Dr. Nono´s blog

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2011-02-18T00:26:00.001Z

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Dr. Nono is tonite in the radio

2007-05-29T17:34:00.000Z

I will be interviewed in the program "La Bombilla, El programa mas viajero"( the light bulb, the program that travels the most of all) from Sanlucar la mayor, Sevilla Today, 29th. The program will be at 21:00 Greenwich time, one hour later in Torredonjimeno, Spain, and two hours later in King Mariut, Egypt. It is a very cool program apparently, i never heard it before :P but i spoke yesterday with German, one of the people producing the program, and he told me about it. They have "random" telephone calls to the world and they get to know different cultures. Every program they have specials about different countries and interviews with people that like to travel differently. They called me for the trips in bicycle in Cabo de Gata with the Hull crew in 2002, Maghreb/Morocco that i did with Mr. Sam "fishman" Petragallus along the Atlantic coast in 2002 and a mad adventure in the Atlas mountain and Sahara dessert with Dr. Tomsy Hedley in 2003. The program in Spanish can be heard online in:

http://www.sanlucarlamayor.es/delegaciones/frames.php?zona=25

Then click on the moving butterfly on the right..But in my mozila firefox doesnt seem to work...just in explorer.

7 wonders of the world

2007-05-26T17:23:00.001Z

Well, the election of the new 7 wonders of the world has been going on for a while in http://www.new7wonders.com/ .The finalists have been selected. No offense, but for me even considering the statue of liberty or the cristo redentor or the Eiffel tower as wonders of the world is a bit excessive. Buildings that have were erected with much more limited technology and have lasted for hundreds, even more than a thousand years deserve this sort of award much more. Myself i have voted: Alhambra, Taj mahal (two of the most beautiful Islamic palaces ever built, one in mud the other in stone), Machu Pichu (unknown how was built at that height without use of the wheel), Timbuctu (even though i prefer the closely related Djenne Mosque, in Mali as well), Hagia Sophia (in one of my favourite cities of all times: Bizancio, Constantinopolis or Istambul), Chichen Itza (i had to chose a pyramid) and the Great wall (the only building that can be seen from space...in mud as well). I missed one in particular, snif, the Shibam skyscrapers in Yemen, made with mud and stone and 500 years standing there. Building regulations do not allow building these beauties nowadays...

http://www.urbanphoto.net/blog/2007/01/22/skyscrapers-in-the-desert/

The result of the award will be 07.07.07, and as the vote is either though internet and telephone, i am afraid that the greater access in developed countries some of my non-favourites will make it to the final 7 wonders, so u go and vote ur favourites!...thanks god theres more than 7 wonders in the world ;) Another of my candidates would have been the mud maze of Ait Benhadout, Morocco, but im too emotionally attached to Maghreb to be impartial in this one :P

Nonorant in Tugareia

2007-05-20T23:17:00.000Z

Here i present one the coolest spot (at least for me) in Alexandria. It was an old commercial stock market trading place in the coast road: Tugareia (literally commercial). In here the transactions were carried out sitting and having drinks. They dont serve nescafe or coca cola, just traditional Egyptian drinks. In here the black & white view of the beach in a cloudy windy day:

The cafe has a very particular structure: half of it is just for men to drink cafe/te and shisha (note that the verb to drink in arabic is used for smoking too...so u drink a cigerrete :P). In this area, these men play infinite competitions of the oh-so-popular board games tabli (backgammon), chess and others. The other half of the cafe is the "family part" where there is not board games. Thats where we always sit. The family part is a bit more expensive and they have particular waiters and until very recently just weak shisha was available. The family area has another peculiarity: you cant stand in there, you have to sit or leave. The reason for this is that given the negotiations that we taking place originally in there conversations could get very heated up, people could enter from the street and join the arguments and so on...so everybody sitting is better for ensuring the peace of the place :D . There is another curious rule: when a man and a woman are sitting alone in a table they have to sit opposite to each other, as hands could go on legs easier :) the funny thing is that this rule just apply to new customers the old customers are free to sit and touch :D anyways, that never happened that i saw :P ...In here i just show the pics of the family area. Currently the age of the crowd in here is a mix of very old men that seem to have been hanging around for decades...

...and young group of culturally and socially active people in different degrees: NGO workers, poets, film makers, theater actors,etc...mixed with many foreigners from everywhere. Bahz defined it as a train station.

The paradigm of mixing of the old and the new/young is a useful guide, thats why the picture of the blog of the photovoltaic panel and the mud building as cover of this blog: The vernacular knowledge mixing with new approaches and ideas, the continuous process of learning the from the past to resolve the future. One of the many characteristics that differentiate humans and other creatures is depict the future and come with new solution for facing the future. The currents affairs in the world from an energetical, environmental and political point of view and dominated by capitalist system, are leading us to destruction. Adam Smith got it wrong in a couple of points: 1. capital is created by extraction from the earth, manufacture and selling a product. and 2. the more consumption and trade the healthier the economy. So basically we gotta take from earth, sell, take from earth, sell, and so on...until we have depleted everything, but we would have very healthy economies!! suuure. So basically in the Smith´s model a building that wastes resources and energy is better for economy than one that consumes near to nothing???!!! how ridiculous and preposterous!! An old Afican proverb said something related to the collapse of such model: when you have cut every tree, fished all the fish and polluted every river, you will realise you cannot eat money. Well the model was still (sort of) good when we had an amount of resources much greater than the needs of the world population. But now, the needs of water, food, energy and education/information/culture of an unprecedentedly rising number of people in the planet are simply impossible to sustain using the progress models we are using if we are ALL to achieve a decent quality of life.

Thanks God, a lot of people have realised that and they are trying to understand the problem in more depth and develop the concepts necessary to address the challenges. There are very interesting papers by Prof. Geoff Hammond in (Bath University) and other authors treating the concept of ecological footprint (http://redefiningprogress.org/). Consider how much area (A1) of fishing, farming and industry area is required for provide sufficient energy and goods to a maintain the population in a particular area (A2). If the whole world population would be to achieve the levels of comfort of London with its energetic and gods consumption levels...mmm are we running out of earth? and at the rate of growth of the population? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population . Take into account that not all the areas are susceptible to produce fish and animals and vegetables and certain goods... and if those areas are degraded to the point that they are over polluted or underwater or extremelly hot dry or subjected to continuous natural disasters? well, thats really what is happening, we are heading towards a massive cataclysm or the apocalypses, doesnt matter what u call it. I hate to say this but i achieved that conclusion from a scientific point of view...we are getting there, and fast!!! Millions of people in their way to death in a painful manner is not good (if ur not a sadistic or extremely desperate...i know, you should be desperate).

Today the British Nobel Laureate Sir Harold Kroto, co-discoverer of buckminsterfullerene molecule C60 (the one that led to the discovery of my beloved carbon nanotubes) had a bitter and justified attack on educational policies (http://education.guardian.co.uk/universitiesincrisis/story/0,,2084784,00.html) , i quote him:

As well as trained engineers and scientists, we desperately need a scientifically literate general population, capable of thinking rationally - and that includes lawyers, businesspeople, farmers, politicians, journalists and athletes. This is vital if we are to secure a sustainable world for our grandchildren.

The facts that a) we use in one year an amount of fossil fuel that took a million years to accumulate, b) we may be on the verge of a climate change catastrophe of global proportions and c) powerful technologies may soon fall into the hands of disturbed individuals with minds riven with those twin cancers of nationalism and religious fanaticism, seem to concern the scientific community a lot more than they do politicians or the media.

I do not agree with one point: powerful technologies may soon fall into the hands of disturbed individuals. It should be written: many powerful technologies have been long time in the hands of some (extremely) disturbed individuals with minds riven with those twin cancers of nationalism and religious fanaticism (and their own personal economical interests)...and many of this disturbed individuals ARE actually politicians and people in the media. Are not the information technologies misused by the mass media to deform reality? Are not missiles being launched daily against civil areas by westerner politicians? Powerful technology IS BEING USED in our faces for not so honorable purposes.

So are we humans predestined to destroy our selves victims of our selfish impulses??? well it will definitely depends on how we consider and resolve problems at global/planet scale. Capitalism has brought advantages, that could have been better achieved by other means, but thats not important now. Who cares how many people advocated for it, promoted it and practice it all way around...we all do somehow, looking at it, hating it and denying it is not going to resolve anything. You gotta play the game, to improve the world requires and effort to change ourselves, is what Prophet Muhammad (Sallallahum alehi salam) called jihad. Jihad literally means effort...nothing to do with terrorists and bombs. Actually for quoting Islam again: the ones who kills one human, is as bad as if he has killed the entire humanity. Clearly many journalists in Europe do not know about what jihad or Islam really means...coming back to the issue of jihad, like every concept in Islam meanings can be interior or exterior. There are literal interpretations and the interpretations that emanate of the Qur2an when you explore the whole thing. And we have to quote the same Prophet again when coming back from winning a great battle: now we come back home to fight the most important jihad, that is the jihad against one selves. Islam gives a higher importance to change the world by changing ourselves, not for killing those people that think differently.

The conclusion of all this is that what we ALL have to do is change and rethink about ourselves in developing and developed countries for achieving global sustainability. In developed countries to help to promote equality at all levels by means of helping other underdeveloped areas (nationally and transnationally) NOT exporting our old models of waste of energy and pollution..oh by they are profitable (at the end we will end up eating our money...). In developing countries, if just one wish: education. But we all know how difficult that is...educational models require social changes first. But as the social changes are slowed down, so is the evolution in education. To disestablish establishments is always painful in one way or another, but sometimes in life we find ourselves in a moment of taking a decision and taking pain. I am sorry for the people that might feel disgusted for the following comment,but ive got a point...the choices are: you can eat camel shit or dog shit; the only sure thing is that you will end up eating shit. The less painful way is changing ourselves: so the muslims do jihad against yourselves if is your faith, and so the westerner or any other religion /culture by any other convincing excuse you want...but for citing Sir Kroto again for the scientific mind "you realise before long that if the world is in anyone's hands, it is in yours." Lets change ourselves by questioning ourselves: what is progress?

Exterior of white mosques in the centre of Alex

2007-05-14T22:24:00.000Z

The most remarkable place in the old city centre of Alexandria is a group of beautiful mosques in the Anfushi area. This neighborhood is a nowadays a very poor area, but still conserves some of the taste of its great past. In this alleyway i found food stalls, parked carretas and children playing football with a can, the Sidi Yakout El-Arsh mosque stands bright white in the background:

In this picture, the contrast is of other nature. I heard once that the aspirations and power of a civilization can be analyzed by finding the tallest buildings in a city...nowadays are not cathedrals, lighthouses or minarets anymore...

