Nadia Farouk, on five years of standing in galleries.

I grew up in Heliopolis — the older Heliopolis, the one Baron Empain laid out in 1905 around the Hindu-style palace and the long, straight streets that run on a grid out from the Basilica — and I went to school at the Lycée français on Sharia Merghany. Most weekends my father would put us in the green Peugeot and we would drive into central Cairo, park somewhere off Talaat Harb, and walk to the Egyptian Museum at Tahrir. I think I have been inside that building, by my own count, about three hundred and fifty times. The first hundred-odd were as a child holding a hand. The next two hundred were on my own, with a notebook. Then the museum changed, and I changed with it.

What this notebook is

Pass Museum Online is a practical visitor's notebook for the museums of Egypt — written for friends, written for strangers, written for someone who just landed at Cairo airport and has six days, the wrong shoes, and a long list of names of pharaohs they cannot pronounce. It is small, it is opinionated, and it tries not to waste anyone's time.

The pieces are about how to actually visit a museum here: how to walk to it, when to arrive, what to bring, how to read the rules, what to do when you get tired in the middle. They are not about which is the most important object — there are scholars who write about that, and they write about it better than I could. I write about the room you are standing in.

What this notebook is not

It is not a booking service. There is nothing to buy on this site. I do not sell entry, I do not sell tours, I do not sell guides, I do not sell anything. There are no affiliate links here, no banner advertising, no sponsored content. The site exists because I wanted somewhere to put what I learned, in writing, for free.

If you are looking for the official information — opening hours, prices, the latest gallery closures — please look at the museum's own communications. They are more current than I will ever be. The notebook is for the things the official channels do not have time to write down: when the late-afternoon sun makes the Mamluk metalwork look like fire, where the bench is on the second floor of the GEM that no one finds, why I stopped bringing a backpack and started bringing a satchel.

How I got here

I studied art history at Helwan University and then Italian Renaissance studies at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, on a small scholarship I did not deserve. I came home in 2017 expecting to teach, and instead spent two months waiting outside the offices of the Ministry of Antiquities until someone gave me a job at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, which was preparing for its first phase of public opening. I was hired as a gallery worker — which, in Egyptian museum practice, means someone who stands in a room, watches the room, answers questions, calls a curator if a child puts a hand near a case, and writes a daily report. I did this for five years.

I was on the floor on the day of the Pharaohs' Golden Parade, on 3 April 2021. I was on the floor for the opening of the Royal Mummies Hall a week later. I was on the floor for the long, slow installation of the Coptic textile gallery in 2022. I left at the end of 2023 to do consulting work, mostly with smaller cultural institutions in Cairo and Alexandria, and to teach two evenings a week at a small community school in Garden City.

Why a notebook, and not a guidebook

Guidebooks are out of date the moment they are printed. A practical notebook can be revised, room by room, every time something changes — a gallery closes for refurbishment, a new café opens around the corner, the metro extends to a station that helps. I revise these pieces about every three months, and I keep a "last revised" date at the top of each one. If something is wrong, please write to me at the contact page. I will fix it.

Some house rules I follow when I write

1. I never recommend something I have not done myself, in the past twelve months.
2. I do not name guides, restaurants, or hotels by name. The choices are too personal, and naming risks turning a notebook into an advertisement.
3. I write in English because that is the language I am asked the most often. Some pieces have an Arabic version on request.
4. I do not assume the reader is rich. Egypt is a country one can visit on a small budget if one walks a lot, takes the metro, drinks tap water that has been filtered, and eats from the small places. The notebook is written with that in mind.
5. I do not assume the reader has been here before.

The best museum visit is the one you remember. The second-best is the one your feet remember. Plan for both.

Thanks

The notebook would not exist without — in no order — the cleaning staff at NMEC who taught me where to sit in the slow hours; the late-shift security at the GEM who taught me which entrance to use in February rain; my mother, who taught me how to read a label slowly; my father, who taught me how to wait; and the strangers, hundreds by now, who have written in with corrections.

— Nadia, Cairo