We have had another very interesting and educational week here in Cairo. We’ve now been here for a couple of weeks and we are feeling very comfortable with the areas and processes for things like traveling around the city, finding places to eat, weekly grocery shopping, just all of the normal life kinds of things. The air quality is not very good – between the sand blowing in from the surrounding desert and the pollution from so much traffic, it’s noticeable and restricts the views of things you want to see in the distance. Speaking of the traffic, it is crazy. We watched a documentary called Cairo Drive this week and if you want to feel like you are here it is a great depiction. Crossing the roads is very challenging – probably even more than we felt like it was in Kathmandu because these roads are so many more lanes of traffic. One of the drivers in the film makes the comment, “if I see space it is meant to be filled,” and that is a perfect description of the approach. The roads have lines to identify the lanes, but they don’t mean anything.
Last Saturday we started the day with Sandy Starbucks time at Cupa coffee shop. We haven’t been able to find the chai latte that Sandy likes on any menus, so Sandy had a Spanish Latte (which was not a good choice as she is caffeine sensitive and she didn’t feel good the rest of the day or evening), and I had my usual hot chocolate. They have a nice outdoor courtyard, and we enjoyed turkey sandwiches while reading. We came home and shaved, showered, and ironed to get ready for our night out at the symphony. We went for an early dinner at Buffalo Wings n Rings – more excellent buffalo wings and onion rings, Sandy had mac and cheese and a salad this week. We came back home to get our grocery shopping done across the street at Seoudi Market and then we were off to the Opera House via Uber for our night at the symphony. Tickets for the performance were $4.45 each and it was fantastic. The conductor is well-known in Egypt and Europe and he really put on a show along with the fantastic music. We also plan to go to the ballet next weekend and so with the inexpensive costs of the tickets and our clothing, we feel like we came out far ahead compared to what we would be willing to pay for this kind of performance quality in the States.
We stopped at Tres Bon when we got back to have dessert, but the dessert chef had already left for the evening. We each had a chicken quesadilla and lemon mint juices, watched a Frasier episode when we got home, and went to bed.
Sunday was our monthly office day – getting bills paid and laptops and pictures backed up. Sandy made beef stew, which we had for dinner. We had Greek salads for lunch and bananas and cereal for breakfast, so it was nice to have a full day of getting things done in the apartment and taking a break from the Cairo traffic.
Monday was a day for exploring the area known as Islamic Cairo. The city of Cairo has been around for thousands of years and Islamic Cairo is one of the older areas of the city. The area dates to before Islam was founded but it is known as Islamic Cairo because of the Islamic history in the area dating back to the seventh century and then moving forward under different Islamic dynasties. There are many mosques around the area and it has been dubbed the city of one thousand minarets because of the concentration of those mosques and their minarets. We took an Uber to Bab al-Futuh, which is the one of the northern gates into the old city.
As soon as you walk in you notice the difference. The lanes are smaller and have a medieval nature to them. Our walk through the neighborhood took us past and into several mosques. Non-Muslims are welcome to enter – shoes must be left outside and it is customary to leave a small tip for the keeper to watch the shoes or open areas of the mosque that would otherwise be closed. These tips are known as baksheesh in Arabic. Another small complex we visited was the Sabil-Kuttab of Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda. These were established centuries ago as charitable buildings. The sabil is a community fountain offering water for families in the area and the Kuttab is an area of the complex devoted to the education of children on the Islamic faith. There are still nearly 100 of these scattered across Cairo.
It is not uncommon at all as we make our way around to be asked for pictures by the locals. This group of women had a fun time each getting pictures with Sandy the Celebrity.
We naturally started to get hungry around lunchtime but failed to take into consideration prayer time. As we searched for a place to eat, everything we tried was closed until after 2pm. We decided to cut our visit short of a couple of other places in Islamic Cairo and head to Al-Azhar Park to get lunch. More than any other place in Cairo, tuk-tuks were the primary taxi mode of transportation and we were continually asked to let them take us where we wanted to go next. Our preference remains Uber and we eventually took Uber to the park. We ate at Citadel View Restaurant and it was great.
Tourist prices, but we had a great chicken, beef, and vegetable dish that was served on a miniature grill along with Egyptian bread with hummus and cucumber yogurt.
After lunch we walked all around the beautiful park and then when we got home, we watched the Cairo Drive movie and Frasier and then went to bed.
Tuesday was our day to hopefully pick up our long-term visas since we are planning to stay in Egypt for more than 30 days. We forgot to take our passports, so we quickly returned home and then went back. The details of this visit are included in our journal entry about the process, but the bottom line is that we didn’t get our visas today – for some reason, they are still at the warehouse that printed the visa cards. We are now supposed to return on Thursday. We stopped by Royal House to get groceries and then had our Greek salads. We worked on some of our travel planning, went to the gym, and had more beef stew for dinner before finishing the night with Amazing Race and Frasier.
There were some sights I still wanted to see that I originally had on Monday’s list, so Wednesday saw me head out for more exploration while Sandy stayed home and worked on travel planning for our next destination that has been on her mind. There is a lot of lodging that we need to get squared away for the coming months and she has been working on that. The Citadel was my first stop for the day. It sits on a rocky hill overlooking Cairo and was originally a fortress and then palace area (along with mosques) during various dynasties. The most recognizable structure at The Citadel is the Mosque of Mohamad Ali. He ruled in the late 1800s and his mosque is visible from a large part of Cairo.