The domes in the Yakout mosque are extremely pretty with their intricate geometrical patterns, the openings that accentuate the verticallity and the typical little spheres topping them:

In here the mosque from the side and the classic stall selling tea and coffee:

In the same square the Sharaf al-Din al-Busiri Mosque and mausoleum can be found. It is a tiny but charming little mosque, were one of the great sufi characters is buried. The long complete name of this man was: Sharafud´-dini Muhammad bin Sa´idi bin Hammadi bin Muhsini bin Sanhaji as-Sanhaji al-Busiri...Al-Busiri A.D.) was an Egyptian of Berber Maghrebi (Moroccan) ascendants from a poor family, who excelled as calligrapher, traditionalist and sufi poet. An interesting fact is that he memorised the whole Holy Qur2an at the age of 13 (!!!). This was the first mosque in Alexandria that i entered; the tomb is said to have el-Barakah (blessing) and that motivates mothers with their little children to visit the highly decorated burial place. Architecturally, the most remarkable elements of this building are the lovely interior marble patio and the silver domes:

The mosque of Abu Abbas al-Mursi occupies the central place in the square. This mosque constructed in 1775 by Algerians, built over the tomb of the Andalusian saint and mystic, Sheikh Shehab El Din Abu El Abbas Ahmed Ibn Umar Ibn Mohamed Al Ansary El Mursi, who joined and then lead the Shadhali Tariqa (Tariqa is a brotherhood, or of school of thought). Al-Mursi ( A.D.) was born in Murcia (as his name indicates) and lived in Seville with his wealthy family working in the trading business. With 23 years he moved to Tunisia where he met El Sheikh Abu El Hassan El Shazly and accompanied him to Alexandria. Here, he stayed as a Muslim teacher for 43 years until his death and was widely regarded for his commitment to help the less favoured in society. The building itself has a very long history, beginning just with the tomb, it was successively enlarged and repaired throughout the centuries until the completion of the final building in the aforementioned date by Sheikh Abu el Hassan El Maghreby. The last reconstruction was done in 1943 by King Farouk, when the mosque was decorated in the Ayyubid style, the popular style at the time of the emigration of Al-Mursi. The shining has been (and still is) visited by many pilgrims from North Africa in their way to Mecca for centuries.

In here the side view of the Al-Mursi mosque from the underground commercial area in the centre of the square:

A close up from the back entrance:

In here the front entrance, where it can be read: "Do not forget Allah", and locals sell some of the typical made in china stuff:

A detail of the pattern of one of the windows:

In here the balcona with Mashrabiya on the side:

And how not? a cat guards the entrance to the toilet of the Mosque :)

Party for celebrating diversity

2007-05-11T09:54:00.000Z

My friends in England, if you are close to Bath on Monday, please do not miss the opportunity to celebrate diversity of this world at the rhythm of the drums in the University. White people, Black people, yellow people, red people, mongrel people like me and even blue people that want to get in better mood will be there...my spirit will be there. (ps: dont feel discriminated if you are of another colour, my apologies to you). This party needs no excuse, but if u wanna find the catalyst, blame an idiot student in Bath University who invited Nick Griffin from the BNP, citing my dearest Dr. Pek: A former member of the National Front and convicted 'for distributing literature likely to incite racial hatred' A man who is widely regarded as a neo-Nazi and a fascist. A man who denies the existence of the holocaust. A man openly homophobic, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic. Thanks God or Allah or whoever you want, his talk, as well his brain, has been canceled...but the party of diversity is still on!!! attend and have a piece of fun for every person in the world who thinks like us!

Bears in the Nile

2007-05-09T11:34:00.000Z

I have been a couple of days in Cairo and along the Nile i found this exposition organised by UN and other institutions. Basically bears have been sent to artists from each country in the world and then exposed all together. It is fantastic the collage of colours, techniques and little cultural references...they all seem to support the same world. I am sorry, but i couldnt record every artist and every country, you can play the guess game, many times is obvious, others not at all:

The Egyptian adventure continues

2007-05-06T00:42:00.001Z

Well last night was my plane back to the UK and my visa run out...and obviously i did not take it. My place is here right now, i am not going anywhere. The things i have got in here are not many in terms of material possessions, but my heart and my soul are full of joy. I am happy here, there is so much to learn and in so many levels. There are good people and bad people everywhere, there are advantages and disadvantages everywhere. I enjoyed many years the advantages of being living in developed countries* but living in the "other side" (in terms of percentage the "other side" are the majority of people, and theres more than one side!!!) has advantages too. Enjoying and growing, seeing and learning, meeting and talking in both sides are enriching...i know a bit of the Westerner world (or better west-south west European) and even less of this one. I will have to go for the one that i know less cos i will learn more here, its opening more windows. There a quotation from the Holy Qur2an: people choose the inferior over the superior (II,61). How can we discern the superior and the inferior? and what are we ready to accept as a proof? what we call proofs in science is something some how very particular. The proof is accepted when it feedbacks the theoretical background fitting relatively well with it. But what about the whole universe that cannot be quantified? what about those things that we are not able to perceive with our senses or with any technology? all the science in a gazillion PhD thesis are infinitely small compared with the number of events in the Universe at an infinite number of scales. Those proofs, signs and answers sent from the unknown world to the heart and mind are incredibly elusive and/or overwhelmingly obvious. Surely, they greatly determine our decisions in life. I extended my visa another 3 months, the Egyptian adventure continues. I consider i took the better over the worse for myself at this moment...so, in consequence, this blog wont be discontinued, home and open books.

This photo is an obvious translation :P

*progress can be defined in many ways, this issue surely takes many books of development, in this particular case referred from a technological point of view.

PS: last nite i committed a very bad mistake in referencing, now is corrected...i ask for forgiveness and i apologise the 3 people that read the article before i had time to find the exact ref. Ta!

Coast in Alex (Part II) - The East port and the Shipyard

2007-05-03T19:05:00.000Z

Continuing with the coast of Alexandria, here it is the East port:

This port is for fishermen boats, the nets rest close to the street:

Boats are varnished in the pavement:

The children have a little swim close to the mosque:

And in here one of my favourite places in Alex: the shipyard. The sounds of this place:

http://omoniak.ath.cx:8888/af_nono/shipyard.wav

Where little fishing boats and big yatchs are constructed:

A massive hull of a yatch is being built:

And in here you can see the scale of it:

Another yatch in a more advanced stage:

And one that seems to be abandoned:

In here a boat collage:

And another little collage, observe the little wooden hut, yes! is as oblique as it looks:

And of course there are people working in the boats, these ones are putting another beam in the hull:

This one polishes the boat:

This one paints:

Close to a boat with a painted Swedish flag (!!??), these two looked...

...at those two pushing their boat out of the water:

The name of the big green and red boat is "Jesus", and has eyes:

And "Jesus" being of that size has to be pulled with other methods:

I love the yellow colour for little boats:

And so they do:

Coast in Alex (Part I)

2007-05-02T01:43:00.000Z

The coast is always present in Alex, is the reference to everything. Here i bring you some of the pics i have taken during all this time in here. First of all, Miami Beach Eskandarella Style:

A little boat floating peacefully:

Some fishermen in the cubic stones´ island:

A guy thinking about...

A school trip to the beach in the afternoon:

Dry stone, wet stone, foam, water,horizon, clouds and sky:

And the banister frames the dying sun:

the fallen man

2007-04-29T03:55:00.000Z

"The fallen man, if is abandoned to his own resources, finds himself somehow in a dilemma between the mental knowledge and the sensitive knowledge: he knows that the mental knowledge is superior to the knowledge of the senses and has to be valued in consequence; but he knows too that the inferior knowledge possesses an intensity that the superior knowledge lacks. The knowledge of the heart explains everything; but in the absence of it and of its extensions, in the absence of faith and the virtues that go with it, in particular the patience in front of what one cannot understand and the reliability in the Providence, it seems like something is wrong; the soul finds itself in a dilemma between hypocrisy and sensuality", M.Lings

As a fallen man I have been looking for water digging a bit here and a bit there, if i keep doing this i will not find it and i will die of thirst. I have to begin my travel digging deep on just one place: my heart; trying to find the string that connects my soul to the world around, trying to find the path that bridges between the finite and the infinite, trying to find the eternal in my memory, trying to find the light in the obscurity of my blinding ignorance. In the place that i am searching, my mind, my heart and my soul will be fused for eternity.

Over two thousand hits and the digital divide

2007-04-26T08:27:00.000Z

Well, and another milestone in my blogger experience. Thanks to the wonderful work done by Google Analytics i can see where is (almost) every person that reads the blog. The Geo map overlay of the last 500 visits are shown in the picture:

I know u cant see nothing in this view, please click on the image for appreciating the pretty orange points that represent your computers on the map. Actually the localized distribution of the people reading the blog is not surprising at all. Yesterday the Internet World Map 2007 was released in http://ipligence.com , from there this image was extracted:

It can be seen how the people hitting in this blog are confined to the areas of high density of the net. The data are quite shocking, large areas of the planet (and some of them very densely populated, Indonesia and India as the main example) are almost empty...but for putting some numbers to it, is good to recall the table ipligence provided:

Geographic Area	Number of Addresses	% of Addresses
Africa	40.241.664	1.519%
Antartica	15.620	0.001%
Asia	371.297.015	14.015%
Caribbean	1.681.866	0.063%
Central America	2.557.340	0.097%
Europe	569.838.903	21.510%
Middle East	12.011.131	0.453%
North America	1.481.754.661	55.932%
Oceania	76.417.711	2.885%
South America	93.409.304	3.525%

Some striking data are: 1. fifteen thousand IPs in Antarctica?! (that was a surprise to me) 2. Taking into account that the population of US is only the 5% of the world total, they hold the 55% of addresses 3. Africa has the 13% of the world population and only 1.5% of the IPs...and so on. Because of this, is obvious that the most of information on the net is in English, which means that a person with no knowledge of English cannot retrieve most of the data, which is a massive language barrier. Furthermore, the levels of illiteracy in many developing countries make Internet an Utopian land for many (not very extreme estimations are that 30% of people in Egypt are illiterate). Others, simply do not have access the technology as many cannot afford a computer or even paying in an internet cafe. These fact is one of the main problems of the so called "Digital Divide", which refers to the gap between those who benefit from digital technology and those who do not (please visit digitaldivide.org for a more detailed description of this global problem). Anyway those who can read and write and have access to the tech dedicate most of their online time in playing games, chatting, porn and downloading...Even in developed countries many times educated people do not make a great use of the vast amount of resources available; there are many many PhD students in European Universities that still make their research in Google (not even the scholar version).

So why is all this mess??? we have been lucky enough to be blessed with one of the most powerful cultural advances (if not the most) of all human history: the computers and the net. The last time that a similar cultural revolution took place was with the invention of the book (through the Arabs that stole the paper technology from two Chinese prisoners :P and then improved greatly the fabrication processes) and the invention of the movable character print by Gutenberg. The time that passed from the moment of the inventions until the majority of people could benefit from that massive cultural tool were centuries. So it happens now, we have an amazing tool without instructions. The people of my generation were educated in a system developed for the old world by educators that thought that www was some association of world wrestling. They did not know, they never taught us. We had to discover ourselves, to explore a vast unknown land with no much guidance...and we still are. I understand it can be very discouraging to search in the net, spending time in distinguishing between useful data and crap... it can be quite overwhelming, but that cannot be an excuse...lets go and use already discovered resources, discover new resources we did not know, use them wisely, identify new resources, use the tools to spread knowledge, to collaborate, to bridge through national borders. Do not forget that, until very recently, information was a rare precious thing. My parents in Spain could not get newspapers from France 40 years ago, and today we can read the news in real time or speak with people from many different countries just with a click.....enjoy the wonderful opportunity that is to have access to information. Enjoy the wonderful opportunity that is to have access to information from this side of the digital divide.

King Farouk´s palace and gardens

2007-04-24T00:51:00.000Z

Here we have a green area, the one closest to Miami in Montazar, south Alex. Apart of being one of the few green areas, is not free to enter and is open to public only when security reasons do not oblige to close it. This beautiful lion welcomes you the the garden:

These gardens host the palace of King Farouk, the controversial penultimate king of Egypt, built in the mid XX century. Today is the Presidential Residence and the interior of the palace cannot be accessed by the public, so unfortunately the otherwise beautiful visit was reduced to a walk in the gardens. The Italian architect (i cannot be bothered to find out his name, im not interested) mixed a variety of styles: a tower in the corner resembling a minaret...but not quite:

And we always need more details, these stairs looks like extracted from an Gothic abbey:

And this reminded me of the words of Charles Correa when talking about Indian gardens: "when the built elements catch part of the sky"

The place when looked closely gives the sensation of a luxurious fortification. And those overhanging roofs...arent they the same than in my parents place in Santa Clara (Sevilla)?

