Cairo's Next Generation: Alex Nakai and the Meraki Skate Crew
One of the things Zedan did, when he wasn't explaining pigeon loyalty games or insisting on paying for lunch, was introduce me to people. He knew who was skating, who was worth talking to, and how to make a connection feel easy in a city that can otherwise be a maze of wrong turns.
Alex Nakai was one of those introductions.
He's nineteen, lives in Bulaq — a dense, working-class neighborhood pressed up against Downtown Cairo — and found skating in 2023 when a friend put a board under his feet and something clicked. He skates with Meraki. Once I met him, that part felt inevitable.
Photo Credit: Luciano Vicente
His first favorite spot was CIB in Mohandessin — a rare open space that felt almost too good to be real in Cairo's chaos. It didn't last. Security shut it down for skating, and that little pocket of freedom closed. Now he skates Royal House or Downtown, tracing new lines through streets he already knew on foot.
Downtown, especially, feels like its own category.
"It has always been our safe place as young people," he says. "Everything we love is there, and it's one of the few places where we truly feel connected to Egypt."
What wears on him is the same thing that defines the city: the traffic, the crowds, the constant compression of bodies and cars and noise. Cairo doesn't really slow down. It doesn't offer much open space. What it offers is concrete — and Alex has learned to find what he needs inside that.
Lately he's been listening to a lot of rap. Marwan Pablo, EsDeeKid, Yeat. The tempo, the bass, the repetition — it matches something about the way he moves through the city.
If someone visited Cairo for the first time, Alex says he'd take them Downtown. Not the pyramids. Not the postcard version of Egypt. The streets where he and his friends actually live their lives.
"The place that feels like a safe zone," he says. "A meeting point."
In a city this size, that's not a small thing to know.
Alex Nakai skates with Meraki. https://www.instagram.com/a.nakais/
