Arabic music rules!!!

Have been listening to Arabic music since a while and warm memories of lovely Cairo are flooding my head…

Those sunlit streets, the promenade along the Nile with the wrought-iron benches, Hard Rock Cafe in Le Meredien, the lovely women with the streaked hair, the hunky men with hair in all states of baldness, the naturally flirtatious attitude which colours all the speech(charming!), the kebabs and koftas, the sexy belly dancer on the Nile cruise, the countless cups of black tea, the quintessential daily breakfast of bread so tough you could barely tear it to pieces called ‘aish’ so apt? Qasr-e-Nil, the lovely bridge across the Nile, the dirty carpets, shorts cups of dense Turkish coffee, the sheesha joints, the fixation with straight hair, the size of the Egyptians, the Pyramids, the Egyptian Museum, Tutankhamen, the sound and light show at Giza, their love for Indians… their natural warmth, the adulation for Amitabh Bachchan and Raj Kapoor, Arabic pop music, the ease with which any Egyptian grooves to music, their humour, their laughter, the overtly gesticulative conversations, the interchange of Ps with Bs making Pepsi Bebsi……. the scary traffic with second-hand Fiats, the ‘Cleopatra’ brand of suffocating cigarettes, the treacherous road to Aleaxandria where the ‘flying coffins’ abounded…
The innumerable trips to the Mogamma or Passport Office, the most bureaucratic outfit in Cairo, the pools of blood on the streets during Bakri-Id, the azaan call 5 times a day, the oft-repeated ‘Inshallah’ without which no sentence is complete.. the gaiety and frenzied shopping during Id, all the meat roasting on spits and road-side grills, the Friday siesta, Khan-El-Khaleeli where the shopkeepers are just short of wooing you, the ridiculous prices for the smallest trifles, the gorgeous leather purses…lovely!

That was one helluva experience.. Masr!