The pines, palm trees and grass surround the palace. This particular view reminded me of south of Morocco (Agdz for example :P)

And in the middle of the palm trees this recently built white void tower is found, being a water deposit:

Some nice details were scattered around, the lamp posts:

The sleeping Lions on a fountain, but the tale tell us that the sleeping looking Lion is really awake, and the Lion with open eyes is really sleeping...

One of the palm tree wood bridges, with the pine trees in the background:

One detail of the sitting place in one of the kiosks built with wood and palm leaves:

The coast surrounds half of the perimeter, the ever present Mediterraneo in Alex. Lovely that was early in the morning and it is still not summer, so the place was deserted:

King Farouk even built an island in for drinking tea at 5pm, some say that he built the whole complex for that reason :D does it really matter? The rich people keep enjoying their tea in here, but in these days in their luxurious yatchs, the lighthouse help them to find their way:

And this fisherman was here at early time to catch his lunch:

And in here a couple more of fishermen in a concrete structure that is literally falling down. I think that is obvious the life time of this building material, no wonder why companies do not insure concrete buildings for longer than 10 or 25 years...meanwhile the pyramids in Giza and the Yemen stone and mud skyscrapers are still there after thousands of years:

Observe how in the first line of coast within the complex they are building these little beach houses, and they are selling them at ridiculous prices...and those beaches are private of course, so they are not accessible to the public either. They have built more things within the massive extension, like the Palestine Hotel (ugly and out of context) and a disco... Weird flavoured place...not quite my favourite taste.

Cats, Gatos and Kettas

2007-04-23T05:42:00.000Z

There are so many cats around Alexandria and Cairo, not so many dogs i have got to say. And most of you know i love animals, and cats are special :) Here are some of the cats i found in the seaside, who were being fed by a lovely old man who looked like a sea man:

Some chill in the sun...

Others still are hungry and ask for food:

This one was sitting on the side of the owner of a cafe, it seemed like he has been sitting there all his life, but for some reason was quite scared of me:

Many feed from the bin at the time of the pray:

In here a close up of a cat eating from the left overs of a fish restaurant:

One day sitting in a cafe in Cairo we found these couple of kittens learning to walk under the supervision of their mother:

One of them goes on his first exploration to the next table, i have warn the waiter that is unaware that the little creature is getting under his feet:

I was wondering that being so little how was possible that there were only two around. In that moment we saw the mother jumping on a very big amphora in the door of the cafe and...

In another cafe, i found a mother cat feeding her kittens...and at one point enough was enough:

Then i played for a while with some of the little kittens:

This cat was asking me insistently for food, and he loved the croissants i gave him :)

And how not? my cat in Tugareia:

but the only one i have not found yet is the little Andalusian cat...i think this guy was looking for it:

Some music and chants in Egypt

2007-04-23T01:30:00.000Z

Of all the things in Islamic countries, the one that i missed the most when i was in Europe was the call to pray five times a day. It actually took me sometime to realise what was it that made me feel different in the streets of Rabat or in a little town of the Draa valley. I know that i could make some point about the noise pollution introduced by so many mosques around the world, but i wont. It marks the rhythm of the day, it grounds the time in such an effective and beautiful way. The voices of the Mohaicins (the ones that call to pray) are filled with emotion, and that feeling soaks every alley way, every street, every town, every city of the Muslim world. It is a daily reminder of our human condition, that we are tiny in comparison with the Universe that we are living in, that our power is negligible in comparison with that of nature. In here i post a verse of the Holy Qur2an sung by a Sheij:

http://omoniak.ath.cx:8888/af_nono/114.mp3

And an islamic chant of a more romantic nature (as i was told):

http://omoniak.ath.cx:8888/af_nono/18.rm

My experience with music has not only been related directly to Islam, actually i have assisted to a multitude of concerts in Alexandria and Cairo. The African, Asian and Islamic influences give birth in this region to a great variety of styles. They are impossible to account for an egnabi like me, but here are some nice examples:

http://omoniak.ath.cx:8888/af_nono/mzmar.mp3

The percussion that makes me go mad, yalla al-tabla!!!

http://omoniak.ath.cx:8888/af_nono/tabla.mp3

And the sagrita, those known high pitch shouts that women perform, they remind me so much of traditional weddings in Islamic countries. You dont know what im talking about?

http://omoniak.ath.cx:8888/af_nono/sagrita.mp3

Apart of the modern anti-music of westerner influence (pretty girls/boys that show loads of skin during their stupid dances but they have not composed a single poem or a melody in their life) contemporary compositions flourish too nurtured by the aforementioned musical traditions, one of the most beautiful examples i found:

http://omoniak.ath.cx:8888/af_nono/secretlove.rm

And i was lucky enough to watch a professional Anun player in my own living room. Here i present the young local talent Amira, from Collage Band in Alexandria, playing a composition of the living legend Belal Hosni...The canabe ahmar crew is in tha house, and this is just the first day of rehearsal !!! wait to see the final version:

This traditional Egyptian instrument is one of the most complicated to play and difficult to master, but as u saw the beauty of its sound when in expert hands cannot be described with words. In here another clip from Amira accompanied by a Re (la pandereta de toda la vida), performing a melody of a known Turkish composer that i cannot spell:

And as a final comedy note, remember:

People and their jobs in the streets

2007-04-21T12:47:00.000Z

In here i present some of the random pictures and videos i have been taking of people in the streets of Alexandria. The people is what defines a country, a culture, a way of life...and the people is what i love the most in Egypt, whatever the hardships they face they still find a way to keep smiling and keep working to feed their families. I really admire their strength, they make me feel alive.

Attending to the streets...many of Alexandria´s pavements are under continuous works. The strategy of the major for improving the city is quite shocking: first call hundred hammer-men to destroy them all, and then begin redoing them little by little...so half of the city pavements are virtually war zones (major vs people). I dunno why he didnt choose the more adequate strategy of "destroy just ONE street, rebuild it and then go to the next one". Maybe he is looking for the lost treasure of Alexander the Great for financing the rest of the works...who knows? Doesnt he realise how hard is for people, specially old people, to live in such environment?. If you are disabled or on a wheel chair, you would be in serious trouble here, refrain from living in this city in 2007. In here we can see an old man watching his steps coming back from buying the bread in my still destroyed street:

But little by little pavements are done, sometimes with the old Spanish standard of one works three look, sometimes they look like most of them are actually doing something about it:

The reconstruction of the pavements is not the only work to be done in the streets, some need installation of new pipes. This guy does all the job on his own, around the corner from my house:

Apart of the people working in repairing the pavements and piping, there are many other people that work in the street. I would guess that the profession that gives more jobs in this category is transport services. There are simply sooo many taxis, sometimes a caravan of them can be seen in a yellow and black procession on the streets of Alexandria. They are more relaxed than the ones in Cairo, but still the drivers have developed a refined language using their horns for insulting each other. Certain combinations of short and long sounds refer to your mother, others to your sisters and others specially dedicated to you :D By the way, horn in Ameia (local Arabic dialect) is called clax, very similar to the Spanish claxon. Taxi drivers like in every country around the world are a very varied species, from hilarious to mad, from serious to absurd, from bullshitters to cultivated...there are all kinds in the fields of God (hay de todo en la viña del Señor).

As the buses are so few, the minivans are the life support of the transportation system here. This city extends along 30 km of the Mediterranean coast, long avenues and the tram run parallel to the sea making the transportation very easy and linear: you either go up or down...So do the minivans. There are no minivan stops of course, so another vernacular body language has been developed for knowing if the particular one you are flagging is going where you want. There are hand signals for every neighborhood: the clock, the all straight, the 5 fingers + 2 fingers, the signal of the bridge, the 5 fingers together pointing down, etc...it is tremendously efficient, and makes it easy even for an egnabi like me. In here an extract of one of my maaany minivan trips, observe how i was not kidding about the pavements:

But there is a particular type of public transportation that i found extremely charming: the tuk tuk. It is a mix between a motorcycle and the car of Mr.Bean. It does not goes very far distances, but for the wonderful price of 5 pences (in English pounds) saves you a 10 minutes walk, and with sound track :) Here we can see one in a street of Alexandria at the time of the pray:

And if you were wondering how does it feel to go on one of those, here we are...and yes is a bumpy as it looks:

In the category of public transportation i am going to include the trolley men, there are versions with and without donkey. The service they give is not to transport people, but to move stuff for a more than fair price, that television you just bought for example:

The winner of the price to the second most popular (economical) activity in the streets has to go to food vendors. I am not going to go in any depth to explain the vegetables and fruit vendors, as they are too obvious and they were covered in a previous post. But how i love to see people carefully examining the goods and negotiating:

The bread and milk sellers and delivery service, either in bamboo trolleys or simply bikes-with-stall. Why are these almost extinct in Europe?

There are sellers of baked sweet potatoes, literally with an oven on wheels (pretty much in the same style that the classic castañero). It serves the delicious and dirt cheap sweet potatoes on a newspaper, i love them.

The sellers of Al-Tarmuz in brine, altramuces in Spanish or lupin in English according to the Collins dictionary. Candy sellers, in here in a quite curious version: a guy carries a long stick with the inflated pink and white bags hanging like balloons from the top of it, and optionally blows a ridiculously loud little trumpet.

Pistachios vendors (and versions with other nuts) that walk around cafes from table to table delivering their nutritive goods. The hommos el sham stalls, that i found to be weird food. A kind of soup with floating chick peas (!!!???), i.e. como el caldo del puchero version chunga. The fool and tameia are two traditional plates that extremely popular and are sold in the streets and i throughly enjoyed many times. And of course the cochari, I love cochari! i could have never though of rice and pasta in the same dish, but it is delicious.

In the category of food and drink in the streets you cannot forget the tea and coffee delivery service. Waiters walk with their tray on their hands serving to the people in shops, to the barber, to the people waiting for the bus, anything goes. Others simply serve tea in the street, i had so many of those:

The award to the oddest job i could find in the street has to go to the guy of the merry-go-round. No engine no nothing, simply push:

Some beg in the street, obviously it does not qualify as a job, but is where they obtained their money and pass much of their time:

Others do not have to beg neither so much to do, they just sit watching the passing cars, people and time:

But by massive difference, the favourite activity of Egyptians and egnabis alike in the streets of Alexandria is to sit in cafes to talk,smoke and drink, a true paradise:

PS: these are just some of the jobs in the streets. There is the guy with scales in the middle of the pavements for telling you your weight, perfume vendors, stalls with only remote controls, the ice boy, the guy selling tapes riding a sound system on a bike, tissues sellers, books vendors carrying 20 books on their arms, the stall that recharges batteries of mobiles, children selling socks cafe by cafe, shoe polishers, the flip flop vendor, the photographer that offers you a pic, and so many others...god bless them.

and the Doctor is...

2007-04-18T17:47:00.000Z

I just received this email, the one that has made me the happiest man in the known universe. If i was feeling lucky before, now i have another big reason.

"Peter Huggard and Paul Snow have approved your corrected thesis. The paperwork is now being passed onto the department and faculty. You should officially hear soon that you have passed and will be awarded your doctorate.

Congratulations Dr Nono"

I would like to acknowledge to all the people that has made my PhD possible with their technical and personal support (many of you reading actually and particularly Dr. Party, gracias hermano, Dr. Pek and Dr. Frog). Thanks soooooo much to all of you

This is a 3D model i did based on Ait el Caid Kasbah, Agdz, Morocco. You can get the full model for goggle sketchup in the 3D warehouse...long life to mud:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/search?q=kasbah&btnG=Search&styp=m

PS: For obvious reasons the name of the blog has been changed ;)

im lucky for...

