Every world traveler has a tale of culture shock. I met a middle-aged man at a cafe in Istanbul before I plunged into the Nile Civilization; he constructed a sentence in a fashion I had not heard before. He made a city the subject, shock the verb, and culture with a possessive marker the direct object: “Alexandria shocked my culture,” he said. “Never seen anything like it.” While we talked he kept shaking his head. He was a passenger off a cruise ship and had toured the Egyptian streets for a day or two. He seemed insulated, a provincial American. I silently but arrogantly dismissed what he was saying.

My first days in Alexandria definitely shocked my culture. I arrived in the middle of a renovation project, during which the city’s engineers were digging up the entire municipal sewer system all at once. Piles of sand and rubble blocked sidewalks, alleys, avenues. Getting groceries required much up and down trekking over mountains of debris. At the time, Alexandria had not eradicated its population of feral animals. It was not unusual when strolling at night to encounter a pack of hungry wild dogs, emaciated and glassy-eyed, seeming to me unpredictable and possibly dangerous. Digesting food was a problem; cockroaches and bed bugs caused uncomfortable problems; language was difficult and so was taking photographs anywhere in public.

It was an arduous six month passage from those first shocks and hard lessons to reluctant tolerance of many strange things. In time I reached knowledge, acceptance, and humility. I came to feel at home. When I left Cairo two years later, I was sad to go.