The view from the. . .

The view from the roof restaurant of the Nile Hilton is amazing, as is the pool. If you come here and are rich, stay there. Roommate # 2 and I walked with purpose as we came into the restaurant where actual guests were still finishing breakfast and enjoyed panorama, especially this direction:


In the afternoon I went to Khan al Khalili with roommates 2 and 3, Little R and S. The Khan is Cairo's grand old marketplace abutting its some of its finest mosques, Al Azhar and Al Hussein. If you ever read Mafouz's Cairo Trilogy, the Hussein Mosque is where the wife goes on her one big outing (her first time out of the house), the escapade for which she is punished by banishment from her home.

Here is a sample of what the Khan looks like. Colorful, crowded, chaotic. The salesmen are very aggressive. In fact, two salesmen spent about 45 minutes showing us quilts they assured us were "handy-made" and the best in Cairo (the same dude who said "handy-made" also kept saying "Yankee doodle dandy" when we admitted to being American). They were far to expensive, however, even in American dollars. I wonder whether the prices would have been better had we claimed to be another nationality? Roommate 3 suggested Romanian.




From the market, 2, 3 and I went over to Al Azhar Park, described on one of my maps as the largest park in Cairo. Along the way I encountered this view of what I think was Islamic Cairo:

The view was right next one of the most terrifying street crossings so far; usually the cars are at a stop-and-go pace so it's not so bad to step in front of them, but here the cars were acting as if they were on the highway. Heck, it may have been the highway: they were going what looked like 60 or 70 miles per hour. And we had two wide sections of road to get across.

The park is indeed gigantic. There is a fancy pants restaurant to which rich people are welcome to take me, and there is a "waterfall" fountain, bathrooms, a "train" ride (the vehicle was not on actual tracks) and one million billion people. Kids all over, even after 9, 10 and, I'm assuming, the hours that follow. Men were also setting up what looked like a stage for some sort of performance, but this was a performance that wasn't starting until after 10 at the very least. The little toddlers might be able to stay up that late; I can't.

The park also had a very interesting trash can that claimed to be an actual recycling receptacle! This claim was completely ignored, however, and all the trash in there appeared to be plastic.


Finally, here are two views of my building's interior. One is of the inner stairwell where the stray cats roam and from which they often mew pathetically, as is their wont. And the other is of our ancient elevator whose plaque claims it was built in 1874. It takes about a hundred years to get upstairs.