2007-04-14T03:11:00.000Z

im lucky for having a smile in the face and...

...for having clean water...cold and hot
...for all the clothes
...for the food i eat everyday
...for all the people that helped me
...for having electricity
...for knowing how to read and write and for having education
...for having ethics and morals
...for having Internet
...for the books i have read
...for not being subject of violence
...for having a passport that allowed me to visit so many places
...for speaking more than one language
...for the people i find that become friends
...for having money on my pocket most of my life
...for all the places i slept
...for respecting everybody regardless of condition
...for my critical thinking...or even for having brain cells at all
...for my hands
...for being an independent thinker not brainwashed by media
...for being healthy
...for my body that withstands adversities
...for having no disabilities
...for having my brothers, my father and my mother
...for being mentally sane (really??)

I would love to know what is the percentage of the world population that could subscribe my words...Those not as lucky as me and many of you spend their life in a struggle for getting things some take for granted...it is an utter disgrace that people that has survival ensured forget what a privilege it is to have it, and still they keep complaining about stupid stuff. It is a responsibility and an obligation for us to make this world a better one for all those who cannot choose.

Curiosity of the day: Remember about fulan? well actually i discovered that there are no zutano and mengano, but actually there are three in Arabic too: fulan, aelen and terten...would be something like aeleano y tertano?

Streets and Cafes in Cairo

2007-04-07T05:00:00.000Z

The center of Cairo boils with activity, it is filled with shops, malls, restaurants, take aways and people selling in the street daily useful stuff and completely useless junk. Billion coloured lights flash everywhere around, in the middle of the night the noise of the horns decreases....but it never totally dies (mal bicho nunca muere). I sat in one of the restaurants in this little street to eat the whole menu: brain, liver, salad and tahina:

The Tahrir square is a massive (and means really massive) square en the centre of Cairo where governmental buildings, mosques, the Egyptian museum and KFC can be found. A street view from the metro station exit:

Just around the corner from where this picture was taken, there is this tiny old style cafe with tables on the pavement and on the street...where old men smoke shisha:

If this city is the city of the thousands minarets, then it could as well be the city of the million cafes :) I have just tasted a few of them. This is the view of a shop from a cafe in El kalili souk where i sat all nite:

In the city center we sat in a quite nice cafe, hidden in a back street:

This cafe was very particular as the building next to it looked very suspicious. Loud music banging through its windows, laughs of women, dodgy guy in the door and so many air conditioners...what happens in that place to get so hot???

And finally my lovely local in Helwan with its chilled out atmosphere and its carved chairs:

The filled stones ready to be smoked in the shishas:

The covers of the shishas piled up on a dusty box :

And in the entrance of my local you can find the latest model of washing machine, i have never seen one this size before...and i really dunno what is it doing there:

Helwan orphanage

2007-04-06T21:52:00.000Z

Ana akum kalilan bfard al kifaya bdar al aitam

Last Friday was the orphan´s day; to "celebrate" it, i volunteered (in a cafe promise to early man) to attend Dar Roshdy Orphanage for girls in Helwan (South Cairo) to take pictures of the party they were throwing and to serve food for few hundred women (the latter didn´t finally happen for some technical problem, but the intention is the important). In there i met the director of the centre, Miss. Nora El Shikh. This woman has a presence and energy that i felt it since the moment i got in the room. Everybody listens to her and the children absolutely love her to bits. I heard the story that one guy that was visiting was massacred by the children because somebody told them, as a joke, that he did not like the director. Water, food, chairs and every imaginable object was thrown to him and then all the girls did a human pile with him on the bottom for punishing him :D this tells a lot about this wonderful woman and about the character of the children :) The orphanage is for girls that have lost their parents, or with parents that cannot take care of them. The door of the place is shown in the picture:

I was a bit uncomfortable at the beginning to take pictures, as i didnt know what kind of reaction i was going to get. But it turned out to be so much fun, children were jumping in front of the camera every time i was taking a picture. They learned my name oh so fast, they were shouting at me to ask me for a picture, bringing me their friends, posing for me, fooling around in front of the camera. They spoiled me with sweets too, everyone of them thanked me for taking their pictures and gave me a cake or a lillypop or anything else, i had to eat them all :D I really loved every moment in there, some of the group pictures:

And in this particular day some boys were there for the party too.

And some of the portraits:

I tried to include as many children as i could in this post, but i am afraid that i still missed some...my apologies to them x x x Do not to forget some of the volunteers:

And finally: the subtitle of the post is a transcription from classic Arabic (Al arabeia al Fusha):

Ana (i) akum (do) kalilan (little/bit) bfard al-kifaya (in social obligation) badar (in tha house) al-aitam (of the orphans) = I do a bit of my social obligations in the orphanage...irrespectively of cultures, we all have social obligations; in the particular case of Islam the concept of fard al-kifaya embodies it. The people and the young volunteers working there are fulfilling that, they are trying to help people that are in worse situation than them...and they are not precisely well off. In this globalisation age these are the kind of concepts that should travel through cultures, these are the kind of actions that should not know about national borders, transnational fard al kifaya. It is my social obligation to use my camera to take the pics, to post them in my blog and to try to help them by asking you to donate money for this place that take care of the of the ones in more need. I will include the web address of the orphanage in this post in the future (the web is being updated), contact me in my email for further information of how to send money. Even a few english pounds would make a big difference for them. Thanks very much. Rabbena Yijalik.

The new Opera house in Cairo and the Nipon connection

2007-04-06T00:47:00.000Z

One of my favourite places in Cairo is the new Opera House of the Egyptian National Cultural Center. It is a complex inaugurated in 1988, seventeen years after the Royal Opera House was completely destroyed by fire. The complex is a series of nicely designed and constructed buildings comprising halls, amphitheaters, theaters, galleries and the music library. It is a reduct of peace in the middle of the jungle where to relax, have a coffee and attend some of the many events (we found by chance a Nubian concert):

Beautiful metal sculptures are scattered around; the violinist:

The stone totem:

The metal worker:

And my favourite, the human brain being driven by an angel and a devil that have gone to the head from the lower part of the body walking upstairs :

And here is me sitting with the sculpture of the great Mohammed Al Wahhab:

This whole complex was built in cooperation with the JICA, the Japan International Co-operation Agency. I did not know that the friendship between Japan and Masr was so deeply rooted...i found this Japanese garden close to the orphanage with a lake surrounded by fifty something massive pink sculptures of Buda...

...with a classic high rise building in the background. In the middle of Helwan, being so far away from the city center, is odd that there is this garden where a pagoda with the minaret of the mosque in the background makes an unexpected sign of communion between such two distant cultures:

Furthermore, just opposite to this last photo (around 171º rotation angle for the picky ones) this classic looking building is found:

what to say? wiriwiked! wiked! Helwan is massive...around 2 million people to be exact ;)

zayy el amar awi...

Chaos and the high places in Cairo

2007-04-02T17:35:00.000Z

I have been the last days in Cairo, the first proper contact i had with this city. I have to say that i do not enjoy massive cities, i feel lost and stressed. Cairo fulfilled all my fears...the mad drivers in Alexandria are the chauffeur of "driving miss daisy" when compared with those in Cairo. Your life is continuously under threat when crossing a street or walking along, as many of the pavements are little urban jokes. Actually in Cairo there are many traffic lights (not like in Alex), the only problem is that they do not work in the classic green, yellow, red international code...nobody could tell me what this meant:

The first day, after just 3 hours walking around the city, the continuous noise of horns, the shouts, the tides of people and the pollution got me totally exhausted. I thought i was not going to survive in here for very long, but actually the next day my brain learned how to ignore all those external influences and i begun to really enjoy it here. The city of Cairo is really impressive, old and filled with flavour, and no wonder why it was named as the city of the thousand minarets. The first important turistic visit was to the citadel, a fortification on top of a hill that has been since the XIII century to the XIX century owned by Ayyubid, Mamluk, Ottoman, and Khedival rulers. The massive Mohammad Ali Mosque (Ottoman):

As it can be seen, the exterior of this Mosque is absolutely impressive...as impressive are the views from this hill, in here the Sultan Hassan Mosque and Madrassa protruding from the city:

The patio of ablutions is simply maaaarblelous:

The minaret from the patio:

The domes from the interior:

It is a real shame that (in such a grandiose building) it feels more like a touristic attraction than a worship place; european and american women walk around with green cloaks for covering their indecent clothes (for a Mosque it is, almost nobody would think to go to the opera with shorts and flip flops).

Another mosque within the walls of the citadel is the Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qala´un Mosque, built two centuries after the great Mosque of Isbiliah, resulted more charming for me. The exterior view is dominated by a green ceramic dome that corresponds to a late addition:

The texture is roughly elegant in the interior, columns from different origin surround squared plan with no walls enclosing any space:

The simple decoration consisting in hanging lamps draws you closer to the austere origins of Islam:

The Al-Azhar Park is the best green space in the city, this 30 hectare complex of gardens and buildings constructed by the Aga Khan Trust in 1984 is in a hill not that far from that of the citadel. The views of the city from the observatory, the walk around the lake, the channels of water that travel along the paths, the beautiful building of the restaurant conform a delicious island of peace in this chaotic city. Within the park there is an amphitheater for performances, i attended two concerts during the week, one of three Egyptian groups and another of Oriental flamenco...i absolutely loved it :)

I love high places with beautiful views, together with the citadel and the park i had to visit Mohatam, the highest place in Cairo where u can see the real extent of this sixteen million people urb, the 7th more populated metropolitan area in the world and the largest in Africa. The character of this place is quite odd at night: lovers, young people partying, old men with women of light horse shoes (ligeras de cascos), egnabis (guiris or gauris) in touristic buses gather together in front of the impressive views. In there i allowed myself to take some arty pics using the lights of the city :P

Apart of such high places there are another billion places to visit down in the city: the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, Hussein Mosque, el zouk el kalili, Al Azhar University, etc... (this etcetera is quite large, for example in 12 km of a El-oaz street there are 6732 monuments, the estimation is that u would need 8 months full time for visiting all the monuments in Cairo). I promise will come back to it...

