Classic Cairo

Explore the Egyptian capital and forget the tour bus

 

 

When my friend suggested that our next biannual trip be Egypt, I have to admit I wasn’t overly excited at the idea.  I mean, I love the food and the ancient and exotic cultures of the Middle East, but I also had visions of swarms of tourists driving past the Sphinx in their air conditioned buses.  To mitigate the imagined crowds, we chose to go in March, after the high season ends, and our plan worked beautifully.  I found Cairo to be very calm and relaxing, sort of like life is a warm summer day over and over, its people stoic but shy, and aside from the truly famous things like the Pyramids at Giza, we encountered very few tourists.

We stayed in the Ezbekieh quarter of the city, about twenty miles east of the Nile and the tourist strip, close to the peaceful Ezbekieh Gardens, Opera House, Central Railway Station, and downtown commercial drag.   Walking around the immediate hotel area was extremely pleasant, with a marked absence of touts, a plethora of coffee houses (ahwe), and local places to eat.  The coffee houses are filled with men at outdoor sidewalk tables, enjoying sheesha (waterpipes), shai ala bosta (tea) and a game of dominoes, watching football (Champion’s League was going on) or just talking.  Women are rarely seen in the coffee house, but otherwise are plentiful on the streets, some wearing the hijab and some not.

The sheesha are hookahs with water in the base, flavored hot coals in a metal bowl on top, and multiple hoses for patrons to draw on.  Packaged plastic tips for the hoses are provided, and properly done, smoke is inhaled and blown out the nose slowly.  The hot coals are infused with traditional or apple flavored tobacco in a special cooker, and stoking the hot coals is a serious art.  The tea is sweet and refreshing, but make sure you ask for shai ala bosta, as otherwise, you are apt to be given a lipton tea bag instead of the wonderful black tea served with granulated sugar and a sprig of fresh mint (nana) that really enhances the experience.

From the street carts to the communal restaurants, the food was wonderful.  Alcohol was not served anywhere, except one tourist restaurant we ended up at.  There was actually a liquor store around the corner from our hotel, but buying beer and smuggling it back to our hotel felt oddly inappropriate here. Primarily we either had kebab of some kind from street vendors, or one of our favorite experiences was at a typical restaurant near our hotel, where they didn’t produce any food, but rather, provided a menu of all kinds of things, which a runner then went and got from one of the street vendors.  We had some of the best falafel (tammiyya) that I ever had, made right next door on a large round griddle, as well as several staples like tahini and baba ganouj.   English was very rarely spoken, and often the menus were in script anyways, so eating was a challenging but rewarding experience, and fantastic for a vegetarian.

The Khan el-Khalili is a very large market in Old Cairo, with miles of vendors selling everything from rugs and spices to household wares on narrow unpaved streets clogged with throngs of people.  Haggling is the norm, but most things are very cheap by Western standards.  Near the market is the beautiful Al-Azhar Mosque.  The walls and chambers were Spartan or adorned with beautiful tile work and rugs, but far less pretentious than their Western church counterparts.  Behind the mosque was a neighborhood of small streets, too small for cars, and as we got progressively further in, there was a feeling of danger confirmed by several people who basically told us to go back, which we did.  Whether this was just a dangerous part of town like all cities have, or a seat of fundamentalism (and hatred of the West) was unclear, but it was the only time we felt nervous in Egypt.

As we found everywhere in Egypt, our interaction with the locals was limited, both by language and possibly our status as infidels.  Aside from a few friendly conversations, most of our contact was with aggressive or deceptive hawkers.  One of the joys in traveling is meeting people from other cultures and spending time learning from each other, and we are conditioned to expect that when someone is friendly and starts up a conversation, that it is genuine without ulterior motive.  In Cairo this was really not the case.  Over and over, we had pleasant conversations with people including those our own age, that blatantly or subtly, always (I really mean always) ended at someone’s shop being shown wares and expected to buy them. 

Of course, one can’t avoid the tourist things completely in Cairo, and despite the crowds and touts, we had to go to see the Pyramids at Giza.  Take the subway to Giza, and then take a taxi from the subway to the Pyramids complex.  While majestic, the pyramids are unfortunately empty shells at this point, with all of the artifacts long ago shipped off to a museum in London or Cairo.   Expensive tours of the inside of the structures are available, but offer little beyond saying you’ve done it.  Guards surround the structures to prevent further degradation, but they supplement their income by accepting bribes, so a little baksheesh and you can do anything short of using a hammer and chisel.  Hordes of tour buses filled the parking lot providing plenty of reason for the hawkers to descend on the area like locusts.

The other big tourist area is near the Egyptian museum along the Nile, where the area is actually barricaded off and only foreigners and those serving them are allowed.  Here one finds the trappings of the West with the Hilton, Hard Rock Café, TGIF and a multitude of other global chains.  One reason to go there though, is to ride in a felukka, a traditional sail boat still used to travel the Nile River.  Going out for about an hour at sunset is a stunning experience, gliding past the shores of this ancient river where so many others have gone before.  It’s a perfect ending to a trip into the fascinating and historic past that is the Egyptian capital of Cairo.