Cairo… What to say about Cairo? Well, I think that the picture above says it all. It’s big, disorganized, dirty, polluted, and BUSY. Think about the busiest most trafficked days of most places in the U.S. Things like right after the Super Bowl, or Mardi Gras, or New Year’s Eve in New York. That’s what it feels like every day in Cairo. The streets are packed, it’s always noisy, and it never stops (well, almost never… more on that later).
It’s easy to see why the Nile is so important with this pic!
Carey and I arrived in Cairo mid-day on Sept. 10th. It was our first day of complete freedom. We had officially COSed and left the country. I should have known that Bulgaria would stab out at us one last time, though. As it happened, the first thing we discovered upon our arrival was that my primary bag had been lost in transit. I had to go fill out a claims form and all that, which took a while because, you guessed it, I wasn’t the only one in line. After about 25 minutes or so of dealing with that we made our way through customs and immigration and were finally able to find our driver from the hotel we booked outside. Our “adventure” in Cairo had begun.
Outside the market and Al-Hussein Mosque
Our friend Andy had told us while hanging out in Sofia that he may have seen about three traffic lights his whole time there, so Carey and I were on the look out for them. Andy’s impression wasn’t a false one: there are almost no traffic lights in the city. The few that do exist are only on the intersections of the most major arteries of the city. They are non-existent on the smaller streets. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a cop there directing traffic with his whistle and white uniform, AK-47 at his side. Aside from that, it’s just pray and go, though somehow this organic method of getting around somehow seems to work. Crossing the street was thus pretty difficult. The old game Frogger constantly came to mind. Carey is convinced that I had a death wish during our time there.
A Butcher’s in Kan el-Khalili
Anyway, after losing my bag, the second thing that happened to me was that I got sick. I blame the pollution. It was really bad there. It was the first time I actually found it difficult to breathe the air that was available. I developed a sinus infection almost immediately, and was also stricken with some pretty harsh bowel problems that didn’t go away for about a week and a half. Anyway, this all developed during the first night there, which Carey and I basically spent wandering around downtown Cairo and getting our bearings. We really didn’t do anything touristy. The one thing we tried to do, which was order some pastry at El-Abd (a super good pastry shop), we failed at because it was so busy and we didn’t know how the system worked. We were able to ask for help in English, but everyone was so busy and it was so crowded that we just ended up giving up in the end.
A spice store in Khan el-Khalili… I like Istanbul’s better.
For dinner Carey and I went to a “Nile Cruise” boat hoping to get a good mix of Egyptian food while soaking up some mild entertainment. Well, it was something else entirely. First off, the food was good, but it wasn’t really Egyptian, or even all that Middle-Eastern. It wasn’t even all that Mediterranean. We were disappointed and felt it really wasn’t worth the money. The entertainment was bawdy at best. There was pair of a dervishes consisting of a dwarf and a “giant” which, while talented, just weren’t that interesting. This was followed by some live music with really, really dorky dancers in day-glow silk outfits that shouldn’t be thrown out but burned, because if you throw them out, someone else might find them and wear them. The last entertainment was a belly dancer who was older, not very fit, and kind of aggressive (having refused to participate in whatever she was trying to get various audience members to do, she smashed her stick that she was balancing on various parts of her anatomy on our table). To top it all off, this lasted for HOURS on end. Carey and I were pretty much exhausted by the end, and I am not ashamed to say I napped at our table. That night we went to bed thinking that Cairo was a little bit different than we had hoped it would be.
A Mosque’s Fountain
The next day, Tuesday, Carey and I decided to head out to Islamic Cairo. This basically consisted of walking around Khan el-Khalili and seeing some of the old mosques and city walls. It was interesting enough, but aside from just the sheer crowdedness of it (which is quite uncomfortable), I was rather unimpressed. For all of its history, Cairo just didn’t seem to offer much to us. We ended up buying some perfume oils (overpriced) after a guy “volunteered” to show us around before taking us into his shop. It was worth buying them just to say we had the experience of haggling, but I still feel ripped off and that I would have been better off not even letting that guy talk to us in the first place.
View From the Top of the Minaret
The thing that we did that I really enjoyed on this part of the trip was that we visited one mosque that was actually quite beautiful. The lighting for pictures in the main square of it was perfect, and we were also able to climb up to the top of one of the minarets and get a pretty decent view of the city. Of course we had to pay for admittance, and then tip the guy “bakhshish” for the trouble of showing up there, but it was still worth it.
View from the Odeon Palace Hotel’s Rooftop Terrace
That night Carey and I went to a place called the Odeon Palace, which was recommended to us by a friend of a friend who had spent some months in Cairo a a Fulbright scholar. It had a rooftop terrace which was comfortable, and good shisha (that’s a hookah to Westerners). I had some of the best moussaka I’ve ever had that night, and that dinner was one of the highlights of the time we spent in Cairo. Again that night we went to bed feeling that Cairo really wasn’t all that great.
The Pyramids Peaking Through the Giza Skyline
Stay tuned for the second half of the Cairo trip, where I’ll post all the pics from the Pyramids. I hope you’ve enjoyed that little preview up above.
