Back to Cairo!

Sunday night found us back on the foreigner overnight train where we got to unwrap our "Good Luck" soap one last time. We were excited to get back to Cairo and back to our beloved Koushary place that was delicious and charged us the right price!

Train across the platform

Still waiting for our midnight train

We spent Monday recuperating from our jaunt to Upper Egypt and Tuesday exploring Islamic Cairo. Here are some snaps from Islamic Cairo:

Mosque we liked, but couldn't figure out the name of

Man with cart

Colorful hijabs

Man in traditional dress

The Gayer-Anderson Museum, house in a
traditional Ottoman house

Ibn Tulun Mosque

Funny story: We told our cabdriver to take us here because landmarks are easiest to convey and it took a 10 minute conversation with a police officer to figure out which mosque to take us to. Why? Because there are multiple Ibn Tulun Mosques in Cairo. Although in our defense, this one is on the back of one of their bank notes.

Lost goat

Mini-Market

Street scene

If I lived in Cairo, I'd go to this bakery

We also caught a glimpse of the Citadel, ate at the touristy (but nice) Mahfouz Cafe, and shopped a bit in the touristy Khan al-Khalili bazaar. Now if I were to sum Egypt up, I'd have to say that, like Morocco, you never quite know what is going on until you have been through it (but it always works out). The Egyptians are a people unto themselves--they are very passionate, very stubborn, always ready to make some money, and, more importantly, going through a pretty huge cultural shift. It's not that we noticed a greater religiosity in Egypt, but I definitely noticed a greater outward appearance of religiosity.

There is the ubiquitous hijab (younger Egyptian women even have their own style of wearing the hijab--more bouffant and stylish) but also calluses on the foreheads of middle age men from "praying" so much. I was both fascinated and confused by this phenomenon as a friend of ours living in Cairo explained that men often provoke the calluses to make them more dramatic. While I'm sure some are genuine (as (I'd assume) in this picture of this older man), I can definitely see how they could be manipulated to create a certain image among some men. While the issue of why Egypt is becoming more conservative is extremely complex (15 years ago, girls did not wear the hijab), my Arabic teacher recently postulated that the hijab and certain uses of formal speech are coming back as a result of the over-crowding in Cairo which necessitates the construction of politeness boundaries to distinguish the classes. See, complicated stuff!

Pic courtesy of Siggi