Creatures in the street

2007-03-29T23:49:00.000Z

And of course the creatures, i love urban goats:

The street of my cyber with my building in the background, the new animal in the hood:

And some of the old skool and new skool in the the hood (who is who? or both are both?):

My favourite cat in tugareia

Curiosity of the day: i might become a Spanish teacher

Details in the streets of Alex

2007-03-29T02:54:00.000Z

I could do a billion post like this one...i cant get enough! So let´s cut the skin, none of my long never ending posts, none of my non sense, no tease just visual pleasure...you will finish soon with this one, here a very classical looking column of a building under reparation:

When old is a synonym of beauty:

Some of the building materials in careful order waiting to be used:

Tomatoes displayed in open air:

The butane gas cylinders on the truck:

The Ficus, as in Isbilliah, are very present:

The tram crossing the centre:

The Murphy´s week with a magical end to it

2007-03-28T10:37:00.000Z

Hello people! It is a miracle i am back in Africa...this time i finished all my hanging businesses in the UK, namely that thesis, and i´m fully concentrated in my egyptian adventure. This was a cursed break, it was not Murphy´s law, it was Murphy´s constitution!!! the things that could go wrong went wrong, and the ones that couldn't go wrong went wrong too...that is what happens when u have butter in both sides of the toast. Let me briefly remember: my camera (catastrophe!!), the charger of my computer and (another) phone charger all broke in 2 days, i lost the adapter from English plug to Egyptian, the printer of my office broke when printing the final version of my thesis, the battery of my phone lasts as long as a sweet in the door of a school...and this is just the material things, the most precious thing that i lost cannot be explained with words...away from sentimentalisms, i went to the airport with 4 hours in advance (yes, i know is difficult to believe coming from me...) following my mother´s eternal advice...and it actually paid back!!! I was suposed to take a bus from Bath, and (even though i explicitly asked when buying my ticket) the bus was full. Then i found a faster connection through Bristle, and the bus for there was late...great! i finally managed to arrive in Bristle bus station, still plenty of time. I was going to take my bus at 2 p.m. to arrive comfortably 2 hours before my flight. So i went out of the station and indulged myself with some picture taking:

So i was there waiting at 2pm, and minutes passed and passed, and i begun to get nervous. Where is the bus??? we got informed it broke in the way from London...ooooh noooo! They didn't know when the replacement bus will come, and there was no other possible connection (except maybe hijacking a bus with my pencil...but i didnt think that would increase my chances to leave the country :P). I had a nervous breakdown after 35 minutes waiting, after the ultra hard week i had, sleeping very very little, working very very hard and all my life and possessions breaking down...i was going to miss my plane. My future was breaking in front of my eyes...The people in the station were extremely rude and inattentive, they didnt find out the telephone of egyptian air for me, of course they wont let me use their phone...and the telephone booth they (not that) kindly pointed me did not accept calls to the directory. I was really freaking out then...after 55 minutes of tense and desperate waiting there with no possibility to warn the plane, the bus finally arrived. I was going to arrive one hour before the plane...i didn't know if i could make it...and then met an angel :) a lovely angel: Madhuad. This Indian woman is a medicine doctor (i think she said pathologist) working in the UK, very well traveled, unrealistically kind and tremendously funny. I think she got fond of me cos i reminded her to her own son, as well as because she felt compassion when she saw my emotional breakdown in the station. She called her daughter, who called the airport and the flight company; then she let me use her phone to call them in person :) She was telling me that i have to keep the balance (in reference to my breakdown in the station) and then i begin to tell her all the problems of my last week, and that it was just the last drop in the bottle...to what she answered: "if you have lost so much, is that life is getting ready to provide you with a lot of new things" :) well, i don't know what was the spell, but i went into that bus with my head filled with worries, and i went out of it with a big smile in my face and my soul as light as i ever remember it...i love that hindi white magic :) And indeed the magic worked! i got to the check in point literally in the last minute (after breaking the world record of 435 meters airport obstacle)...i was going to make it to Africa, and i actually did it :) This time i have come back to stay, that is my main aim...to generate enough income for surviving here indefinitely...i dont know how naive i am, but im sure that life will teach that lesson to me...again

PS: the new egyptian (bad joke) constitution has been approved the day i arrived...a sad day for this country. At least now is legal to breach human rights...

Egypto Interruptus...

2007-03-21T01:01:00.000Z

Technical reasons took me to England for 6 days...After a taxi (miami-station), bus Alex-Cairo airport, plane Cairo-London (...after 14 hours traveling) i finally was in the bus destination Bath (or Baaaaaath in local English). After a little nap i spend the last hour of my trip admiring the landscape through the window. I found a patchy afternoon and everything in the west country (arrrgggghhh) looked as green, clean and nice as ever. Where the spirit of the country side and the silent left overs of industrialization got frozen in the built environment:

I love the architecture of all the little towns in the way, south west vernacular in action:

And another English sunset for my collection:

I forgot how cold England could be...

Over one thousand page loads...thank you all

2007-03-18T13:16:00.000Z

Well, there is no much of a story for this post, there has been over a thousand hits in a month since i put the counter. So beyond my expectations as it is my first experience publishing what i write, is my first blog, is the first time i publish my photos...i am really flattered, so i want to thank all of you reading from Masr, UK, Spain, China, US, Canada, France, UAE, Yemen, Trinidad, Bosnia, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece, South Africa, Croatia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Germany, Uruguay, Bahrain, Chile, Ukraine, Italy, Indonesia, Mauritius, Netherlands, Hungary, Brazil, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Norway... I didnt know what this blog was to be, i have just been trying to open a little window through my eyes to the Egypt i am living in. I really hope that i am succeeding in making you feel a bit what is like to be here, that magic of traveling without moving that the books have given me so many times. I intend to give you a hint of the taste of the spaces and people of this country without the blurred filters of media, solely with the subjective texture of pure personal experience...thank you all for peaking through this little window.

The flea market

2007-03-16T23:38:00.000Z

Today i visited the flea market in Alexandria. Really, i have not seen more junk piled up in the streets in my whole life...The system in here works like this: guys with carretas and donkeys walk around every neighborhood shouting like mad men, and everybody will give them the old stuff they dont want. Then they take everything to this old industrial area, expose them in massive piles and try to sell them. This point can be easily illustrated by this picture, the tram passing through the only corridor available:

As you can realise there is no apparent order...an old telephone close to an iron, a remote control of an unknown appliance close to a vase of a mixer, doors and windows, sewing machines, etc...the list is almost infinite. It is indeed very amusing to see all these objects, you cannot predict what is coming next :) From the chaos certain patterns emerge, as we scientists know; therefore sometimes the classification is something like "small metal pieces":

Other times (the less of them) is a bit more obvious like "bathroom stuff". Observe the demonstration of the vendor sitting on one of the toilets:

The classification is not always possible to make, even though some premeditated order can be hinted. This guy seems mainly interested in wheeled stuff and lamps...

But, as i was saying, the most of it is simply chaotic, shoes and electronics was one of my favourites:

And for not forgetting we are in Africa, the ever present colourful approach:

I have to say that there was many interesting and useful objects to be rescued from there. Old russian film projectors, shishas, furniture, tools, engines, suspensions, keyboards, typing machines, radios and many others... A paradise for any curious and patient mind. Particularly interesting was the offer from this guy, that claimed to have an engine that runs forever without the need of any fuel, quoting him "by thermal expansion" mmm really??? This guy was either a thermodynamics heretic or the Nicola Tesla of the Arab world :P

The day i was treated like a muslim terrorist

2007-03-15T12:49:00.000Z

Masr, historically, has certain similarities with Al-Andalus. As a start is the only other exit of the Mediterranean (literally the Middle of the Earth) to the ocean which makes it a very strategical point to commerce. Since both are relatively flat lands with abundance of water they are very rich agriculturally. Due to such circumstances many different powerful civilizations have controlled those areas, Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Ottomans, etc...For the particular case of the Roman Empire, Al-Andalus was the granary of the West and Egypt the granary of the East. Such civilizations not only benefited from our lands, but they left a tremendous technological inheritance that throughout the centuries mixed and evolved. As a result, in both places, we became a center of interest, not only for economical reasons, but for cultural reasons too. Due to that, we attracted intellectuals from different religions and places in the world that enriched furthermore our lands. In Al-Andalus, as well as in the particular example of Alexandria, we had periods when Muslims, Christians and Jewish lived in in relative peace. Reminders of such mixes can be found in both lands, from Seville (with the second biggest cathedral of Catholicism after St. Peter in Rome), where the "christian" temple is half Islamic (conserving the Minaret and the patio of ablutions of the old mosque) and half gothic...

...to Alexandria, where mosques and churches stand side by side:

I have been having very long conversations about religion and faith with some locals, and i have realised how long it has been since i went to church or even considered my own faith. I stopped making questions because i could find no complete answer, i could not find it in the Bible, Torah, Coran, Bhagavad Ghita, Tao Te Ching, Popol Vuh or any others i read. So a couple of days ago, i was coming back from my visit to the Carita's building outside Alex, when i found myself walking between that mosque and that (Coptic) church in the picture. I stopped and observed all the people going in to pray and i felt like going inside the church to explore that field that i abandoned so long ago. i know most of you are surprised with this...but surely not as much as i did (actually when i told this story to Bahz he asked me if i went in there for research :D). I walked to the church, and in the door two security guards stopped me: They asked me for my passport, meanwhile one inspected it, the other was saying in Arabic that i was Muslim pointing to the Mosque opposite (my 2 month long beard was not helping). The next idiotic question from the man looking at my passport was "where are you from?"...ehhh i thought it was obvious from my passport, but i answered. Then he took my right hand and checked my wrist trying to find the tattooed cross that most Coptic people have, and obviously couldn't find it. Then he asked me why in my passport doesn't state that i am Christian, i answered because almost every Spanish is Christian (at least on paper) as freedom of religion was abolished five centuries ago. Both were quite aggressive, and that was not putting me in a very good mood. Then the guy turned his attention to my bag, i opened it and begin taking things out: my notebooks, my books, pens, my sweater, my calculator...basically the usual stuff. He searched every pocket in my bag until he found something and gave me an accusative look and with a menacing voice he inquired: "what is this??" You could have guessed it was a gun from his face, but it was my USB pen. I thought that was the end of it, and that they would let me pass to the church. I was wrong again, the guy was taking me to the security office to do a body search!!! At that point i refused to go further with that non sense, i sent him to fry asparragous (lo mande a freir esparragos) in my best Spanish, i turned around and left the building. I felt what many Muslims feel everyday in many places around the world, pure religious discrimination...I do not think that i am welcomed to the house of God anymore, it was a sign: i will stay away from it...

Curiosity of the day: Egyptians just have one sound for "p" and "b", and many of them interchange it very happily. This difficults communication even more, let me give you some examples: pan and ban sound the same, palette-ballet, bale-pale, bay-pay and the always funny brick and pitch :P

The architectural rant

2007-03-15T11:59:00.000Z

Not so long ago Alexandria was a city of low rise buildings, with front gardens where children used to play safely under the view of their families. Around 30 years ago such model begun to crumble to leave space for a so called "progress"; the owners of the houses were (and still are) seduced by the idea of selling out making massive profits...(dinero es el unico dios verdadero?). Nowadays there are few of the original buildings left, like tiny creatures surrounded by a world where they will not be able to survive. They were condemned to certain extinction long time ago... this one in my street reads the proud statement: "this building is not for sale, for more information call lawyer fulan"...i wonder for how long.

Note that the colour of the building in the photograph has been enhanced because i felt like it :P I have already showed some high buildings rising from relatively small bases thanks to the black magic of concrete, every square centimeter meter is treated like a potential 13 floors high building. This is the block where our flat is, note that the big space in the back of it is a new construction site.

Due to this particular way of understanding (??!) urban planning and development, the density of population in Alexandria is tremendously high. Such high density posses a further problem in a developing country like Masr, as the deficient public transport system is unable to cope with all these people, collapsing the streets with more cars, with the consequent degradation of the air quality. Furthermore, as buildings are separated of each other by a couple of meters, ventilation and natural lighting are poor. If that was not enough, the small gaps between buildings are not the paradigm of cleanliness, as people simply chuck stuff in there. An illustrating example is the beauty of the "view" from our living room:

Other consequences on the quality of life is that the reception of radio signals and mobile phones inside those buildings is very limited. So we are forced to hang outside the window for having a proper conversation...And by the way, green areas are not to be found anywhere, except inside private residences of relatively wealthy people. I wonder what is the responsibility of governments and designers (together with clients). Dont they realise that besides the great wonderful money they are making, they are leaving a legacy of houses and neighborhoods where it is not very desirable to live in? Surely that does not matter as none of them live in a place like miami, they can live in some nicer place...unlike most of urban population in the world.

