The Land of Sheesha and Shwarma

Egypt may be famous as the land of the Pharaohs, the Nile and my boy Moses, but to me the best parts of Cairo involved copious amount of water pipes and mystery meat on a stick.

Our flight got into Cairo at about 9am, which meant it left Nairobi at the thrilling hour of 5am, which meant another exciting 2:30am trip to an airport. A few things immediately struck me about Cairo: a Cinnabon in the airport, sidewalks on all the streets, elevated highways, and (for the first time in Africa) free maps that were not part of a guide book. I was pretty psyched.

We met up with two other ADP folks, dropped our bags and had a nice mid-morning wander down the Nile into Coptic Cairo. This is home to some old Christian churches and an (the??) old Jewish synagogue, blah blah blah, much more interesting were the donkey carts weaving in and out of traffic, the people at sidewalk cafes or stoops enjoying a morning sheeha (hookah, arguilar, hubbly bubbly, whatever) and me trying to speak Arabic. From there we went to the Citadel which is a pretty amazing Islamic complex in Old Cairo. It features a huge, beautiful mosque with towering arches, domes and miniarets and a really cool view out over the city. After getting sidetracked for a quick minute in a sandstorm, we went to Kahn-al-Khalili, grabbed a quick bite of schwarma and kosheri (rice, pasta, beans, pasta, potatoes, pasta, pretty much every carb ever invented) and headed into Cairo's market/souk. It was just getting dark and the market was kicking into high gear, with people selling everything from spices to gold to perfumes to water pipes to tourist craps to cotton. It was a pretty awesome atmosphere, we wandered the narrow alleys and haggled with the touts for an hour or so and then relaxed in Cairo's oldest cafe (El Fishawy) with some mint tea, sheesha and watched the tourists run around. Capped off the night with McDonald's soft serve (I've now had it on 6 of the 7 continents...) and a sketchy ten minutes at a sketchy bar (Cairo has a really cool night cafe scene, but being Islamic that scene does not involve booze).

Saturday was pyramids day so we got up early (I wake up much earlier on the weekends than I do on weekdays here), had some amazing 25 cent falafel and got the pyramids when they opened. They are pretty impressive, and like all big old things (Macchu, Angkor) that much more amazing to realize it was built without modern technology. The Giza pyramids are right outside of Cairo and early in the morning we got some great shots of the pyramids with the city, dunes and camels in the background. Within about an hour, they were overrun with tourists, tour busses and touts trying to get into every photo or get everyone onto their camel. We took shelter inside the great pyramid which was kinda a cool experience (they only let like 100 people in each day), but its not like there is some cool sarcophagus or mummy chilling in there. Moral of the story: get to Giza as early as possible.

From Giza we headed off to the Step Pyramid which is the oldest stone structure in existence and much less touristy than Giza. Wandered around the archaeological sites, debated whether the hieroglyphs were original and marveled at the way Cairo springs up out of the desert (kinda like Palm Springs). Last stop on the tour was the Red Pyramid which is out in a little oasis and was the model for the big Giza pyramids. At this point we were pretty pryamided out, started taking the most ridiculous pictures we could think of (YMCA with the A being a pyramid...) and headed back for some well deserved falafel and baklava-esque deserts. Of course the falafel turned into a sheesha and mint tea. Which turned into more sheesha and mint tea (and dominoes, cause that is what they do there). After a few hours of that, we had a good dinner at Abu el Sid (highly recommend the pigeon) in Zamelek and called it a day.

Sunday was our last day and it followed a fairly predictable theme: falafel, walk, sheesha, repeat. After a breakfast falafel, some people checked out the Egyptian Museum while I skipped the crowds and ventured around the Nile and some of its islands for a while. We reconvened for some more shwarma/falafel, an amazing mango juice and an afternoon smoke. We walked back to the big market/souk, thought about buying stuff but mainly settled in for a few more hours of mint tea and sheesha. We decided the best way to deal with the touts was simply to say to them "Welcome to Egypt" which got most of them to leave us alone but unfortunately devolved into me trying to guess what country all the passing tourists were from and then say it to them in their language ("Wilkommen auf Egyptstein"). I also managed to pick up an awesome visor with built in sunglasses that says, appropriately, "Welcome to Bejing" and finally, finally got a straight razor shave (apparently people in Nairobi aren't too fond of letting a stranger hold a razor blade to their face).

So Cairo was definitely my favorite city that I've been to in Africa and we had a great visit. Until it was time to fly out of their airport. First, the path to drop people off involves driving through the parking lot, making a U-turn and cutting off oncoming traffic. Once inside, the screen tells you to get in really long line 1 if you are going to Nairobi. Once we finally got the end of really long line 1, they told us that to go to Nairobi you needed to go to really long line 2 (never mind that it was just two security lines going to the exact same place). So after trying to lie to the guy and say we were going to Tel Aviv (not smart), we went to where line 2 should be. But line 2 was really more like funnel 2, with about one hundred people just trying to push and hiss their way through a three foot opening. Got through that, fought with the soldiers who were demanding paper tickets (well not literally fought), then got to funnel 3 to get our boarding passes. Finally after that it was the surprisingly orderly line 4 to get through immigration and we were off. It was like they took all of the crazy that should be in an African city and just bottled it up in their airport.

And now I'm back in Nairobi where the craziness is much more evenly distributed.

This is what we looked like after three days of non-stop sheesha