This passage describing pre-Napoleonic Cairo, from Geoff Manaugh’s review of Nina Burleigh’s book Mirage grabs me by the subconscious:

You knock two or three times — and then crawl through a small circular door in the middle of a brick wall that could just as easily have been the entrance to a building. And then you’re gone, hiking through a part of the city you’d never even heard of before.

I just can’t get enough of neighborhoods divided from one another by hobbit-doors. I’ll be spending a LOT of time in Imaginary Cairo for the foreseeable future.

_{Image CC-BY-NC by docman}

There’s a great thread up on grinding.be that mashes together skater culture, architecture and grinder culture. Go check it out!

_{(Skater image CC-BY-NC-ND by Ignacio Nuñez C.)
(Grinder Symbol copyright is probably held down by Avatar. Used here totally without permission, but go buy lots of Warren‘s books.)}