🗼 A Tower Built to Insult the United States, in Full View of Its Embassy

The Cairo Tower exists because Gamal Abdel Nasser refused to be bought. A CIA operative reportedly handed Nasser a personal cash gift meant to steer him away from supporting African independence movements — an attempt at quiet influence Nasser found insulting enough to make public. Rather than pocket it, he redirected the entire sum to Egypt's government to fund a monumental tower, deliberately sited on Gezira Island so it would rise in plain view of the American Embassy across the Nile. Egyptians nicknamed it "Roosevelt's endowment" after the CIA officer involved; the phrase got garbled in translation into something considerably ruder once it reached Washington, and the tower's nickname among Americans stuck for decades as an inside joke about exactly who got the last laugh.

The rooftop where James Bond fought a henchman in The Spy Who Loved Me is a real, functioning museum. The Gayer-Anderson Museum is two 16th-century houses joined into one home by a British army doctor who spent years filling the rooms with furniture, textiles, and antiques collected across the region. The production shot Bond walking straight out of the Mosque of Ibn Tulun next door and into the "mansion of Fekkesh" — actually this house — before the rooftop chase scene. Decades later, both the mosque courtyard and the terrace look almost exactly as they did on camera.