Thursday, March 29, 2012

Nottingham-Berlin

Full english gourmet breakfast



Streets of Berlin
Joke, Daniel, Rudolf at West Germany club Berlin

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Two SUDDEN INFANT shows!

During a short break of my Cairo adventure, I will play two SUDDEN INFANT shows this month:
Nottingham (UK) and Berlin (D).




















24/March/2012
SUDDEN INFANT
BBBLOOD
H
AQUA DENTATA
JENNA FINCH & LAUREN MARIE
@ The Chameleon, Nottingham (UK)
http://www.rammelclub.org/
















28/March/2012
SUDDEN INFANT
DANIEL MENCHE
@ West Germany, Berlin (D)
http://www.eineweltaushack.com/




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Monday, March 12, 2012

Heavy Cairo Metal
















So far the strongest sexual stimulation since my arrival in Cairo I recently had on a street while walking with my Polish friend Marcin towards Tahrir Square. We bumped into a group of very sexy Cairene mannequins. Some 'no photo' shouts of the shop owner couldn't stop us to take a pic of these lovely futuristic ladies, who for sure already have set new post-revolution levels for Egyptian women.


















Last Sunday we witnessed the first Metal Blast anniversary festival at El Sawy Culture Wheel in Zamalek Cairo. Half a dozen Metal bands (Scarab, Perversion, Bilocate etc), all from the capital, were jumping the huge stage and fired the crowd up for some amazing Death-Metal moshpits and Egyptian headbanging. Sadly no beer could be found within a radius of 7 kilometers (actually it was of course strictly prohibited to drink alcohol and/or smoke at this festival in Cairo), I tried to enjoy myself with an evil bottle of still water.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Air pollution - Noise pollution!

















The air pollution in Cairo is a matter of serious concern. Air pollutants that are very high are particulate, hydrocarbons and lead.  All are cancer causing agents.
The World Health Organization reports that the Air Pollution in Downtown  Cairo is 10-100 times what is considered a safe limit. Cairo is in the company of other Cities like Mexico City, Bangkok, San  Paulo, Delhi which are among the worst Cities in the World in terms of air pollution.
The US environmental Protection Agency has published Risk data which states  that above the safe limit, the risk of developing serious respiratory  disease and cancer from inhaling particulate in air (dust & soot and  hydrocarbons, heavy metal compounds) is: 2 persons for every 1000.   In addition to that, the dispersion factor (how fast the pollutants in the air  are dispersed because of the weather conditions like the wind, rain, air, temperature) makes a difference in the severity of exposure to air  pollution.
Cairo has a very poor dispersion factor because of lack of rain and its layout of tall buildings and narrow streets, which create a bowl effect. I don't claim to have accurate data on Cairo air Pollution. There isn't  any. I can make a reasonable assumption, that Cairo air pollution is  similar to the low range of Mexico City & San Paulo, which we have good data  for. I have been to Cairo four or five times in the past two years. The air  is thick, gray and there is a haze over Cairo . The sky is not blue but  gray. Very similar to Mexico City and Bangkok.  The weather conditions make the dispersion factor twice as bad as Los Angeles, which has good air pollution data.

-Dr. Salah Hassanein


















CAIRO - Egyptians in this capital city say it is harder and harder to be heard and to have a voice, but they are not talking politics. Well, not only politics.
What hey are talking about, or rather yelling about, is noise, the incredible background noise of a city crammed with 18 million people, and millions of drivers who always have one hand on the horn and rules-free way of thinking.
"Whenever I talk to people, they always say, 'Why are you screaming?'" said Salah Abdul Hamid, 56, a barber whose two-chair shop is on the corner of a busy street on the north side. 
Mr. Hamid was, of course, screaming. It was 4 p.m. in Rhode al Farag, a typical Cairo neighborhood teeming with people and shops and cars and trucks and buses and horse-drawn carts. From his shop, the landscape of sound revealed a chorus of people, struggling to make a living, trying to assert themselves in a city, and in a country, where they often feel invisible.
Noise - outrageous, unceasing, pounding noise - is the unnerving backdrop to a tense time in Egypt, as inflation and low wages have people worried about basic survival, prompting strikes and protests. We're not just talking typical city noise, but what scientists here say is more like living inside a factory.
"It's not enough to make you crazy, but it is very tiring," said Essa Muhammad Hussein, as he sat in a cracked plastic chair outside the corner food shop his family has owned for 50 years. He was shouting as he talked about the noise, though he did not seem to realize it.
"What are we going to do?" he asked. "Where is the way out?"
This is not like London or New York, or even Teheran, another car-clogged Middle Eastern capital. It is literally like living day in and day out with a lawn mower running next to your head, according to scientists with the National Research Center. They spent five years studying noise levels across across the city and concluded in a report issued this year that the average noise from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. is 85 decibels, a bit louden than a freight train 15 feet away, said Mustafa el Sayyid, an engineer who helped carry out the study.
But that 85 decibels, while "clearly unacceptable," is only the average across the day and across the city. At other locations, it is far worse, he said. In Tahrir Square, or Ramsis Square, or the road leading to the pyramids, the noise often reaches 95 decibels, he said, which is only slightly quieter than standing next to a jackhammer.

-The New York Times















Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Thursday, March 1, 2012

30 days!




















Thirty Cairo days! My first month in the big Nile city.
And I still haven't seen the pyramids!
There's no rush for Gizeh.
There's no rush for sight seeing.
There's no rush for big plans.

But there's always time for another shai tea!



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