Hi all – a lighter blog back home in Cairo after the last, fairly grim one I’ll admit, which was a radio script of a piece for Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE, on the drought in Kenya.

I got caught out today. In aimless wanderings around my neighbourhood, trying to find shops open in the middle of the day, I came across the one shop doing a roaring trade, Mandarine Koueider, a chic patisserie on Korba, specialising in all the sticky, super-sweet delights that Egyptian Muslims love to eat once the sun has gone down and the feasting begins. Actually, not just Muslims, all this sweet-toothed country loves mainlining baklawa, kunafa, zalabia – anything involving pastry or fried dough, crushed nuts and lots of honey or sugar syrup.

So I’m queuing up with the best of them, and finally my turn comes. I order kunafa, with its pastry base, fresh cream and sweet vermicelli on top, little fingers of baklava – crushed nuts and honey rolled in filo – and what I thought looked like the Greek mezzaluna shortbread and pistachio bites. As he was making my tray of sweets, the guy behind the counter did what all sweets men do and offered me a taste of the baklava. So I did what I always do and smiled and popped the sweet in my mouth, only to realise I was surrounded by perhaps 40 people who have not eaten nor drunk a thing in 12 hours. Spot the non-Muslim, eh?

For those of you who haven’t twigged yet, it’s now Ramadan, Islam’s holy month. Falling on the same date in the Islamic lunar calendar, in ‘our’ Gregorian solar calendar, it’s a moveable feast. This year, Ramadan (which translates as ‘scorching heat’) runs from 22 August (so we’re well underway) finishing with Eid-el-fitar on 20 September.

This week, the temp ramped it up and the aircon died, so it was time to road-test two places to swim in (or near) Cairo. The first, the Atlas Zamalek Hotel has a rooftop pool that the Lonely Planet says is usually empty. Which of course made us deeply sceptical as once it’s in that guidebook, nothing’s ever the same – to travellers’ annoyance and owners’ delight. However, they were right. We were the only people there on a weekday afternoon. The LE40 ($9) charge lets you swim and order from the café. So we swam in the cool water and ordered salads and burgers, fresh strawberry juice and club sandwiches. The water wasn’t so clean, so I’d say no to opening my eyes underwater. But when it’s this hot…

The hotel wins bonus points as we were two girls in bikinis (yes we had sarongs to cover up when walking around), and the marked absence of perving from the charming middle-aged waiters was downright refreshing.

The second place was the Sakkara Palm Club (in the pic) just up the road from the ancient pyramids of Sakkara. Entrance is either LE65 to swim only or LE95 including a buffet lunch. Cool music from the DJ, large pools with little palm islands and *gasp* a swim-up bar! We spotted some bad, bad girls on the submerged bar stools snogging dodgy looking men. But apart from that, the crowd was a mix of locals larging it up and lots of foreigners in packs. The pool attendants were constantly combing the water to keep it clear, and stopped anyone from the worst excesses, such as taking plates of watermelon on the pool (hey, I agree, no food in the pool. Who wants to swim alongside soggy tomato slices?) but indulged us by bringing an ashtray so our nicotine-dependent friend could smoke in the shallows. Ah Egypt. Lovely, lovely Egypt.

Details: the Atlas Zamalek Hotel, 20 Gameat El Dewal El Arabeya St. Mohandiseen, 02 3346 6569
Sakkara Palm Club, Marioutiya Canal Road Tel: 02 33819 1775

This morning on the train, I bought some hair pins and that liquid glue that instantly sticks your fingers together.

A woman in a niqab (the black robe that covers everything but eyes) was doing a roaring trade in eye liner pencils for about 50c each.

This is one of the great things about Cairo (and many non-first-world countries). Your shopping comes to you. Forget newspaper sellers, you can buy screwdrivers, pens, combs, washing-up cloths, scouring pads… sometimes all hanging off the one body.

Of course, tissue sellers are a given on every carriage, every metro station, every corner, and I even saw Vodafone top-up cards being hawked on the train the other day. My best investment to date has been a pretty fold-up paper fan, perfect when the fans on the metro carriages’ roofs break down.

