The bars of central Cairo: Echoes of a bygone era
The former police officer is part of a cadre of older Egyptian men who frequent drinking holes and belly dancing cabarets chronicled by the Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz in the 1940s and popular with Cairo's artists and intellectuals until the late 1970s.
Many of these establishments have fallen into disrepair and disrepute as Egyptians grow more observant of Islam, with its prohibition on alcohol, and the country's elite migrates away from the traffic-choked streets of the now crumbling central city.