The architectural and egyptian paperwork week

2007-03-08T23:31:00.000Z

The first architect in the week was M.Rifaie on Monday, who drove me to the Arab Academy of Sciences (AAS) and facilitated me access to the architecture department library (RIBA accredited degree). In there (limited but high quality collection) i studied books on Hassan Fathy keeping up with my research on Egyptian vernacular and in the hope of meeting some people that could lead me to architects that are maintaining their traditional methods. My hopes proved correct! I met various architects that facilitated me some names and places where to keep digging. Ahmed is working in a practice in Cairo and when he found out about my research asked me very kindly if he could accompany me in my walks in his city. He has studied the work of the great Fathy but, as sevillians rarely go up to the Giralda, he has not personally visited them; so i will have some expert company. He was especially helpful in giving me some background information about the history of the capital and the remainings of buildings of the past. His help was not only restricted to that, he forwarded me information about the incredible lecture that i assisted last night in Biblioteka Alexandrina (i will detail later). The second contact was the architect Mr.Yunus who led me to the work of PhD A.B.Elseragy (thesis title: Architectural and solar potential of curved and flat roofs in hot arid regions) by the University of Nottingham and currently working in the AAS; fortunately they had a copy of his thesis in the library and i had the chance to have a look to it (ill have to return to this one). Mr.Yunus is helping me too to arrange a meeting with PhD. G.Moshad, as she researched egyptian vernacular in her doctorate. I really thank Mr.Yunus for his help; research would be an impossible task without the help of the local experts. Mr. Rifaie, a very busy and talented young man, not only made all of this possible by investing his precious time in me, but we found a very interesting project where we might collaborate in the future .

On Tuesday i received more help, this time from Aya, an architect from Alexandria University. She offered some of her holiday time to help me to gain access to the library of her University to assist me in my research. First we went to the University with my certificates and identification, we sat in the security office for half an hour before the security man could work out what was the procedure. The procedure was that I needed an approved paper from a different office...that is exactly the kind of thing i was trying to avoid. So we walked 15 minutes to the next stop, spoke with some people and found the woman that deals with this sort of cases for international people. Very kind woman indeed, what i do not understand is how a person in her specific position does not speaks English or French!!! but at least we seemed to be going somewhere, i needed a couple of photocopies of my passport, my spanish ID, my letter from Bath University and the corresponding translation to Arabic...and even prove of my application to Cambridge University, thank god that i was not asked for my birth certificate. I did not have all of these on me, and of course that was impossible to return with them on the same day (cos they close at 2pm), so we arranged to come back the following day. I did not think that Aya had to come with me next day, but the woman in the office insisted quite forcefully that she should. So Aya, again, had to spend more of her time in that office, apart of making me the favour of translating my letter from Bath University. We arranged to meet next day in Biblioteka Alexandrina to go together, but the lack of morning coffee mixed with my lack of sleep made me go in the morning to the office instead and i forgot totally about the real meeting place. If that was not enough and as most of you know already, many times my mobile is a purely decorative object i carry around with no battery with the sole purpose of occupying space in my bag. So basically i left her waiting for me for 45 minutes with my mobile off until i could work out a way to contact her (her number locked inside the idiotic item). I felt so embarrassed that, on top of all the time and help, i made her wait. In the mean time, i hanged around with all the security people in there, i got introduced to everyone of them, they brought me tea, offered me cigarettes and ask me about Real Madrid and Barcelona FC and told me about the local football teams (here you are Jimmo, the comment you were waiting for). So finally Aya arrived much less pissed off that what i was expecting and i lost the count of the times i said "sorry". So, back to the international woman that does not speak any other language but Arabic, we handed all the papers and everything seemed (and i mean it, just seemed) fine after some complimentary 30 minutes of discussion, apart of the fact that we found out that this permission document was valid just for 4 entrances to the library...ok then! But there was a little final requirement: i needed the signature on the document of the head of security to validate everything, they might think that a Christian terrorist might blow up their library...fair enough! I thought that was going to be a piece of cake as i knew already all the security people...but no!!! after another 30 minutes waiting i was informed that the man could not sign the frigging paper that day and that i should come back the following day for it!...agggghhh!! i was beginning to lose my patience, that place looked pretty much like the mad house of the 12 works of Asterix and Obelix..but ok...just one more day and i could go to the library, i just want to read!

After the early morning hassle, i went to meet Dani (Spanish psychologist) in his workplace, the Alex Med Centre (https://www.bibalex.org/English/researchers/Alexmed/alexmedcenter.htm). It is a very reputed research centre within Biblioteca Alexandrina. There are many architects working there, some of whom i got introduced to. I spent half of my time theoritising to work out with Mr.Karakiri the possible use of one anomalous tower in the archaeological site he is studying. My suggestion was a particular astronomical use, but we require the exact calculation of the orientation of the complex to know if i was right in my guess. The other half of the time, i spent it Dr.Aref, who helped me greatly to find out more names that i should dig in, and some potential problematics that i might find out when implementing my proposition. Very critical, very insightful, very kind...very useful. I met the subdirector of the centre, but i failed (just then) to meet one of the people i have been wanting to meet even before arriving, Prof. Mohamed Aued, the director of the centre and one of the most prominent egyptian architects of our times. But due to that, he is an incredibly busy man...i had to wait

So today i had come back to the mad building again, one of the security people led me to another and this one to another one. They did not seem very busy at all, in groups of sixes or sevens sitting in many offices smoking cigarettes and drinking litres of tea. In the fourth room i saw the first of them actually "working", he was typing in an old looking computer with his two index fingers at a rate of approximately one stroke per second, with breaks to smoke and sip his drink (no much stress, i see). So after asking and asking about my paper, they could just ask me where were my papers...oh no! they did not have a clue of what i was talking about. Finally one of them seemed to understand...or did he? he told me to sit, order one of the others to bring me more tea and he begun to call in the phone. Meanwhile, seven officers stood in the office and talking in arabic about me...i could catch doctor, isbany, isbilliah and things of the sort. After the third call of the guy, interrupted by a 5 minute call to his wife, he told me everything was ok...yeah? where is my paper then?. He answered me that there is no paper!!! that i just have to go to the library and ask for fulan and give him his name and mine and he will know what i am talking about...so conclusion: i went out of all of that hassle with a couple of arabic names that i scribbled in a post-it!!!...i really cant wait to go to the library and find out the rest of this story and wasting some more of my time drinking tea and watching more officers talk in the phone, i cant get enough of it. This is one of the few moments when i come to realise how much i miss England.

The architectural week culminated today in big style. I assisted the lecture, organized by Prof. Aued, and named "the language of architecture" by Charles Correa, (http://www.charlescorrea.net/) world famous Indian architect, planner, activist and theoretician, winner of the Agha Khan Award in 1998. He is one of few great architects originally from the developing world that has built most of his works in his country of origin, and still gained wide recognition from western countries from it. He studied in Michigan University and MIT and then came back to India, where he made tremendous effort to adapt the technical advances of the modernist architecture to vernacular typologies. That makes him tremendously relevant for my research, as he has managed to draw a successful bridge between the past and the future. He has been specially concerned with using modern building technologies for designing low cost shelter in developing countries respecting the cultural values of the place. His presentation was simply wonderful, he explained many of his works and how he developed his own language of architecture, some extracts from it:

-"developing a language of design respecting the local cultural values"
-"This power point thing is a menace" (when the presentation was giving him some technical problems)
-"understanding the past to understand the aspirations of the people in the present"
-"an architect should only build in places where he has been living in" (criticising architects that build in places that they have no previous cultural knowledge of)
-"Simply copying an existing building or typology is kitsch; the transformation of old cultural and architectural concepts for fulfilling the needs of the users is good practice"
-"Incrementality, Pluralism, Participation, Income generation, Equity, Open to sky space and maleability"
-"build a rich building that poor people can enjoy without being intimidated by it" (in reference to the Ghandi Museum designed by him)
-"The centrality of an empty space in hot arid climates is related to the ancient idea that enlightenment can just be achieved in open air"
-"achieving complexity through manipulation of simple structures"
-"the beauty of science is undervalued nowadays"

The humanity that this venerable man transpired, his words encouraging the young audience of architecture students to innovate, his humility and simplicity made me love the man even more than the architect. He has become in 3 hours in one of my heroes (thanks Ahmed for telling me about this lecture, i will be gratefull for the rest of my life). And that was not all, among others, i met Mr.Gharib a PhD student in the AAS that is researching in Life Cycle Assessment of buildings and another teacher in Alex University who is going to help me circumvent all the stupid paperwork. And finally, i managed to meet, with some bravery of my part, Prof. Aued!!! i asked to meet at some point with him and he kindly passed his arm over my shoulders and accepted with a smile in his face. I hope he does not forget me!

The greatest sunset i have seen in my life, yesterday form the ship building site in Alexandria. As my strict principles dictate, the colours are not photoshoped...but i could have done it to clean to beach :P

Curiosity of the day: Hassan Fathy found a perfect moment for the implementation of his ideas about recovering vernacular architecture when Egypt suffered shortage of modern building materials due to the sanctions imposed after the declaration of independence of Egypt from England in 1956.

"See you soon" to the early man

2007-03-06T21:17:00.000Z

This is a sad moment, one of the members of the red sofa crew (el-ahmar canabe crew) has left us. He like many other educated, professional and talented Egyptians is going to emigrate to Saudi or Emirates...the estimation i heard is that there are 45.000 Egyptian scientists working abroad, we could really do with all those here! The same great problem that can be found in many other countries in Africa: brain drain. The difficulties at all levels (social, economical, political, etc...) that most of people face here on a daily basis are fueling the dreams to live in any other place and killing any hope of amelioration. One simple example (and not representative at all of the width of the multifaceted problematic) is that one of Prof. Ahmed Zewail (Nobel laureate in chemistry). He finished his undergraduate degree in Egypt and emigrated to the US, where he ended up in CalTech. This guy really loves hes mother country, for a graphical example go http://www.its.caltech.edu/~femto/ and pass the mouse over research themes. He put his research on the map of Masr, how lovely/geeky the mesoscopic phase in the new valley? If that little detail of his love for his country was not enough, i will tell you more. He came back to Egypt with a great plan: to create a whole new university for boosting the research in here and to try to retain the great intellects this country produces. He spoke with the government and fought and fought and fought for it, problems, problems and more problems...at the end he could not get anything done and he had to go to Qatar to open the University. The teaching is: if a Nobel Price falls in despair trying to implement a promising project to develop the state of education, science and technology in his own country, who can keep his hopes high??? everyone should agree that that will be a great for Masr, but nevertheless another battle was lost...the fight is still on...so my dear friend, you are another innocent casualty in this non-sense war, i deeply cry for your lost. Still, this was not a bad bye letter to a friend, it is a see you! I really hope one day in the future we will be able to repeat this picture in a much better Masr for all:

Ashof washak alla kher!

Curiosity of the day: When we are talking about somebody of unknown name (or we cannot be bothered to repeat it) the generic words used in Arabic and Spanish are fulan and fulano respectively. Arent you impressed? i was! And if you are wondering mengano is unknown to the arabic speakers :D

Kawalis Masr Project

2007-03-04T16:53:00.000Z

The other day (Thursday) a very pleasant coincidence occurred... as i have been demanding continuously to be fed with Egyptian music, Bahz brought me a cd back home. It is the first compilation by a project called Kawalis Masr, or Egypt Backstage. This is a very interesting project, they use music done by musicians (meaning not just a pretty face singing commercial songs) and distribute it for free; the costs are covered by the publicity inserted in the funky looking booklet inside, a picture of the booklet is shown:

Immediately, i put the music on my computer, and i fell in love with one of the tracks called "Darabou El-Amar" or "they shoot the moon" from a band called Eskenderella (Alexandria in Arabic):

http://omoniak.ath.cx:8888/af_nono/DarabouElAmar.mp3

Now you might understand why i loved the song so much...minutes later, Balal came back home and he told me there was a free concert the following day (Friday) in the Jesuit Centre by...Eskanderella!!! I could not believe it :) Of course we went and the whole concert was simply amazing: the band is composed by a guy in the laud that sings too, a pianist, a percussionist with two djembes and two female singers:

After the concert, many of the people that assisted to it gathered in one of the classic meeting places in Alexandria, a cafe called Tugaria (sorprendentemente similar a tugurio :D). I met by chance some spanish people that i was due to meet since i arrived, but we never did...so was another nice coincidence. I met as well many interesting others that offered me their valuable help in my research. Apart of the people, i met another lovely cat, that loved me so much too. As soon as i got in the cafe i looked at him and smiled, then i went to sit for an important meeting with Haythem (one of the founders of the NGO), and oh surprise! the cat ran to me jumped on my lap meanwhile i talked :) He was so fixated with me that when later on i left my jacket on one of the chairs he jumped on it and dozed peacefully:

Once everyone was gone, Haythem and me stayed there until breakfast time (9am) talking about more potential projects within the NGO and funding possibilities in Egypt for other projects. Very productive and interesting meeting i have to say. In the way back home i took this picture in the seaside:

I really like the dissolving skyline...

