Lately I haven't seen much of Cairo. The nomad cafe on King's hotel a couple of blocks away from my house was the only new place I discovered last week. That's it. The rest of the days have been spent in the office. If I go home by at 10 PM it would be an early night. It's tiring work with plenty of interruptions. On an average day I have to wear 3-4 different hats in working with different aspect of the company and that is a drain on energy.

My eating schedule has gone native. I would barely eat breakfast, skipped lunch and then have dinner near midnight. This is diet, Egyptian style.

My shisha has gotten abandoned unused since I bought it almost a month ago. My TV satellite channel has been broken for almost 4 weeks (to the chargrin of Luli) without being fixed and yet I don't mind because there's no time for me to watch anything. No, I haven't been to any cinema here yet.

Mediterranean.

There's only one main road that matters in Alexandria, the 18 km long corniche. You have buildings on the right and a great view of the Mediterranean sea on the left.

You can actually see the Mediterranean  sea from the library.

What I love about Alexandria is the little beaches that scattered around the corniche where you can dip your feet to the warm water of the Mediterranean. And the breeze from the sea is a nice change from the dusty air of Cairo.

Yours truly in Ramses station, Cairo waiting for the train to Alexandria. One way ticket first class train costs 35 LE for a comfy 2 hours ride.

Part of Alexandria Library (the new one)

Montaza. This beach is located in a huge park where the ex King of Egypt used to live.

This is the city that build SilverKey.

This is a view of the war room from my desk. All projects' related information would flow through this room and this is where we do our 15 minutes stand up meetings every noon. (and if your blog just happens to be on my screen, don't feel big headed)

This is the view of the war room from the other side. Yasser was about to jump. The spiffy new lamp is a bright Halogen white light.

If you come to the office, you will see that it looks nice and comfortable but not fancy. Nothing superfluous is added here and it looks more expensive than it does. It comes straight from the "simplicity" school of design.

This is probably the first time I've ever quoted the Bible on this blog but I found this quote in a Newsweek article and I find it awesome.

"Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here I am. Send me!"
—Isaiah 7:8 "

"She's got eyes as pretty as a pair of jewels
Falling down the Camden
like a couple drunken criminals
She had a messy bedroom on the edge of town
I had never been good enough to ever keep around
Said you didn't love me, it was right on time,
I was just about to tell you, but ok, alright
Said you didn't love me, didn't mean a thing,
English girls can be so mean
But, ohh, look at you now
Ohh, look at you now
Mmmm, best I've ever seen
Just a tall drink of water, just a-pourin' on down the sink
"

English Girls Approximately.

This song always makes me miss Chicago. I don't know why. Probably because I used to play

it out loud in my office during my night working session although there were other songs

as well. It could be that the sad and catchy tunes rewired my nerves to trigger the memory

of Chicago just like "Relax" triggered Zoolander to kill the prime minister of Malaysia.

What I miss mostly is the lack of barrier between sexes and social class in the social

settings in Chicago, unlike here in Cairo. Here class and social status matters, religion

matters and sexes matters.

There's a reason why sappy love songs here are huge. Bryan Adams is Zeus here; yup that

fuckin' Bryan Adams. There's a deep longing for deeper connections between man and woman

outside the purpose of getting married. And if you are poor here, you can kiss "getting

laid" goodbye. Marriage is expensive here, more is required than the "get drunk and married

in las vegas" style you can get in the US.

Here, divorce is easy; getting married is hard.

I have been sitting in this place for hours configuring little things and checking up on last minute tasks that need to be completed.

Day by day, the singular vision established with Adam in Atlanta December 2002 is being realized and today is just another day. Promises are being fulfilled and more people are joining on the journey. I'm both proud and fuckin' tired.

Let this place be a joyful one, the one you are glad to wake up and go to everyday; where you work, learn and make other people happy with your creation.

This is the main development room (there are 4 other working rooms in the office). It's a spacious L shaped room (the _ side is not shown) that host 8 people on one side and 2-3 people on the other. I took this early this morning. The computers arrived later  in the afternoon.

This is the view of the | side of the L shaped room. As you can see, we are putting a lot of empty spaces around.

This is the _ part of the L. That door on the far right goes to a small corridors that connects 3 other rooms (+bathrooms and a full kitchen).

This is earlier tonight when we installed 6 of the 13 computers we have. Yup, those are dual monitors goodness.

Set up

Update:

I woke up to an aftermath of a chill (literally and figuratively) and fun party, with cups and plates scaterred everywhere. My maid is going to hate me today.

 I have three unifinished vodka and two local liquors that makes you blind.

