Cairo they call Umm-i-dunya — Mother of the World, a massive, dirty, noisy and crowded place alive with kinetic energy — for the past thousand years a Muslim city, before that the site of layered kingdoms and monuments, and long before that it formed part of the ancient route for human migrations out of Africa. Buildings are unheated in winter, so you dress inside as people in northern countries do outside in their cold weather: in long underwear and layers.

Outside our windows, concrete buildings rise gray and mostly featureless like the desert stretching for hundreds of miles around us. Streets are more like alleys in this part of Cairo, narrow and strewn with trash. Foreign embassies and ambassador’s residences fill our neighborhood, creating the need for men in uniform armed with machine guns to stand watchfully on strategic corners. Looking straight up from our balcony we can see a sunlit penthouse apartment on the twelfth floor of an adjoining building, occupied by the owner of the Emirates Airlines, a rich man. In the street in front of his building little children sell packages of Kleenex to help their families survive; tourist police guard the ATM machine at the bank; and a fruit vendor spends all day offering sweet cactus from his primitive, hand-drawn cart.

Five times a day the call to prayer goes out downstairs and next door to us in wavering, amplified tones from what I call a religious sub-station, a storefront mosque with a green-carpeted entrance, heavily used by the local men. Everything else is handy too: there is a tour operator, an electrician, a plumber, bakers, grocers, snack-vendors, restaurants, a barber, a pharmacy, an ironing shop, a photography shop, a masseuse and many cab-drivers — all within half a block of our residence. Many of these businesses have runners who make quick deliveries to upper floors. In our lobby sleep two young men available to assist with unloading, carrying and errand-running. Food is cheap; produce comes in limited variety but maximum freshness. People are helpful, and if you can get past the noise and the dirt, Cairo can be an extremely habitable city.