Coming back to Egypt in March 2007 was something I´d never believed would happen, if you had asked me about it half a year ago. Maybe because of this, the impressions which drenched us this second time, were as intense and overwhelming as they had been the first time. Finding ourselves in Cairo after a long day´s journey felt like landing on another planet. So much is different from our well-ordered, structured European world.

Outside our hotel on the Corniche, the Arabian cacaphony is at full blast. Below the touring boats have their mooring site, and towards evening wild party music tries to entice you to a tour on the Nile. The boats are small motorboats with many-coloured lights which blink on and off incessantly. You wonder if anything at all of Night-time Cairo can be seen from these circus-like inventions. To all this, comes the normal rhytm of Cairo traffic: incessant beeping of horns, clatter from horse-carriages, police sirens. Someone collects horse manure from the street, a couple of daring-do young boys walks fearlessly right out into the traffic, beveiled girls giggle under the trees near to where feluccas are for rent. Their sails are enormously dirty, or so it seems. Maybe they are just worn, and therefore have lost any brightness.

In the evening there is a group of three men playing at a café at the hotel. The music seems to be traditional Egyptian songs, the instruments are one violin, one tambourine and one string instument resembling a lute. The music is beautiful, suggestive and strangely comforting. We sit and listen quietly, while all around us Egyptians drink coffee, mint tea or smoke Shisha pipe and talk engagedly between themselves.

Life is a fuming river in Cairo. I am in the middle.