Thursday takes us first to American University Cairo on its impressive new campus in one of the fast-growing new suburbs of Cairo (pictured). We’re there to meet with Nabil Fahmy, Egypt’s Ambassador to the United States from 1999-2008 and currently dean of a new Global Studies and Public Policy school. He’s generous with his time, [...]

 Our boat cast off at dawn, and we floated through bucolic green landscapes on our way to our first stop at Kom Ombo, dedicated to the crocodile god Sobek and to Horus. The picture shows our incomparable Egyptologist guide Moufid Mansour giving us the fundamentals of hieroglyphic reading. In the afternoon the boat stopped again [...]

The odd thing about this picture of our group is that Abu Simbel as a backdrop simply looks surreal. But then the reality of the engineering and artistic feat of physically relocating this massive monument to Ramses II and the smaller Temple of Hathor ahead of the rising waters from Aswan Dam is almost impossible [...]

We’re welcomed this morning at the U.S. Embassy for a briefing by the Chargé d’affaires and other senior officers on the U.S.-Egyptian relationship and current Egyptian political events, folowed by a wide-ranging question and answer session. The rest of the day takes us into the citadel originally built by Saladin to guard Cairo during the [...]

We gathered for the first time yesterday evening in one of the beautiful reception rooms of our Cairo hotel, built originally in 1869 by Khedive Ismael as a guest palace to entertain Empress Eugenie of France and other dignitaries for the grand opening of the Suez Canal. This morning we begin the day with the [...]