Notes on Egypt Abundance in the desert When my driver picked me up to take me to the New Capital, he was certain there had been a booking mistake. “Are you sure you want to go this way? I can take you to the pyramids or Alexandria instead.” There was no mistake. But driving there, past a mural of Egypt’s President Sisi every few hundred meters (sunglasses on, pointing at renderings of his new mega-city) I didn’t know what to expect. There’s only so much you can understand about the New Capital from reading about it online. Almost all the pictures are airbrushed or shot to show only the skyline without the heaps of rubble just to the side. Even the name is confusing. After years of competitions, jury deliberations, and proposed names like “Kemet,” “Wedian,” and “Memphis,” the city is still technically just the ‘New Administrative Capital.’ Cairo isn’t sinking like Jakarta, and nobody seems to know for certain why the New Capital exists. The official reason is to relieve congestion in a city whose metropolitan population is ~20 million. Yes, parts of Cairo are incredibly dense and congested, but there are also parts that are quite nice and spacious. The New Capital isn’t just a convenient annex to Cairo’s outskirts. It’s in the middle of the desert and took us an hour to get there and, according to my driver, “two hours, if there’s traffic.” On the night of Eid al-Fitr, Cairo was filled with swarms of teenage boys eager to practice their English with lost-looking foreigners. So I asked them why. Based on my highly formal street survey, the most common response from teenagers was that “Sisi wants to show he’s got big balls.” Someone told me he wanted to be like Khufu, who built the first