Cairo

Cairo is wonderful, but has many of the problems you would expect in a city of 20 million people. The traffic is horrendous, and completely chaotic. There are 4 million cars in the city, and it seems that 3.5 million of them are on the road at any one time, all looking for a place to park. There is no parking anywhere, so people stop everywhere. Double parking is endemic, and triple parking is not uncommon. There is no rush hour per se, the traffic stays bad from 7 am to well after dark. Traffic jams can develop at random, (see triple parking, above) and may last for hours. Stop signs are treated with a mixture of disdain and contempt. Lane markings are considered as mere suggestions for the uninitiated. In a traffic jam I was stuck in for 30 minutes, there were five streams of traffic on a three lane road. Cars were inching forward with mere centimeters between them, horns blaring.

Pedestrians can expect no quarter, and seek none. Nonetheless, jaywalking is very common, with pedestrians having as little respect for the rules of the road as the drivers. Our guidebook advised that we find some Cairo natives, preferably with children, who are going in our direction and cross with them. This proved to be sound advice. The other way of crossing the street is to find a traffic jam and cross while the traffic is not moving.

We stayed in a hotel on an island in the Nile, in the somewhat upscale district known as Zamalek, where we could walk and explore without fear of getting lost. We also went to the famous National Museum, with its unparalleled collection of artifacts, statues, sarcophagi, and tomb ornaments from pharonic times. Right next door to our hotel was the Euro Deli, a cafe that had free internet and sold mango juice from fresh pureed mangoes (thicker than a milkshake) in large beer mugs, amd had free wireless.

Everbody smokes here. We went to a restaurant and had very good Egyptian shawarma (quite different from the Lebanese kind we get in Toronto), but it was so smoky we didn't go back. One further problem is that smoking shisha (flavoured tobacco in a hookah) after dinner is fashionable in restaurants and cafes. It is very common to see people drinking tea and smoking shisha at sidewalk cafes.

We also visited the mosque of Muhammed Ali (no, not the boxer, the guy the boxer named himself after, when he became a Moslem), very beautiful, and the fortress built by Saledin in the 12th century to protect Cairo from the crusaders. The crusaders, fortunately, never got this far.

The pyramids of Gizeh, guarded by the sphinx, are awe-inspiring. The sphinx has the head of a man and the body of a lion so it will have intelligence as well as strength and courage to guard the tombs. Gizeh was once in the middle of the desert but is now a suburb, the Scarborough of Cairo. There is a Pizza Hut and a KFC right across the street from the entrance to the pyramids, and a Hard Rock Cafe just down the block. There are also lots of guys trying with great persistence to sell postcards, camel rides, plastic pyramids and assorted other tacky dust-catchers "very cheap price for you, my friend".

We finished off the day with a stroll through the souk (open-air street market) of Khan al-Khalili, which for the first couple of blocks is all tourist souvenirs, and then becomes a market where Egyptians shop for clothing and household goods, all sold in small stalls.

That evening, we boarded the overnight train for Luxor, to visit our friends and see the Valley of the Kings.