaiting me. Loss of data, a defunct machine, being on assignment without a microcomputer. The nightmarish scenarios flashed before my eyes; I shuddered at the images.
Then I got a message from Adam of the MacCast podcast fame and he suggested a number of things including that I look at a Security Preference Pane which had a check box for "Log out after 30 minutes of inactivity" and, sure enough, I had checked the box. I unchecked it.

My unexplained log outs seemed to go away. Was it all caused by that security check box and my willingness to leave my PowerBook's lid up? I think so. After thinking about it I realized that I had a new habit of leaving my laptop lid open as I went to meetings. This meant that my Mac was still running and the 30 minutes timeout was operative. Since my meetings generally went beyond an hour, the log out feature kicked in. All this fuss for next to nothing.
Today Sameh, who sits beside me in the office taught me how to say "Al hamdo lelah el naharda el khamis." It's Egyptian for "Thank god it's Thursday."

Ahmed was in the office today and told me that there was some kind of problem with the project server that they were trying to fix. He said (proudly) that there were five American computer engineers who were working on it as we spoke. I said that that sounded to me like five guys sitting around a table drinking coffee and complaining.

When we got to the hotel, Marcia suggested that we have breakfast tomorrow. I said yes.
and she said to call her.

*** Friday, 05May06 ***
Try as I might I couldn't stay in bed beyond 7:40 so I was up and about and called Marcia at 9:00 A.M. We met in the Cafe at 9:30 and had a pleasant omelet and croissant. She has charm and the conversation was quite pleasant.

I left at 10:30 and took the "Red Line" south four stops to Mar Girgis with the intent to go to Babylon Fort (as shown on my hotel map). When I exited the station I couldn't see the fort but I could see herds of hordes of tourists milling about.

A Coptic church with a function underway.

One of the things I have learned to do is to "sidle up" to the edges of these groups and listen to what the leaders tell their charges. It's never very informative but I can learn what the hot sites are in the neighborhood. This is especially valuable on days like today when I have no plan and just a spot on the map I want to go to -- and only on the map as I have no real idea what I will find.

When I overhear the tour leader, I find out why I wanted to be there. It amuses me that, while I have no idea what they paid to be there, it cost me 12 cents. I have only a suspicion but I think they paid more than I did. So it amuses me to lower the average cost of a tour by participating without paying.

On this occasion, tour leaders frequently pointed out that 2000 years ago the surface of the land was about ten feet lower than today so we were frequently looking down. That bit of information impressed on me what 2000 years and a lot of dust can do to change a city.
Today's discovery was that there was a 6th century church there -- or the ruins of one, depending on your opinion -- named after St. George. I never knew he was popular outside of England but here he was slaying dragons with aplomb (I saw the murals). It was a Coptic church meaning that it had been built by the (now) Christian minority in Egypt. Copts are an Eastern Orthodox faith so there were icons and Greek lettering in the church. Duly noted.

Even better, the church had been built over the hotel where Mary, Joseph and Jesus had stayed while in Egypt. What luck! I followed the tour group down stairs and through ancient streets I would never have discovered on my own and got to peer down the stone staircase into the marble clad room used by the Holy Family. There was no explanation why the Holy Family would want to live under a church that wouldn't be built for 500 years but the crypt was clean as a whistle. Mary must have been an immaculate housekeeper.

There was a (relatively) modern St. George's church on the tour and here we -- I felt myself assimilating into the tour group rather like the Borg assimilated those it encountered -- could take pictures. At the front, over the alter, was a large tapestry of Christ rising from the grave. His six foot tall image was tastefully edged by colorful Chase lights that blinked on and off in sundry schemes too complicated to describe briefly -- and you do want me to be brief, don't you? On the back and side walls, icons of the saints stared at this triumphant spectacle.

I try to observe the rules even when they appear to be distinctly irrational.

I try not to be obvious so I float from group to group depending on how boring the presentation is. That means I move around a lot. One group I followed for a while went to an ancient synagogue, named Ben Ezra. At first I couldn't figure out what language the tour leader was speaking, his Egyptian accent masked it completely, but then I heard one of the tourees ask him, "Ne rabota?" and I got the message.

Of course I learned nothing about the synagogue but I got to look at it and thought it beautiful. Small though it was, it had nice proportions and beautiful abstract wood carvings on the walls. There were marble monuments in the middle of the two story room but the Hebrew inscriptions meant nothing to me.

I wandered on and found a Coptic church that looked like the one I couldn't photograph in but was filled with locals, not tourists, and they were having a great time. Some ceremony seemed to have just ended and people who had very young children were in the front of the church and they were being photographed and videoed. No signs here preventing pictures. Every one was in a good mood and happiness abounded.

I followed a group and they went to the "hanging or suspended church" (several tour leaders described it in exactly the same way) which wasn't and hadn't ever been hanging or suspending. Simply put, it had been constructed with an entrance about 30 feet about the ground level on top of a old Roman fort. For that it was called a hanging or suspending church. Go figure.

In my wanderings I wondered how much of what I was seeing was genuinely old or merely very dingy. Tourists love dinge -- they regard it as proof that they were justified in paying whatever they overpaid -- and they are awed by it. I am a bit harder to please and I noticed a lot of evident restoration that the tour guides were not mentioning -- not that I want to be critical.

The famous Nilometer.

After I had exploited the tours I decided to follow Plan B: walk over to the Nile and view the Nilometer, the ninth century "device" for recording the height of the annual Nile floods.
My first problem was to get across the Metro train tracks and there seemed to be no way to do this without doing what I did: I bought another ticket to the Metro, entered the station and walked over the bridge over the tracks and then exited on the other side. It only cost me 12 cents but I wondered why there wasn't an easier way for the locals.

Finding the Nile was easy and it was a short walk to find a place where the Nile cruise boats weren't blocking a view of the Nilometer. For all its many mentions in tourist guides and prominent location on tourist maps, the Nilometer was spectacularly unimpressive! What a waste of time! Take my advice: don't go there.

I walked north toward my hotel and got there about two hours later. It is beginning to get warm here.