Khan al Khalili

There was a stiff breeze today which made the heat much more bearable, but stirred up our allergies. Jim got an itching attack, and for less than $2 bought a steroidal cream, which would have required a prescription at home, to address it. My eyes were burning and nose running.

When we landed in Egypt, they scanned us with a thermometer to check our temperature, screening for swine flu. I haven't seen any news, and am wondering if it's still an issue. It is here, at the Paris airport and in Lebanon - with signs all around directing one to a doctor if within 7 days they get sick.

We took a taxi to Bab al Nasr -- an old gate entering the city from about 1000 BCE. I have my flash cards from Islamic art history classes, and the gate and some of the old mosques are in my pile. It is easy to travel by taxi here, and cheap. We get directions written in Arabic from the hotel desk, and ask how much we should pay, then negotiate with the driver before we get in the cab. We walked through the big gate, with unbelievable hammered metal doors -- impressive in their relief, then through Islamic Cairo to Khan al Khalili, a huge old multi-storied labyrinth of a bazaar. Navigating it was like playing the kids' game Chutes and Ladders. We were more impressed with this market than the one in Istanbul, which is itself spectacular. We were in search of an old restaurant El Fishawy, which everyone knew how to direct us to, but we meandered so extensively, we would have never been able to retrace our steps. There are touts for each store, but they are good-natured and not as intrusive as the ones in Istanbul. We had to go down a steep flight of stone steps, with the last step being very narrow. At the bottom was an open shop, one step to the right. If you missed that last steep step, you'd end up sprawled in the middle of the shop. Cairenes are jovial and fun to play with. I told the shopkeeper at the base of the stairs that he made the step narrow on purpose to snare customers into his store. It took him a moment to get what I was saying, but he loved it. They are always teasing us.

Mustafa has included his friends in our meetings. Tonight we met his friend Moatiz (not sure of spelling) at a Syrian restaurant for dinner. Tomorrow we go to Giza to the pyramids, and later I hope to go to the Soliya office and meet more of the people I know. Maybe we can fit in the Egyptian Museum too. These 5 days are going by too fast, we leave for Luxor on 30 June.

We were explaining how Americans drive to Mustafa and Moatiz - in straight lines following laws. Cairo traffic is an order of magnitude more chaotic than Beirut's. Throw pedestrians in there, choosing to walk whenever they want, across masses of traffic in no lanes. It is a free-for-all, including wrong way drivers sometimes working their way upstream as well. Here the horn honking is much more strident -- they mean business, not like the friendly warnings of the Beirutis.

Jim and I stopped at the Cairo Marriott, we had heard they had an oasis of a garden. We walked into the huge lobby, trying to figure out how to work our way out to the garden in the interior of the complex. We gave up quickly, turned off by the sterile mass produced "luxury" hotel environment. There's something about the canned, frigid, perfumed air that makes me want to escape. We decided we'd rather sit on the shady planted terrace of our hotel, chatting with the other residents. Tomorrow to the pyramids, inshallah.