After September 2001, foreigners in Egypt, as a group, began to change. They used to be a motley collection of scholarly oddballs with an interest in Medieval weaponry, hieroglyphics, or Ottoman bureaucracy, scam artists with an interest in getting rich on oil or USAID contracts, or Marines with an interest in getting the hell out of here, and, if possible, getting drunk and laid in the meantime. I liked the scholarly oddballs and the Marines best.

International flotsam and jetsam of the kind you find the world over—criminals, pill-freaks, pot-heads, freeloaders, misfits, adventurers, fallen priests—would also drift in and out of town. Let’s call them “Flo” and “Sam” for short. Flo and Sam used to (and perhaps still do) congregate at the fleabitten Hotel al-Shams, which had a decent cafe where local parasites thronged to take advantage of them. I went once to find my old roommate, a shifty felucca captain with a criminal record and a good heart, after he disappeared with some of my girlfriend’s money. I watched the little symbiotic ecosystem in that cafe for hours and wasn’t once bored.

Flo and Sam would also drift into Bab al-Luq’s landmark Cafeteria al-Hurreya, where they would rub shoulders with artists, revolutionaries, real-estate agents, informers, human-rights lawyers, small-time crooks, slow suicides, journalists, and other undesirables with a shared interest in beer.

To be fair, Hurreya also catered to chess players and distinguished gentlemen such as the one who once graced the masthead of this blog. And to be fair, Flo and Sam sometimes stopped drifting, got serious and got respectable jobs: Even the former U.S. ambassador sometimes recalled his days as a shaggy-haired backpacker in Egypt, and I genuinely believe those days gave him an affinity for the country that few of his predecessors shared.

I should add that I believe I have some dim memories of having some truly piss-poor beverages at al Hurreya some long years ago. Never was to my taste, but a certain nostalgic Anglo crowd liked to meet there as I recall (dimly).

Now, the question comes to mind, was I a scam artist, or jetsam? In any event, not working on USAID (which practically bloody runs certain sections of the economic sections of the government - well, runs is too strong, insofar as that would imply a degree of efficiency hitherto I think unseen in Egyptian civil service), and not on oil, perhaps I escaped the scam artist category. Or the scholarly oddbal,l since I took my Arabic from the grand Maghreb and the Sham.

But beside this diversion, it does seem to me that one runs into a rather good number of Americans now who've come to MENA to study the Evil Enemy Language and come in with bizarre hang ups, such as Pollack's (again to have been so offended as to find that book worth writing an op ed - but then his whinging smells like underdone MEMRI work).