Ah, just as the blog was almost happening in real time, I found this in my Drafts folder. A little treat from the winter Egypt trip. It all makes me a bit nostalgic. They have bad taxidermy here in Beirut, but not so much of the other attractions.

Downtown Cairo is one of the world’s more nonsensical shopping districts. Every other store is selling shoes. The ones that aren’t selling shoes are selling either lavishly embroidered galabiyyas or somewhat shocking lingerie. If you wander off the main streets, you wind up in an area where all the shops sell prosthetic limbs.

I didn’t want to take a picture of the lingerie, because it seemed like too much of an obvious conversation-starter for any random dude on the sidewalk, but here’s something nice for the gentlemen:

It’s gotten a little crazier since the revolution, as the police aren’t out to keep the sidewalk vendors in line. They’ve gone nuts downtown. It makes it very hard to walk, but I have to give props to the guys who sell men’s clothing on Talaat Harb at night. I saw one stand in the middle of traffic, forcing cars to stop, while he unpacked a bale of made-in-China Versice jeans. Occupy for ad-hoc capitalism!

More prosaically, it’s easier than ever to buy a headscarf. And women are wearing them double- and triple-ply, carefully selected to match their outfits. Haven’t seen such color-coordinating since middle school. Or felt so totally uncool.

Competition has forced shop displays to get more outlandish. Or at least that’s how I’m rationalizing something like this:

And this:

And this might be explained by the fact that it was getting close to Halloween. Or maybe not.

I read a while ago (I believe in Max Rodenbeck’s great Cairo: The City Victorious) that when Cairo was at its peak in the early 20th century, the most elite downtown shops would display, for instance, a single perfect shoe. Now the strategy is reversed. When in doubt, put as much out on display as possible.

But when a shop is so bursting with love, as this one is, how can you not love it back? Same goes for Cairo, you see.

I had another collection of funny little items from Cairo scheduled for this week, but it just seems too flip. Instead, here’s a good collection of post-revolutionary graffiti, all from one corner in Zamalek. Fight on, Egyptians.

Not to jinx anything, but I think it now seems a little more appropriate to post my “oh my gosh, I had such a great time in Egypt” pics. Now that people aren’t (at least at this moment) getting tear-gassed and whacked with sticks.

It’s hard to talk about Egypt without mentioning all the political business, of course, but being there was a great reminder of how life goes on, and pretty magnificently. A country can be going through its largest upheaval in 50 years, but people still go to work, shop for vegetables, smoke a sheesha… Traveling there was 95 percent normal.

I did happen to leave just a few days before the November 18 protests got ugly. But I did also happen to be there on October 19, when the military killed 19 Copts. For better or worse, life went on the next morning. Cairo is a very big place.

In no particular order, here’s what caught my eye in Cairo:

Cairo has tuktuks now. Actually, only Giza has tuktuks. They got banned from the east side of the river because it just made the traffic too insane. Small towns have tuktuks too. The vehicles are actually imported from Thailand. Here’s our driver in Wadi Natrun:

The best tuktuks have huge sound systems, and our driver was blasting who I later found out was DJ Amr 7a7a (say it ‘Haha’), this tune that I heard many times over the rest of my trip. Sorry–can’t find version with words and his magnificent use of AutoTune. Just imagine 13-year-olds doing gangly dances to that tight bass line in a dusty small-town road, and you’ll get an idea how bad-ass we were rolling in our tuktuk.

Speaking of drivers: Cairo taxis (most of them) have meters. I still am marveling about how the simple addition of meters has transformed Cairo cabbies from some of the worst in the world to some of the best. Now that neither front seat nor back seat has to stress out about the fare, Cairo drivers can turn on their full charm. (Oh, except that one who showed a woman I met pornographic photos on his cell phone. And the one who pulled out a gun–!!!–from under his seat and showed it off to a guy in my class. And the one who, far less nefariously, drove me through the Al-Azhar tunnel for no good reason at all. But all the rest of them are true gentlemen.)

Egypt has a lot of Mubarak to get rid of. Here in Mansoura, he’s been painted out of a mosaic:

In the Cairo metro, Mubarak station (the one at Midan Ramses) has been hastily changed to Al Shohadaa — ‘Martyrs’ — or just blacked out.

In Cairo, it seemed like there were a lot more young women out on the street, especially noticeable at night. Though at night I wouldn’t have been able to capture this great look:

Color seems to be used a little more liberally on buildings. At least more than I remember, but in my memory, Cairo is always solid brown. I wonder if we might have the Chinese to thank for the colored paint–I noticed all of it was from there. People rarely have control enough to paint a whole building, but they’ll often paint their balcony a bright color, so it pops out from the rest of the brown building. This isn’t paint, but it gives you an idea of the effect:

In Islamic Cairo, the stretch of medieval buildings known as Bein al-Qasrein is done with restoration, and it looks beautiful. I was worried it would be too tidy, too fake. But it has aged well, and most important, people seem to hang out here in a way they didn’t before–it’s more of a public space than a thoroughfare. Here’s the inside of one of the buildings:

Elegant, calm, restorative. This is the side of Cairo that’s there, but hard to see–you have to go looking for it, and you certainly won’t read about it in the newspaper.

So, so rarely do I get to make a real logistical ‘discovery’ when I’m updating a guidebook that I just have to take a post to brag about the clever route I found to the camel market in Birqash.