Vegetables and fruits In the market

2007-03-03T23:46:00.000Z

I went yesterday to the market of my street, Friday is the holiday here as you know . You can get the little audio file (left click on the link and "save as") i recorded while walking across it, i hopes it gets you a bit more into ambiance:

http://omoniak.ath.cx:8888/af_nono/walkinthemarket.WAV

And going back to my visuals, here i present a collection of some the most common vegetables and fruits that can be found in the market. One of my favourite fruits, the bananas:

Artichokes (eng), Alcachofas (esp) or Al-Jarchuf (arabic):

Red onions:

Strawberries and oranges:

Tomatoes and sweet potatoes :

Limes and lemons:

And the already famous, basketball size cauliflowers:

PS: the clear sunshiney African sky helped a lot for achieving those vibrant colors ;)

People in the market

2007-03-03T21:42:00.000Z

The good in the market are not only the vegetables, there are people too!. This was the only person selling non-vegetables items. The careful organization of the shoes and the decoration of the bike suggested me that this guy was a good business man:

In spite of my general reluctance for bothering people if taking photographs of them (as i did in Morocco), i gathered myself for making some portraits in the market. But actually they seemed more than happy; so much that at some point i was being pulled from the two sleeves on my jacket in opposite directions, with a third guy calling me to take a picture of something else. Anyway i solved this with a couple of words in Spanish, not a big deal anyway, most of people simply ignored me ;) This man actually insisted with a big smile that his lovely horse appeared in the portrait with him, he treated the animal like a brother, the horse was well fed, scrupulously clean and perfectly combed:

This one did not even bothered talking to me, he saw me taking the picture and smiled proud of his onions...

...and these two even prouder of his artichokes, they both hold a couple of them specially for the picture:

These two were very funny, they were fooling around with each other and laughing a second before i took the picture:

This one did not seem so happy, but thankfully not because of my pictures. He was standing up on top of his carreta shouting non-stop to many people. I don´t really know who he was doing, maybe the bamboo cage rental service as all of them were empty :P

The kids were very friendly, these two wanted their donkey to be immortalised with them:

This boy seemed specially nice and innocent:

And for finishing with the kids; i really liked these ones...they told me "good man" for photographing them, how sweet?

As a final note, even though there is not people in the image, the decoration of this carreta says a lot about the dedication and creativity of the owner:

No wonder why I really love those old style markets...

From the top of my building

2007-02-26T16:35:00.000Z

My building is one of the highest in the area, sixteen floors high. Since i arrived here i asked everyone in the building if the top was open, i wanted to see the view; everybody told me that it was not, as it is very dangerous. Yesterday i ignored everybody´s comments and went out to the stairs (see picture) decided to discover for myself, or even to find an alternative way to access the roof.

For some reason the lift (oh! the lift deserves a post of its own) goes up just to the 12th floor, even though the shaft indeed reaches the top of the building. Another little mystery, i could try to ask Aam Sahad :) So, i walked up four floors and to my delight, there was no lock to the roof...mmm actually there was no door at all! I do not know why i do not go and check things for myself every time. The view is mind blowing, truly amazing! From there it can really be appreciated the high density of buildings, as well as to explore the surroundings from a new perspective. You can see the mosque in my street in this picture:

This is a picture of the building next to ours, it contains all the elements that repeat all around: lift shaft, satellite aerials, water deposit and ladder:

In this view we can see the roofs of the buildings surrounding the little street in the back of my house, particularly curious is the great amount of piled up wood in one of roofs to keep the building rising:

In a zoomed detail of the last photo you can find this boy, he seems to be having quite a lot of time in his hands:

In this other building builders could be seen in action and three children playing around in the floor underneath:

I have done a pasting exercise with photoshop for composing a panoramic view of the north-north east skyline of Alexandria from the roof, the result can be seen in the picture (sorry for the couple of patches :P):

Fact of the Day: Since the assassination of Sadat in 1981, Egypt have been uninterruptedly under emergency law.

Details in the streets

2007-02-25T20:51:00.000Z

There are a number of photos that i did during my walks that i particularly like and that i did not show until now. Just for the need of beginning somewhere, i will do it by another of the already classic adverts, tweety (or Piolin) is there because is a kid´s wear shop (!!??):

This must be one of the few traffic lights in Alexandria (is the only one i saw), but is purely decorative, nobody seems to notice it:

This is a detail of the carreta of the fruit stand at the door of the mosque in my street:

This is a bike of an old man selling oil (i think). Particularly funny is the attachment method of the tin with a bicycle tire:

Some peppers hanging of the window of a restaurant in the centre, i love the colours:

This is one of many of the cats that i have photographed in the streets, this one was specially friendly and cute:

Fact of the day: I know now the name of THE cafe (where i have my kaua halib every morning), its called "el fardús" or "the paradise". Very nice place to start the day indeed ;)

Aam Sahad (Uncle Sahad)

2007-02-25T00:31:00.000Z

I have told you before about Sahad, uncle Sahad as everybody calls him. He has been the guard, the maintenance guy, the receptionist, the bin man, the mailman and the bread delivery service in the building for thirty years, every day of the year, no holidays.

He is such a simple, religious (you can see the dark mark on his forehead because of so much touching the floor with it when praying) and proud man. He literally guards the building day and night. During most the day he sits in that chair controlling everybody going in and out of the building. Nobody he does not know will pass without a whole explanation of why is he/she coming, what flat is he/she going and any other question that he finds relevant. For example he will not let pass any girl to our flat, cos no girl is supposed to come to visit us!!!. When he is resting or eating during the day, he does it in a room of his basement flat where he can still see and hear when anybody goes in or out. Even in the night he closes the fence in the entrance to the building, so he will have to wake up every time anybody wants to get in. In the middle of the night you will have to call him: "Aam Sahad! Aam Sahad!", you will hear him waking up very slowly and muttering in Arabic meanwhile he finds the key and walks to open the door. I feel guilty for interrupting his sleep, so i always tell him asif (i am sorry)...he always responds with something intelligible that i freely translate for "is ok". He does not speak any English (well, just "hello") and he talks to me in Arabic like i am proficient, but his dark benevolent eyes and his broad honest smile speak an international language...god bless him and might his socks keep him warm!

PS: i dont know who is the woman in the photo, but she sits there all day long too!!!

Fact of the day: Alexandria´s streets are all in continuous work, i have not seen many "finished" ones...the joke in here is that the major is looking for the lost treasure of Alexander :)

Some historical facts about Islamic Sci and Tech.

2007-02-23T18:39:00.000Z

I have just finished reading a little lovely book called "Introduction to Islam" by Ziauddin Sardar and Z. Abbas Malik. Do not panic, oh Westerner readers!, the book does not intend to be the first step towards the conversion of the infidel. Z.Sardar is a writer, critic and broadcaster living in London, and he is the author of a great deal of books in Science and Technology in Islam and other related subjects ( http://www.counterpoint-online.org/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=533 )

Is really impressive the clarity of the explanations and level of insight achieved in this "for-children" looking like book. It guides the reader through a fascinating travel from the times of Muhammad to present day, showing a great deal of balanced criticism to certain aspects western and islamic worlds alike. This is a must read for any person that wants to understand a bit better the world we are living in, and particularly it is a very objective presentation of Islam, unlike many of the deformed visions presented daily to us in mass media. Much of the material contained in the book i knew it already, specially related with science and technology in the knowledge-based Muslim societies of early days of Islam. Others i simply did not know them. Nevertheless the author does a very good compilation of a few things that the West learned from the Muslim world. Note i have taken the liberty of rearranging the items into a more logical order, rephrasing some and adding others:

- How to argue: philosophical and intellectual methods
- Classic Greek philosophy: Plato, Aristotle and others
- Arabic numerals and the zero (from india)
- Algebra, trigonometry and spherical geometry (taken from the greeks and greatly developed in Islamic countries)
- The scientific method (mathematical abstractions and empirical method)
- Basic set of astronomical facts and laws
- Laboratory tools: test tubes, flasks, etc...
- Hospitals, surgery tools and the basic canons of medicine (Avicena or Ibn Sina)
- Bibliographics tools: Catalogues, bibliographies, dictionaries, thesauri and encyclopedias
- Organization and administration of libraries
- University system: From the two oldest universities in the world University of Al Karaouine (Fez, Morocco) and Al-Azhar University (Cairo, Egypt) established as early as the IX century. Note that in the antiquity there was other learning centres (Plato´s Academy in Athina, Greece) but they are not considered Universities for their different structure.
- Paper Manufacture (paper was invented by TS´ai Lun in 105 A.D, and "stolen" by the Arabs in 751 A.D)
- Publishing companies and bookshops
- Hydrology, advanced methods of irrigation and other agricultural technology
- Navigation, compass and astrolabe (the first analogue computer)
- Cartography, the first world map and travel books

Well, what to say? Just to point out that what we called Renaissance and the scientific revolution could have (Obviously!) never happened without all this advances introduced to us by Muslim people. Actually many of the works that we in the west believe "original" from our scientists were actually inspired or directed copied or plagiarised from some of the works in the aforementioned fields of study. The list is truly impressive and i recommend some further research for the curious mind.

The author mention: "some things that the west failed to learn from muslims (and which muslims themselves have forgotten)":

- Knowledge and values can not be separated
- The importance of holistic thought and action
- Environmental husbandry: The islam establishes protected zones, Haram and Hima, were developments were forbidden for the conservation of the environment)
- Animal rights...yes the first animal right statement was formulated by Ibn abd as-Salam in the XIII century)
- Multiculturalism: Al-Andalus, the place where i come from, was the first and the only truly multireligious and multicultural society in history; Muslim Bosnia and Malasia are contemporary examples.

And these are just the most prominent examples, there are many others...Islam is not a culture of violence, barbarism and ignorance, actually history tell us just the opposite. Nevertheless theres violence, barbarism and ignorance in all places and times regardless of the religion.

As a farewell note a quotation from Muhammad: "Go in quest of knowledge even to China"

Walk in the centre of Alex and the little translation game

2007-02-20T21:57:00.000Z

Yesterday i went with Belal to the city centre of Alexandria for a meeting in Caritas Egypt and for taking some pictures. I found the centre a very familiar scenario, the views in there are not so different from those ones found in Seville: orange trees, narrow streets and balconies in every building. A typical example of a balcona (yes, another common word in spanish and arabic) can be seen in the picture:

Obviously, the style of many of the buildings are not so similar to those found in Al-Andalus, but dont you find some of the arches in this building reminiscent to those found in the Great Mosque of Cordoba, and others sort of quotating Gothic style?

