Every Friday morning, Cairo takes a deep breath. The sky is clear, the streets are unclogged, and the call to prayer rises from the city's mosques through an extraordinary silence. It's a wondrous pause for this megalopolis of 16 million. And a brief one. Within hours Cairo is roaring, pouring, screaming, screeching, honking, hollering, laughing, loitering, wheezing, teasing, rushing, crushing, shoving, moving and grooving. Things are back to normal...
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Ursula Lindsey is a journalist and writer based in Cairo, Egypt.

She is a staff writer for Cairo magazine, and a frequent contributor to the Daily Star (Beirut) . She writes a column on Middle East events and culture for Popmatters and contributes to the Arabist Network, a collaborative weblog on Arab politics and culture.

She has also written for the Cairo Times, Egypt Today, the Times Educational Supplement (London), the Oxford Business Group Emerging Egypt series, and Middle East International (London).

She is a regular reporter for Voice of America radio, has contributed to NPR News and to Free Speech Radio News, and is a Cairo correspondent for the BBC-produced program The World.