I like dreams and I love to dream. I reached a point in studying Arabic when the hard confines and strict rules of its grammar gave way to some truly beautiful poetry (thank you Dr. Yaseen Noorani), which could never be as beautiful in translation. In my dreams, I open books of classical Arabic poetry and read them. And fully understand them – each and every nuance and epithet – without reaching for a classical Arabic dictionary and tearing my hair out over which of the twenty English meanings is being used.

In my dreams, I read with the voice of Mohamed Al Mohalhal Al Yassin.

It’s a beautiful advert which shows an often unrecognised modern creativity from this region. As glorious as the screen images are though, it’s the voice that stops me dead every time it comes on TV.

No, this isn’t some cheap attempt at temporarily upping my viewer stats.

Summer is whacking Cairo now. Usually we wait until mid June, early July for days in the 40C range, but this year the onslaught began early May. One Summer ritual which remains constant though is the influx of Gulfies (Saudis and Emeraties) from their baking countries. Imagine, coming to Cairo mid Summer to escape the heat!

To satisfy the invasion of walking Dinars and Riyals, advertising and entertainment lucratively turns due East. Tastes are a little different to what Egyptian’s deem attractive and are immediately identifiable. Even belly dancing has its own style in the Gulf (lots of Heavy- Metal-type-long-hair circular-head-banging — sans greasy hair!).

I’ll keep sharing as long as I can. (Ooooh, don’t say I don’t spoil you!).

PS Cherry Tart – cos I’m making another as I type.

It took me a couple of days of watching Noor to figure out what was going on, not only in plot but with the actors’ mouths.

Noor is a new TV show in Arabic on one of the free satellite stations originating from Dubai. This particular station, MBC4, usually shows English language programs: Rachel Ray, Oprah and Dr Phil are staples – we’re not exactly talking high brow entertainment!

Nevertheless, and perhaps because of this, I like this show. Of course, it could also be because it is extremely odd to watch Arabic being spoken by so many people with blue, green and light eyes. The Arabic is Lebanese, the people beautiful and the landscapes stunning. After a few days of assuming it was filmed in Lebanon by actors mouthing strange words, I have just figured out it is a Turkish TV series dubbed!

The real reason for my new addiction though? The leading man has one of my favourite, and seldom heard names: Mohanad (yes, that’s an N in the middle) and I’m not sure I could ever get bored of hearing it.

And they speak slowly enough, with enough pauses, for me to actually understand!

NB I have stopped comments to this post. I have absolutely no contact with MBC nor the makers of Noor in Turkish or Arabic. I merely wrote a personal account. Please pass any comments you my have about the programme onto the channel directly.

This is the normal mid-sized lantern that people hang up during Ramadan. The top of each panel has a crescent moon, a symbol of the religion, with the bottom of the panel showing the Ka’aba. Each vertical side of each panel has a minaret. The colours can be different, as can the panel designs, but the theme is the same. (click photo to enlarge)

This is a more unusual design, but pretty nonetheless. The silhouette is of a mosque. (click photo to enlarge)

This beauty is one of the largest options standing at about 2m (approx 7ft – well, we are allowed to have both now, aren’t we..?). It may be a month of goodwill, but it was chained to a railing, just in case…

This is a close up of the top panel in the large lantern. The pink writing inside the yellow on blue says God. In the lower red panel, there are two minarets, the Ka’aba and the word God written above (in different script than on the upper panel).

I’m not sure what the top bright light is exactly – it may be a fault, who knows – but the two upturned hands are the equivalent to the Christian palms pressed together in prayer. Directly above the hands, inside the crescent moon is the word God again and beside it another minaret.

Culture or religion, or a mixture of the two, the fanoos are a beautiful touch to the festive nights.

It is with great embarrassment that I currently totter around the house. So much so, in fact, that I think I’ve hidden it pretty well. I blame the pyramid personally, had I not descended into it’s belly I would be walking around without the threat of my quads giving way.

Perhaps the fact that everybody else was moving more slowly behind me could have been a sign to slow down, but I didn’t really like the length of the tunnel ahead of me, so made bit of a sprint up the makeshift stairway. Well, I say a sprint, my head was somewhat lower than my shoulders and my shoulders were nearing hip level. Obviously man has grown a little in 4000 years or so years.

The pyramids form part of a tour of duty when guests come, and I usually opt out, or at least comfort myself with lunch at a nice hotel next door before or after running the gauntlet of the Giza plateau. Our current guests wanted to go to Dashur pyramids, so off we went on Friday morning. Well, that was the plan. By the time we got in the car, it was already pretty hot and the sun was nearing noon.

The road to Dashur is clearly marked on the map. On the road there are clear signs for Dashur, in English and Arabic, just to make sure everybody knows where they are going. Following both the map and the road signs, we drove along the pretty palm lined road, confident that we were nearly there.

Then we reached Dashur village. At this point the road ended. On the map. In reality it carried on. Were we on the right road? So it seemed because Dashur village is more of a hamlet and there were no other roads.

Asking a group of women with large pans on their heads which way the pyramids were, they pointed along a road they called the Desert Road and said, “That way.” It certainly coincided with what the map was saying, but then we’d already figured out that the map was crap.

So, we asked a neatly attired (not, of course, that neatly attired people know more about roads than ragamuffins) young man at the side of the road. He pointed back down the road we’d just come from and said, “20km down there.”

Off we trotted, looking doubly hard for roadsigns again telling us to turn off for the pyramids, but there were none.

The trouble was, despite the crap map, it was rather unlikely that the Dashur pyramids were 20km away from the village, as that would mean they were near other villages, and surely would have been named after the other villages rather than Dashur.

As luck would have it, we passed a little tourist minivan going in the opposite direction so did the ubiquitous (on every road journey in Egypt) U-turn and followed it.

And yep, the Dashur pyramids are not accessed from Dashur village, but another village entirely, and just before you reach the turn off, there is a sign with an arrow pointing straight ahead, over which is written “Dashur”.

Anyway, as befits a blog from Egypt, here are some pyramid pictures.
This is the Bent Pyramid, so called because half way through building it someone realised the angle was too steep and it would be ridiculously high (this was the first smooth edged pyramid built) so they changed the angle.

This is less than half way down the tunnel into the Red Pyramid (the first correct smooth edged pyramid) that I thought I’d sprint up as we left.