The sports club: Gezira Sports Club is huge, a relic of colonial days. Started in the 1880s as a British officers club, it is 150 acres dead in the center of Cairo. Squash, tennis, many pools for eg diving and water polo, several golf courses, basketball, running tracks, workout rooms, boxing, equestrian, and of course croquet (those ground even have bleachers for big events).
The kids are taking tennis and they have a couple ball boys.
Like all much of Cairo, it clear was so so so elegant, but now it’s dirty, needs paint, and there’s trash everywhere.
It’s like a college campus with no classes and quad after quad: there are several coffee shops, bakeries, a pharmacy, clinics, a bank, even a McDonald’s (where they have learned my order)
There are crew everywhere: sweeping, but with branches not brooms, and waiters that serve the hundreds of tables and chairs along the many quads. They go I think just to the same cafes we go to… Security, sitting in front of each pool or field like they have in front of many buildings in town .
And thousands of people: hundreds engaged in all the sports, but also older groups, couples, friends, families, all just hanging out very much like the old woodcuts of 1890s in Paris or London, but no kids with hoops, organ grinders etc. No, the kids are on bikes, hoverboards, and electric scooters.
Closes at 1am and it’s usually crowded until then.
The little kids here perhaps more at the club than on the street exhibit an unusual poise: they introduce themselves and then engage in actual conversation. At parting they will thank you and wish you well. There are a couple kids here on hoverboards that act like they could also talk on their phone and smoke a cigarette at the same time
Engels in Egypt and Israel 
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