I know that some of you will be wondering: what are normal looking buildings doing in this blog?, sincerely i just did not want to give the wrong impression of Alexandria city centre. In spite of the most of buildings in there being shocking just for their disrepair state, i manage to find the following pearl among them:

What else can be said? An image worth a million words! A funny thing that happened while taking this picture, is that a couple of girls that pass through there every day noticed for the fist time the building when they saw me photographing it. Their comment (thanks to Belal for the translation) was something like: "Oh, i never notice how beautiful this was!"...emmm obviously they did not have a clue of what my opinion was.

Another similarity i found between Sevilla and Alex is the ridiculous number of coche de caballos in the streets to show the city to (and to extortionate) visiting foreigners:

The driver´s face made me laugh for the calm that transpired out of him, simply lovely! Just round the corner from where this driver was smoking and chilling, i found this the door of a cafe; i just could not get my eyes out of it:

So here is the little translation game: can anybody guess what is this all about? The person that guess right will get a golden cockphant (or gallifante for spanish speakers). The solution to this puzzle will be revealed in the next few days...enjoy!

PS: Party cannot participate in the game cos he already almost died laughing when i told him the solution

Marriage in Egypt

2007-02-18T19:37:00.000Z

Well, i am back to life! i have spent the last two days tremendously sick: neck and back pain, stomach ache, nausea, vomits, headache, fever...I do not know exactly what it caused it, maybe an insect in my tea, maybe the tap water or, as one of my friends suggested, an airborne virus. In any case , after a 18 hours session in bed, i feel great and i am eating like an animal again.

Last Friday i had a very long conversation with Khaled and Bahz about some social realities and customs in Egypt. Making an effort to compile some of the most shocking wages i found that:
-Engineer makes between £40/month and £80/month,
-Medicine doctor working in a public hospital makes £17/month,
-Medicine doctor in a private hospital £40/month,
-Lawyer £10/month (but as i heard lawyers work for free many times, so many they are...for example the Pizza guy from the corner of my street is a lawyer!),
-Accountant £10/month,
-Teacher £10/month,
- and finally, Government Ministers £1500/month!!!
...never mind stating the wages non-graduate jobs

Keep in mind those figures, now i will describe the requirements that the father of the bride will impose to any man that want to marry one of their daughters (traditional Egyptian customs, they are still widely followed). Note that these figures vary according to the class and education level of the bride, the ones stated are average ones:
0. Education (at least as good as the education of the bride) and sometimes all the older sisters of the groom have to get married before him.
1. Permanent job (contract job many times not accepted, i heard of a case of a guy that had to drop a job in the UN to get married because it was not permanent)
2. Owning a house or flat (rented house is not valid in most cases): as a reference the cost of a flat in the outskirts in Alex is £10000
3. Mahar (dote) is the money has to be given to the father of the bride between £1000-£3000
4. Gold for the bride, around £1500
5. Wedding and honeymoon costs: £1500 + £1000. Obviously these figures vary depending on the size of the family, but they are generally quite large.
6. All electrical appliances for the house
7. Furniture of the whole house, except the kitchen

And what the woman has to get for the marriage?
1. The furniture of the kitchen (normally bought with the Mahar)

How does anybody gets married at all taking into account their wages? By the way, my housemate Badry intends to get married next year: donations are welcome :P

Lost photographs?

2007-02-14T14:16:00.000Z

It is a pity i do not have my camera with me (Badry borrowed it until Friday for going to Cairo) because there are so many pictures i would like to have taken. The picture of me with my legs hanging off the side of a local carreta [1] pulled by a skanky tiny donkey and driven by a small mustached man holding a cigarette in his mouth. The photograph of Sahad (the "recepcionist" or guard of our building) with lettuce falling over his chin and pulling my arm in a "forced" invitation to eat, with me having to escape as i was going to be late if i stayed there with him. The picture of a woman in my street shouting in an angry and reproaching voice to a man in that pretended to ignore the whole situation. Fortunately i manage to get a picture of the two guys that serve me my Kaua Halib (cafe latte) every morning, they are so nice with me.

The cafe at the end of my street (known as THE cafe) where these guys work is indeed a place where i have been spending quite a lot of time. Last Friday going to THE cafe (mmm i will have to find out the name of it) i crossed the market and i took this picture of my street from my favourite table:

Look at the size of those cauliflowers! (u can click on the pics for seeing it full size). I have to say that i love the detail of the panel of the British nursery; which lead me to the question: what is a British nursery? a place where they speak in english and feed fish and chips to the children? :D . The massive grey wall that can be seen at the left of the picture is the building next to ours. Later the same day that i took the picture, after a meeting (in another cafe) with Bahz and Badry, i came back to the cafe and stayed there all night chatting with Yasser and Khaled. The conversation lasted until 7 a.m. and comprised history, architecture, race, identity, engineering, magic and the weird, religion, another coffee please!!! The next day (actually few hours later) i had to be at 2p.m. in the NGO to sign my contract, so i legally became research consultant and trainer with my best sleepy face.

In any case not everything has been chilling and chatting in THE cafe. In there we did a rough structuring of the course i am going to be giving for a few tens of guys and girls in the next months. In there, Khaled, Bahz and me developed the basis for a proposal related with implementation of renewable energy that has the potential for ensuring the economical survival of the NGO. Yesterday in THE cafe we designed the pieces of furniture that we needed (within budget). From there we went to the wood shop that we discovered the other day, bought all the wood and transported everything to the work shop (for cutting the pieces) in the carreta of the small moustached man. Once back home we begun (we are not finish just yet) to assemble the tables, shelving units, cupboard for the kitchen and the desks. Finally i have a desk! I designed it incorporating the latest recycling techniques: The door of the kitchen was wasting too much (of the little) space in the room, now in my room as been put to better use :D In that desk/door is where many things are supposed to happen in the next few months.

[1] Carreta is the same word in arabic and spanish, in english is a trolley like that one in the picture with the cauliflowers

The biblioteka alexandrina and the seaside walk

2007-02-06T17:46:00.000Z

Waking up at 11 am after only two hours of sleep was the first of my achievements of the day. After the preceptive coffee under the morning sun and some little chores i went to get the "minibus" to the Biblioteka Alexandrina, by "minibus" they meant a Nissan vanette packed with 15 people (modelo la flagoneta del tintorero del poligono); but with a 15 km trip costing 10 pence is not a question to criticize the transportation means :P The central building of the modern library of Alexandria is a massive concrete truncated cone covered with stone slabs where inscriptions in all known alphabets have been carved:

The Biblioteka is just few hundred meters away from the location of the ancient library (known as the temple of the muses or Musaion), where Euclid taught his Elements, the greatest mathematical treaty in history. Thinking that all the geometry studied in the last two millenia was formally taught for the first time so close to where i was standing filled me with great emotion. I entered the library with this overwhelming feeling in me. The interior is spacious and evenly illuminated by the light entering through openings in the tilted roof. Unfortunately after 3 hours of exploring i was quite disappointed. In first place the library looks more like an attraction for tourists than a research center, and secondly, after careful study of the catalogue i realised that the collection is nowhere close to what i expected from the once greatest book repository in the world. Nevertheless i managed to find a few useful references.

Once out of the library i took the decision to walk back home along the seaside. During this 3 hours walk i would have time to discover the chaotic architectural collage that is Alexandria. An uncountable number of high rise buildings seem to compete for the little available space, almost leaning over each other (see photo).

The whole thing did not make much sense to me, one building would be of colonial style, the next one filled with references to ancient Egypt, followed by a high tech hotel; the next with references to Islamic architecture, followed by a brutalist piece from the 70´s...and the list has no end. The immense majority of such buildings would have made me cringe if in any other place, but overwhelmed by the naivety, improvisation and lack of any sort of architectural convention of this concrete labyrinth, my senses relaxed. Suddenly i found this whole chaos tremendously comic, i was standing in front of buildings and smiling, the passing by pedestrians looking at me like i was mad. And in such a good mood i discovered some of the most amazing pieces of architecture i have ever seen. I will give you some visual examples:

1- The concrete spider:

I found this structure sitting on top of twelve stories high building...there are no words, i simply could not work out what was going on in there after a while observing the "thing". Please if any of you have any idea of what on earth could be that concrete cubicle with oblique supports, please comment.

2- What could be a building by BEST architectural studio (famous American firm that design buildings that look like they are falling apart):

Observe the detail of all the upper floors perfectly finished, meanwhile the bottom ones seem to be falling apart...another architectural mystery.

3- The egg:

This is one of my favourite pieces; completely unaware and uninformed by its surroundings, it looks like a massive animal died in the middle of the city leaving its beautifully textured shell behind.

4- The melting column building:

This building seemed at first glance to be relatively normal, the front columns and the openings of the bottom floor as well as the stone slab covering seem reminiscent of some ancient temples...but what is that bent column on the left? If is not load bearing, why did they put a column at all? and if is simply aesthetic, why they did not put another of those pretty ones? It seems like i have little idea of architecture.

5- The wind cutting building:

This is the side of the building facing the sea wind, i might be conceding too much credit to the designer, but looks that the purpose of such shape is to reduce the tension in the structure...or maybe it was simply the shape of land that was left available :D

I have to say the selection of buildings to put here has been very very contested, i am so sorry that so many other outrageous buildings have been left out of this post. Maybe i will write a second part of this post to include some other pieces. As a farewell note i leave u with a lovely image of the end of my seaside walk.

Fact of the day: The graveyard of Alexander the Great is undiscovered somewhere under the city

Arrival in Alexandria

2007-02-05T13:25:00.000Z

Sunday night i left the house at 2am and took a taxi to Heathrow Airport. In there i spent my time reading in the deserted airport until the time of embarking (see photo).

I arrived in Cairo airport at 3pm on Monday after spending all my time in the plane recovering all the sleep i missed Sunday night ;) Yasser was in there to pick me up, negotiate with the taxi driver, take me to the train station and invite me to a delicious egyptian coffee. Before i realised, i was (for the first time in my life) in a 1st class wagon to Alexandria. The 2 hour and a half trip to Alex passed without any other mayor incident, other than me committing the mistake of ordering food in the train (i think it was cooked by the same chef that serves that "food" in all the planes in the world). Khaled, the person that ill be grateful all my life for facilitating my trip to Egypt (might Allah have him in his grace), was in the station waiting for me. Together with Badry (one of my house mates) we went for having a proper Egyptian feast: salads, beans with humus, omelette, grilled cheese, beetroot, chips, etc... And then i begun to enjoy and "suffer" the famous egyptian hospitality. I have come to realise that the argument of me trying to pay something and not being allowed is going to happen quite often. They dont know limits of hospitality, god bless them!

After dinner we came to our flat, and my first surprise is that i live in a neighborhood in the east of the city called Miami (no further comments please). The flat is in the 7th floor of a high rise building (18 floors) that look like one that has been teleported from Sarajevo :D Inshallah, I will post an article just on the state of the lift in the next few days, it is simply hilarious. In the flat i met my other two house mates, Bahz and Balal (Bibo), and we went for a coffee in Amys favourite cafe. In there i met two architects, Karim and Mohamed, that begun to help me with my architectural findings. The (hours long) conversation was extremely animated, from buildings to energy, from terrorism to cultural issues and finally, back to in the flat, talking about cinema with Balal until 9am that i went to bed...where i died for only two hours, as i had to be at 12 am in the Biblioteka Alexandrina.

Fact of the day: Egypt in egyptian is called Masr!!!

Introduction

2007-02-02T21:40:00.000Z

Hello everyone!

The most of you reading out there know already i am going to Egypt on Monday. The main plans: working for an NGO in Alexandria, learning Arabic and doing architectural and technological research. Inshallah, I will be posting little pieces of text and photos for sharing this Egyptian experience with you.

I hope well all enjoy
Nono

PS: Feel free to criticize, comment, reference or discuss.