Cairo life

View from the hotel pool deck. Overlooking the Nile and one of the bridges that was featured prominently on the news during the revolution.  

It was actually too cool to swim. The weather was perfect, but it wasn’t hot enough to feel like you needed to get in the water to cool off. Our evenings were full of jeans and sweatshirts — it only really got warm for our last 3 days there. 

I was reading aloud to the boys over the noise of the traffic — horns honking and cars in the background, when the noise suddenly got louder and we could hear shouting. Everyone jumped up to see what was going on below (I was on high alert anyway the whole time we were downtown) and then spent the next 5 minutes watching the fight that had broken out. One guy with a big stick, another hiding behind the various freeway overpass pillars and chucking bottles and rocks, people running in between moving cars . . . just your normal street fight. 

Later that night we went over to Khan al Khalili, the huge souk that stretches on and on forever. We found a place that served great schwarma and other Middle Eastern appetizers like hummus, mutabal (roasted eggplant with yogurt), and tabbouleh (chopped parsley salad). After dinner, it was time for tea.

We were specifically trying to make our way back to Fishawy’s, the oldest teahouse in Cairo. We wandered around a lot of back alleys and bought a glow in the dark mummy and a plastic pyramid snow globe before we found it. The craziest part? They remembered Josh. I thought the owner was just using one of his lines until we showed him the baby and explained how much bigger she had gotten and he responded by making his face into a frowning pout, perfectly mimicking the skeptical baby we had brought to his shop last time.  

We ordered the mint tea (the black tea comes in individual pots and the mint is placed in the cup — you add sugar and bruise the mint to your liking).