Male to female ratio last night was 11 : 4, which means there are ROOMs for improvement. I mean there are supposedly more women than men in Egypt. My chicago ratio is usually 45:55. Next time I will invite the girls  personally instead of delegating it and call the guys at the last minute :)

But I'd love to send lots of love to the girls (Nisrin, Luli, Kaitlin and Sarah) that save the party from a complete boy scout event.

The shisha situation can be improved by having another set dedicated to another tobacco flavour and a dedicated burner for the coals.

Have you heard that bloggers speak like they write? Well, it's true. Egyptian Sandmonkey and Jimmy speak like they write.

I took the last train from Helmiet Al - Zaituoun (red line - North) down to Saddat and transferred to the Giza line for Dokki. The whole trip took 45 minutes.

I am a veteran subway riders as I've been taking subways as a primary means of transportation for the 6 years of my time in teh US (NYC and Chicago) and let me tell you, the last train in Cairo is a tame bunch. There was no annoying drunken kids leaving from the bar, or smelly homeless man taking shelter in the train or assorted musicians playing bad music on the train.

Cairo subways are cleaner than all NYC subway stop and most of Chicago's.

Cairo subway is definately a G rated system, family friendly but a bit boring. Chicago gets NC-17 for ocassional nudity and NYC takes the cake for the hard core chaotic interesting smelly triple X experience in a subway.

I finally saw the one pyramid from the street of Giza by car yesterday. Man, I never realize those things are fucking huge. I'll start my travelling next week after the office is done and opens.

One day worth of walking today in Cairo after a sandstorm last night.

Today I purchased 13 high end computers and two printers and put 43,000 LE charge on my Amex business card for 50% payment. Holy crap.

Everybody gets a dual monitor computer except for the designers that prefer single 19".

Tomorrow I'm buying a fridge and all the little stuffs that makes cool and functional office.

A handyman will come tomorrow for electricity stuff and some woodwork, cleaning people on Friday and computers deliveries for Saturday.

Now that all the furnitures in my office are delivered, I have installed myself in this brand new office with its 2mbps connection. Yay. Say goodbye to working from home.

A quarter kilo bag of Oregano and Basil cost me 7 pounds. That's just over one dollar. A handful of Basil leaves would have costed me 3 dollars in the US.

Ah, my kitchen is going to be happy. Luli and Nisrin are coming over tonight for dinner.

These are shopping lists for SilverKey Egypt office for tomorrow.

9 Dual Monitor 17 inch LCD Workstation for developers,PM and Technical writer.

2 19 inch LCD workstation for designers.

1 17 inch workstation for Office Manager.

1 Continuous Build Server where we run all our team build.

10 whiteboards.

1 rolls of flipcharts, dozens of markers, tape, rules and other creative writing tools.

The office layout is optimized for pair programming. Pictures will follow soon.

We are starting operation next Sunday (which is the start of workday in Egypt)

Our Gigabit LAN is already installed as well as 2MB ADSL. Another 2MB ADSL connection is in the process of being installed (which will take another 3 weeks because we have to install a new phone line)

Arabic Virtual Keyboard

آثآثغب عهاوظملايون وز الف

I'm finding Arabic easy to learn, hard to pronounce. (the above text is gibberish btw)

My typical day begins at 9 am when the school children starts playing and making noise that reach the tenth floor. I would make my own breakfast before 10 and then my work day starts. Right now this means shuffling between my apartment to the still constructed office or hopping to taxies. Dinner would be at 7. My night ends at 9 pm as my night shift for Chicago time starts until 3-4 am.

Then I need to improve my non-existant Arabic, find venue to train and squeeze time to see Cairo; and meet other people.

Time is literally running out on me in Egypt.

Four girls and one boy got accepted to the Salam program today. You better pray that you get one of these girls in your LC; they are smart, opinionated and a lot of fun.

Street football with the kids from Ainsham University English  and Literature faculty.

Some of the folks I play football with (look, my hair grow fast)

Here's an interesting nuggets. I made more non-AIESEC friends here than AIESECers in my past  3 weeks here (none in the picture is AIESECer). I haven't met any of the trainees nor talk to the local AIESECers except for Luli and Nisrin.

Rules for Leading

1. Establish trust.

2. Build vision.

3. Take blame.

1. Establish trust.

2. Build vision.

3. Take blame.

I'll write more on leading vs managing later especially the aspect of decision making.

Digs has been blogging about his male maid experience in China. I have a Nubian maid (she's from Aswan) helping out too. She comes three days a week mainly to do cleaning and laundry (and ironing). She cooks but I am very protective of my cooking domain so this is one less thing she has to do.

The downside of my cooking activities and her thrice a week schedule is that I have still do dish cleaning most of the time.