Other than the mosques and the view across Cairo (you can see the pyramids of Giza on a clear day, but my day was not clear enough), there are two museums – one is the police museum, and one is the military museum.
From the Citadel, I walked down to the Mosque of Sultan Hassan and Rifa’i Mosque.
The Rifa’i Mosque is the final resting place of the last Shah of Iran, who died in exile in Egypt after his medical treatments in the United States.
I ordered Uber to take me from the mosques up to Saint Simon “The Tannery” Monastery. It’s not an easy site to get to because it is up in the hills overlooking Cairo and you drive through an area called Garbage City. I wish I had taken a picture going up but the label is appropriate. This is where the garbage trucks (which are mostly open-bed trucks filled with garbage bags) bring all of the garbage for sorting. The road is narrow, and the area is very crowded, so it is slow going up and down the hill. The churches at the top are really interesting. They are built into the rocks, so they are basically cave-like in their appearance.
Omar was my Uber driver, and he agreed to wait for me up there and then drive me home. He was such a nice man – no English, but Google Translate worked for us. I grabbed a chicken shawarma sandwich before we headed back down into Cairo. Sandy got a lot of her planning work done although there is always more to do with this kind of lifestyle. She also washed our sheets and cleaned the apartment. We went over to the gym together for our workouts and then we went to Bonachi restaurant for dinner. We both had chicken piccata with veggies and mashed potatoes and lime mint juices. Delicious. They asked us to do a video review for them, and they will post it on their social media sites. We were already stuffed but as a thank you for the video, they brought us a plate of mashe. This is an Egyptian dish that they typically serve during Ramadan, which starts in a couple of weeks. Mashe is a plate of various peppers and grape leaves stuffed with rice and it is a good dish during Ramadan to help people get through the fasting periods.
It’s Thursday and that means we get to go back to the visa processing office. But good news – we arrived at 11am and we were out of there at 11:15 with our visas in hand. That is a relief to have done. We were never worried about getting it done – we were just getting tired of having to spend so much time dealing with it. We came back home and went to the gym and then had Greek salads for lunch. We decided to head to southern Cairo in the evening to investigate the possibility of getting a pickleball game in. When we arrived, we found the courts in an area that is a huge sporting club with lots of sports represented. The four pickleball courts were empty even though I had read that there was supposed to be open play from 4pm to 6pm. Shoder was just arriving at the courts and even though he didn’t speak English, we were able to communicate enough to determine that tonight is not open play, but there was time before people had the courts reserved for him and me to play a couple of games of singles. It was great fun and then others started to arrive.
We met Ian, Bea, Phil, and Bonnie – all from Canada and now living in Cairo, three of them as teachers. We stayed around and watched them play four good games. Then we headed back home and had the rest of our beef stew for dinner. Our friend, Sarah is coming for a visit next month and so we spent some time working on her visa (not in Egypt – it is our next destination that she is coming to visit) before wrapping up for the day.
Today was another field day – a workday where we leave the “office” and go explore the area. Our first stop today was the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. After seeing the Egyptian Museum and the Grand Egyptian Museum, we weren’t sure a third museum would be necessary. We are very happy that we did the third museum. It’s a modern structure and has three main areas – the textile hall, the main hall that walks you through history from prehistoric times to the 1900s, and the Royal Mummies exhibit. It took a couple of hours and is curated very well. The highlight is the Royal Mummy collection, which is composed of roughly 20 kings and queens, and they are displayed in chronological order from the period around 3,500 years ago. No pictures are allowed. The condition of the bodies is amazing and some of them with their hair still very much intact. There were a lot of school kids in the museum and as is often the case, they love taking pictures of the non-Egyptians. Sayeed asked me to take a picture, so I asked him to return the favor.
We enjoyed lunch at one of the cafes in the museum and then took Uber to the Coptic Museum and explored Coptic Cairo. There is a long history of the Coptic community in Cairo. This is a branch of Christianity that broke away from Roman Christianity during the Byzantine split of the church. The Coptics even have their own pope. The area inside the walls of the Coptic community felt more touristy than other places around town, but we visited a few beautiful churches and a synagogue that catered to the small Jewish community through the course of time. I don’t believe there are any Jewish families still residing in Coptic Cairo. One of the churches is built over the cavern in which Jesus, Mary, and Joseph stayed for a period of time when they were in Egypt.
We left Coptic Cairo and walked quickly over to the Nile River, crossed onto Roda Island, and walked down to see the Nilometer. This is an old structure – more than 1,000 years old – that was used to determine the “health” of the river. The level of the Nile was measured here in August of each year, and the measurement would predict whether the Nile valley would flood, be faced with drought, or have the right amount of water for healthy farming yields. It would also determine the amount of taxes that would be charged for the year because the river level indicated the output from the farms.
We then headed home, showered, and went for our Friday night burgers and beers at Bob’s Bar. Love that routine and we will miss it when we leave Cairo. Before bed, we had the chance to catch up with Brian on the phone and that finished up this week.
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