Public space in DK - der mangler det

To elaborate on something from Paula's blog, Why is poor dear old DK such an un-social space. I've got part of it. There actually is no public social space. No public socializing. People go out and picnic outside en famille a lot, sure, with their picnic boxes, and are incredibly super-active physically and nature-wise, but if you look at what is happening, people never gather to meet new people. You don't see folks socializing in restaurants. There ARE hardly any restaurants. It's all DIY stuff with people who already know each other, make up a defined social group already. To put it another way, there are no fixed, pre-existing points where you go to socialize. It's all freelance.

There you have it. That's why those of us who come from the South culturally (me, for instance) choke so much. There's no social oxygen flowing around.

But rather than dwell on it, I'd rather get on with manufacturing our own social oxygen - and booking as frequent trips abroad as possibly possible.

Safe! Though I shouldn't say, Home

I'm safe, back in the real world, away from the G.B. (the Great Blank, elaborated on Paula's blog). Can't upload a photo because of hardware challenges. We MADE IT! past the thermal imaging monitors at Cairo airport - the authorities are quarantining anyone who comes into the country with a temperature, because as always they define nasty lergies as sabotage brought into the glorious mother country by foreigners, probably Israelis in disguise at that. The lockdown of the American University dormitory - 250 people inside, faculty as well as year-abroad students - has been lifted. Anyway, we made it. And once through that lunacy, back into our glorious, ALIVE city of idiocy, beauty, wisdom, grit, dust, dirt, ignorance, LAUGHTER. Private beauty (gardens, a nightingale, early morning pools), public squalor (dust, risking your life crossing the road [tho our policeman still recognizes us and stops the traffic for us]). ([([])])

Good Lord, why does living in a sad and empty place where people are only 1/4 alive make you feel so awful? I am going to work out some ways of proofing us against this.

But I also have to stop pining for Egypt and start treating Denmark as a real home to live in. Rather than waiting for the torture to stop. I can have them as two parallel worlds perhaps, so that one doesn't cancel the other out. Dualism is not the answer.

Oh I can hear the azzan. In Egypt, at least, the foreigners are polarized into those who can't stand the azzan and those who it makes feel comfortable. Actually, one of the nicest things about being back is the ambient noise. There's masses of it, everywhere. On Thursday night, when Egypt beat Italy in whatever the football thing was, you should have heard the driving and tooting in the street. I recorded it, will post. But there's always a lot of it. I like that, it makes me feel safe.

Happy Lucy ..

Love outpouring

I (I mean we) are going back to Cairo in four days !! Just for three marvellous weeks, but back to the city I love and back to one of the great multinational metropolises in the world. Istanbul, Bombay, New York, maybe London .. Here are just one or two snapshots of what Cairo means to me:

Beautiful Zamalek streets with my girls walking home from school:



And the counterintuitive street experience:



Gardens, and sun, and colour, and LIFE:



And deep shade and bright light, and people SOCIALIZING:

#

And my Cairo at night:



And over towards Mohandiseen:



And the incomparable Nile:




From our apartment:







The butcher downstairs in the Coop:



Amm Abdu and Ibrahim of the garage:



Ibrahim the rubbish and Ibrahim the garage man (who I quarrelled with for years):



And sitting in their street:




And the shawarma man:





And this isn't even my medieval city, for which I stayed .. I don't seem to have any digital photos of Islamic Cairo, they are all on old-fashioned slides from the 1990s.

Some places on earth just are lovelier than others.

Something VERY good about Denmark

One of these blogs was tagged recently to name some things that we like about Danish society. Well, here's one, and a really good one. There isn't social snobbery. A couple of my children's schoolfriends' mums clean, and nobody looks down on them or treats them differently. And the person who sometimes cleans our house, who is a qualifying psychologist, is giving me a really nice linen skirt for a birthday present.

I think that's amazing actually.

Bloggers - what are we on about then?

Kel has okayed it, so here are some pictures of our meeting up yesterday. Here are Kel, and Nicki, and me.







So, met up with a real, live Arhus blogger tonight, and it was lovely. But I cannot get used to this funny sensation, of driving to what is, in effect, a date with someone of whom you know some rather personal sides but who is someone you don't actually know at all.

And then the other weird thing is that there is this big difference between the person you know from their writing - who is the person as they see themselves - and the person you actually meet coming from outside, who may be quite different. Talk about subjective/objective and multiple identities! It’s enough to get you reaching for your Wittgenstein.

I've never seen so clearly that how we see ourselves is not how others see us. And do we write for ourselves, or for the hypothetical Reader? Or just to be friends, perhaps.

There you are, that’s enough philosophizing for tonight. Tomorrow I am supposed to get up for a huge bike ride with my eldest daughter. I wanted to explore north-western Djursland, but she is put off by the weather forecast and wants to go boring old south where the rain isn’t.

What a day

Obama said the unsayable today in Cairo. He said that the suffering of the Palestinians is intolerable; he used the word Torture in the US context; and he said out loud, in Egypt, a country which I know very well, that all peoples long for a government that doesn't steal from them. Bless him for daring to change what can be spoken.

Just bless him, actually.

And on a day which commemorates Tiananmen.

What a day.