December 26 -- Cairo: A Day Off (by Roger)

We took another nice day off the tourist trail today to enjoy being in this wonderful city.  Well, mostly wonderful.  I’m having the slightest bit of trouble coming to terms with the no-heating/50-degree days here.  The only vaguely heavy clothing I brought is the red sweatshirt which figures so prominently in most of the pictures I’m in, though I’ve managed to convince my Mainer traveling companion to loan me one of the heavy shirts he packed.  I suspect he was tired of hearing me whine.

We spent the morning in the room, reading, writing and listening to the city.  John Cage would love this place.  Every driver seems to have his own little horn melody and the overall effect is of a joyous cacophony, only augmented at 5 am and 5 pm when the main calls to prayer produce yet a second, overlapping cacophony.  And for all that, the soundtrack of the city doesn’t sound like noise.  We’ve tried, but we haven’t been able to record it right yet.

We finally got out of the room and started picking up a few things for Stateside.  New belts and window shopping took us one of our favorite little side streets, a lively alley full of cafes and small restaurants.  And a barber shop, which we both needed to visit at this point in the trip.  A couple of haircuts later, we stopped into a place whose menu we couldn’t read; got a “meat-with-cheese,” as a friendly guy translated for us; and then dropped off our purchases at the hotel before diving back into the old market south of us.

More bustle and cacophony, this time supplemented with vendors shouting their bargains.  First, we stopped into a tea-and-nut shop to pick up dried hibiscus flowers.  Egyptians use these to make a fragrant, lightly-sweetened tea that we’ve been served when we arrive at hotels and other places.  Drinking it here the first time, I had a Proustian tea-and-madeleines moment that took me back to Mali, so I wanted to pick some up.

With me focused on finding our favorite brass worker here, we went ever deeper into Khan al-Khalili, passing some enormous Hello Kitty stickers I wish I’d bought one of and multitudes of cloth salesmen.  Lou was in shop-til-you-drop mode, and we rooted around in nearly every dusty little shop we passed.  And we kept unearthing unique treasures; ask me about my new door knocker later.   We finally had to pass on the pair of 36” long cast iron architectural medallions, one of Alexander and the other of some goddess.  They weighed just under 45 lbs each, which meant we could’ve checked each in a suitcase if we had found suitcases big enough, but we have a few books to bring back, too, so we were worried about the weight.  My only regret of the trip so far.  And we’ve already had to buy new suitcases anyway.

I finally found my brass-smith and, as I feared, he needed more time to make my censor than we had left in Cairo.  So I left Lou poking around ewers and brass pots in yet another dusty shop to go get a bowl of lentil soup and a cup of coffee.  We finally met back up, pulled all our purchases together and headed back to the hotel though the legion of people, parcels and cars.  And Lou got us take-out for dinner to conclude another wonderful day in this wonderful city.