Kids often work with their parents or alone, rushing down the carriages to drop lollies or gum in passengers’ laps, shouting the price as they go, then sweeping back up the carriage to collect the unwanted sweets. Sometimes, a woman will silently drop religious leaflets throughout, instinctively avoiding the non-Muslims.

Of course, they’re all illegal traders competing in an economy where unemployment is officially at 9%, but most pundits place in the mid-teens. A recent Reuters report stated that 20% of the population live on less than US$1 a day.

When I went to my Arabic class early on Thursday morning, the taxi skimmed through empty streets so fast, the driver HAD to give me change (normally they will shamelessly pocket whatever you put in their hand, even a 100 pound note, unless you put up a fight).

Where was everyone? They’d all scooted up to the North Coast for the long weekend which celebrates Revolution Day when King Farouk I was toppled from his throne by military coup in 1952, led by a handful of officers, three of whom (Sadat, Naguib and Nasser) would go on to become the first three Prime Ministers of Egypt and have metro stops named after them.

(Egyptian trivia: Farouk’s full title was His Majesty Farouk I, by the grace of God, King of Egypt and Sudan, Sovereign of Nubia, of Kordofan, and of Darfur. He might have been but a puppet of the English, but love the throne! So much more colourful than the incumbent black hair dye addict, Hosny.)

So Cairo has been a ghost town…well, as much as a city of 16 to 20 million people (give or take 4 million) can be. Even chic Sangria, a nightclub, bar and open-air restaurant on the Nile, was quiet on Friday night. Walk straight in and get a riverside table for eight! No crawling between elegantly exposed knees to get to the bar! Room in front of the mirror in the ladies! Bouncer let the men in wearing ‘slippers’, ie cool leather thongs!

While we chilled over cantaloupe (rockmelon, for you Aussies) shisha, we heard that the normal 1.5 hour journey between the city gates of Cairo and Alex took double the time, the traffic on the mega-freeway actually stopping for an hour late at night. Knowing Egypt, though, some enterprising young guys would have appeared from the farms along the roadside selling tea, cigarettes and blow-up beach toys at 3am.

Ghost town or not, the Corniche along the Nile was still bumper to bumper traffic when we left Sangria at 1.30am in the Victorious City which I’ve heard not described as the city that never sleeps, but the city that sleeps…in shifts.

Check out: Sangria, Corniche el Nil, opposite the Conrad Hotel, 2579 6511. Reserve on Thursday and Friday nights if you want a table outdoors. If all else fails, the garden below is often nearly completely empty, even though its dreamy white curtained lounges are gorgeous.

(Pic credit of Sangria: www.eklegodesign.net)

The temp in Cairo is ramping, up with 40 degrees and sunny blue skies the norm. It’s the time when the city fills up with gulf Arabs coming to the cooler climes for summer, escaping their countries’ 50+ degree heat.

Yesterday, I made the mistake of travelling on the metro in morning peak hour. It was the MOST intensely crowded train I’ve ever been in – breasts, waists, heads, handbags, children – all enmeshed to create a jigsaw of human flesh, with not even a puff of air between. And the fans overhead in the carriages were broken. Just lucky this was the women’s carriage. Otherwise, it would have been a frotteur’s paradise.

When I got to my destination, I washed the sweat of other women from my skin.

Sometimes, there’s a funny camaraderie on the metro. Those fortunate enough to get a seat will take a standing woman’s heavy handbag and put it on their laps or, which I saw yesterday, even take their children, covering them with kisses.

On the way home, two girls sitting in front of me stood up to leave, and another woman and I took their place. Except the other woman was the size of the two skinny girls, and we just squeezed in on the bench seat.

Finally, she was replaced by another woman holding an infant. She hauled up her robes and, the baby’s head hitting my arm, she fed the child, all the while squished up against me. Mind you, opposite was another woman with a child maybe a month old, much admired in the carriage, when another woman sat carelessly beside her and rested her large handbag on the baby’s head. She felt something under the bag and casually moved it off his tiny head. No prams in Cairo.