A Blog by the Editor of The Middle East Journal

Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Nostslgia: Once, Long Ago, The World and I Were Young. Though Cairo was Old

Midan al-Tahrir, Cairo, sometime in the 1960s: the then new Nile Hilton (today no longer a Hilton) and Arab Socialist Union HQ (later National Democratic Party HQ, burned in the 2011 Revolution), with a working fountain in the Midan.

Photo source

1 comment:

David Mack said...

Thanks for this bit of nostalgia. I arrived in Cairo when the Nile was in flood for the last time in August 1964, hugging my dog eared copy of Hans Wehr. As a Fulbright Scholar in the Middle East for the first time, I imagined that I was making good progress at Arabic. It was a news vendor in Midan at-Tahrir who quickly taught me that I was unable to speak the Egyptian dialect well enough to buy a copy of Al Ahram.