"See you soon" to the early man

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

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...