Saturday night I went to Ali’s Kabab Cafe for dinner, by myself. It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve been there. There was something about being alone, and for once not seeing anyone else I knew, that reminded me of when I first moved to New York, and Astoria. I just sat there and read a little, and occasionally stared mistily into space, thinking of…geez, nearly a decade ago.

Back in 1998–or maybe it was 1999 by the time I got to Kabab Cafe for the first time–Ali’s felt like a little airlock between New York and Egypt. Not that I missed Egypt exactly (here’s one reason why), but I still felt a little out of step with glossy, consumer-y NYC, and I needed a little more dim lighting, hot tea and weepy Umm Kulthum music in my life. In those early days, going to Kabab Cafe felt like I was visiting a foreign country again, one whose GDP was based on nostalgia, atmosphere and clouds of sheesha smoke.

Now I know half the other regulars, Ali and I are friends, and he doesn’t smoke the water pipe in his place anymore. Almost nine years have slipped by since I was in Cairo–and now I’m set to go back again, in less than a month.

Last time, I was there for a year doing the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA). Not only was Arabic irrelevant to Americans back then, pre-9/11, but the social shenanigans of twenty wacky students in the pressure-cooker of Cairo were utterly wasted, because reality TV hadn’t been invented. This would’ve been ratings gold: mix medievalists up with political wonks, throw in a few Mormons, shack us up in grand, decrepit apartments with dusty chandeliers, and make us all sit in class together for eight hours a day. Weirdly, I am still friends with a good portion of these people.

This time, I’m going to update a guidebook to Egypt—a job I’m now feeling like the 25-year-old me should have done. In my preparation for the research trip, I’m finding it very difficult to brush away all the emotional associations and remember the details that might be relevant to a traveler who’s not sucked into a yearlong process of ego destruction via high-school-style social snubs, recurring illness and failure to grasp the infinite subtleties of Arabic grammar and vocabulary.

Such as: Men will harass you like crazy on the street. (Mental note: Buy more sports bras. Breasts must be locked down.)

And the gauntlet of cab drivers at the airport—it’s like the paparazzi, but not. Know where you’re going, and how much you’ll pay.

And it’ll probably already be crazy hot. And pack Kleenex—the smog makes your snot run black at the end of the day. And be careful crossing the street (especially careful this time, with my now-blind eye).

As you can see, I’ve been slowly building up to a full panic. It’s a very specific version of a broader pre-trip anxiety that always seizes me, no matter where I’m going (this Thursday: New Orleans, where I will certainly miss Jim and Daphne’s wedding because I will have been mugged and shot and left in the middle of a potholed street).

I’m trying hard to think positive. Normally I would do that by thinking about food.

But Cairo is a difficult place, food-wise. Not only is it not exactly bursting with deliciousness, but my gut flora were so traumatized by my decade-ago visit that my stomach still lurches a little when I think of, say, tabbouleh on a hot summer night. (Why did I eat that? No sane Cairene eats parsley salad in the summer.)

So I think it was my solo visit to Ali’s that warmed my heart a little, and created room for the barest flutterings of excitement as I was flipping through guidebooks today: al-Tabei, that place with the super-garlicky marinated tomatoes; Fatatri al-Tahrir, where you can get a flaky “pizza” topped with jam and coconut and nuts; kushari, the lentils-n-rice topped with a zingy vinegar-tomato sauce; even those 20-cent mashed-potato sandwiches with the crunchy bits of cilantro; and the chicken livers and French fries at the Odeon bar.

After that, I run a little dry in the restaurant department, but now, in my reverie, I’m on to bars and clubs (Atlas in 1992, my first trip, now that was a scene, and that upstairs joint where the Sudanese prostitutes hung out) and then, most important, my salvation in Cairo: grocery shopping.

The shiny-clean milk store. The corner shop where I realized, after months, that I could buy eggs in any number I wanted, rather than base 12. The master orange-juicer down the street. The neighbor greengroceress who heckled me for not being a regular customer. The creak of donkey carts laden with cactus fruit and mangos rolling past my window.

There’s plenty more. But no one wants to read Zora’s Proustian Guide to Cairo. I’m glad I’ve arranged a long visit—the whole first week will likely be spent getting all those Masri madeleines out of my system.

And then the next week, I’ll be back to beating off the street lechers with a stick, fighting with cab drivers, stomping up stairwells to fleabag hotel after fleabag hotel and cringing in horror every time I blow my nose.

Yallah—off we go.