Short version: take the train to Birqash village; hop on a truck for the last five minutes to the market.

For all I know, other guidebooks already have this info, but Lonely Planet currently advises a complicated series of at least three microbuses, which frankly in the many years since the market moved from Imbaba to Birqash, has always made me tired just to read about and I’ve never bothered going.

But this time, I’m responsible for the Around Cairo chapter, with the camel market in it. While I was busy putting off the schlep, I happened to notice that the train runs through Birqash. In my mind, any train is better than a bunch of microbuses and having to ask directions repeatedly at the crack of dawn.

The train is the ‘Cairo outskirts’ line (khatt al-manashi) and runs out of Ramses station to Birqash. It goes from track 22, which is a little Hogwartsian in the way you have to walk way up track 11 to find it, up around a bend. And the train is utterly dust-encrusted and looks like it hasn’t moved in years.

At this point, I guess I should qualify my judgment: if you like trains, this particular train is far superior to microbuses. If you prefer a clean seat, no flies and surfaces that don’t make you regret having worn the clothes you just washed, then perhaps you should stick with the microbus strategy.

But even in my nice clothes, I still think a train trumps all, and this one costs only LE1.25 (20 cents), with people-watching for free, and vendors traipsing through selling peanuts and flashlights and safety pins.

I hopped the 9am train, which left on time and got me to Birqash about an hour later. If I were going to the camel market for real as a tourist, though, I’d take the earlier train, at 7am, to get to the market in the thick of the action.

I arrived a little over an hour later at the station in Birqash, which is on a little strip of land between two canals. I crossed the bridge to the south, thinking I might find a cab or a tuktuk (yes, btw, there are tuktuks in Egypt now! Imported right from Thailand!). But Birqash isn’t even big enough to merit tuktuks, it turns out.

But some men advised me to hop on the next truck going by, and I did. Five minutes later, a bit to the southwest of the village, we all piled out at the market. I offered to pay my truck driver, but he waved it off, probably because it was such a short distance, but maybe also because I’d ripped the knee of my pants wide open clambering in and was now cutting quite a pathetic figure with my scarf wrapped around my leg like a tourniquet.

Even though I was there a bit late, the market (which runs Friday, Sunday and Monday) was interesting enough. And I swear camels love having their pictures taken.

Obligatory warning for animal-lovers: the market resounds with the thok-thok-thok of sticks on recalcitrant camel rumps.

And the area outside the market is like a camel apocalypse, with dead ones strewn around in the dunes, with piles of trash as garnish. It ain’t pretty.

But just like the guidebooks say, the market is a real “whoa, I’m in Africa” experience.

And with the train, it’s easier than you might think (if slightly grubbier) to get there. For lone women, I think the train is preferable too, because you’re on there with families going other places, whereas the microbuses and trucks are a pretty much all-dude scene.

I was prepared to walk back to the station, but a truck stopped and insisted I get in, and when it turned out he wasn’t going that way, dropped me off and got me on another truck. You don’t need much more Arabic than ‘souq ag-gamaal’ and ‘Birqash’ (pronounced Bir-ESH) to negotiate the whole day, though the Birqash train station sign is in Arabic only. Some ladies on the train even told me when my stop was coming, which was helpful.

And the kid selling safety pins was on the return train, so I was even able to fix up my pants. (Return trains run every hour or so, and even if you have to wait, you’ll probably meet some nice people in the process.) A mighty fine day that made my job feel all worthwhile.

By the time you read this, I will have returned from my second of two trips to Egypt. I haven’t been there since 2007. I was of course fascinated to see how (or if) things had changed since the revolution.

The changes weren’t immediately obvious. Same crowds, same pollution, same bad traffic. Worse, in fact, said taxi drivers, because traffic cops weren’t really out in force anymore.

Same hucksters plying Talaat Harb. In fact I got lured into a perfume shop because a guy started talking to me about his experience during the revolution. So adaptable, these guys! Another gambit: “Don’t go that way–it’s closed for a demonstration!”

One concrete change: no more men with giant guns slumped in guard kiosks looking bored. Their presence used to be so common that ‘ZabiT’ (officer) was one of the first words I learned in Arabic class here. In 1992, my friend Karen got a picture of herself posing with some, and captioned it straight from our textbook dialogue: ‘Ma hadha? Hadha ZabiT.’ (What is that? That is an officer.)

And graffiti. Everywhere. Gorgeous and fully formed. Some of it bursting with psychedelic color, some of it in elaborate stencil portraits of the people killed during the revolution. The sad panda of the cheese commercials is slumped on walls everywhere: don’t say no to regime change.

And then there’s simply this:

I would love to end the post on this note, but it would be dishonest. When I first arrived at the end of September, public spaces felt noticeably joyful. Now as elections are getting closer, there’s mounting anxiety. The election system is opaque and disorganized, perhaps intentionally. The Maspero incident proved everyone’s worst fears about the military council. The Salafists are saying (and doing) ridiculous things but getting all the press. Even the graffiti is being painted over, chiseled out and even covered up by campaign posters.

It will be partially resolved in late November, when elections start in Cairo and Alexandria. Meanwhile, people are looking back at their photos from the 18 days of the revolution and recounting their stories, trying to rekindle that optimism. Hanshuf ba’a. We’ll see.