Start of the blog, some context

Hi,

I'm doing a few blogs, one is actually an attempt to write a novel. The other blogs are about stuff that is happening in my life as a person living in the Netherlands, and a third is a blog about me being an IT guy using the Netbeans IDE for development.

Since I'm no longer living in the Netherlands and instead am now living in Cairo, Egypt, I've started this blog. It's a blog about living and working in Egypt.

I'm working at CIB, a bank in Egypt, where I am the Chief Architect and Head of Architecture and Strategy. This is all within the IT department. I started on January 3rd of this year and ever since I've been living in the Grand Hyatt Cairo. The hotel is right on the Nile shores and fairly close to the office, but not as close as the Four Seasons, which would've been the hotel I would stay in were it not that it was completely booked.

I arrived in Egypt on January 2nd, and started at CIB the next day. Ever since then, I've been back to Holland twice. Every other weekend I spend with the family in the Netherlands. Which typically means I catch the KLM flight on Friday morning 4 AM arrive at 8 AM at Schiphol Amsterdam airport and on Sunday night 9 PM I fly back to Cairo and be back in the hotel around 3 AM. This is doable, although last time I was kind of very tired on Monday, which was a regular workday for me. But allows me to see my wife and kids and they see me. And we have a blast of a time. Meanwhile I'm using Skype extensively to communicate with the family while I'm not there.

The rest of the world is kept up to date with my proceedings here in Cairo through Twitter, where you can follow ThreeAxis, which is me. And now there's the blog. This blog. And I plan to post mainly in this blog all my realizations of being a Dutch expat in Egypt.

So keep an eye out for this blog. Follow it, or follow me on Twitter.

Iwan