…pieces of my Cairo

First off, we’re all a bit shaken – Cairo is shaken – by the bomb explosion at Khan el Khalili earlier tonight.  A woman was killed, several were injured.  Anyone who has visited Cairo has been to Khan el Khalili, it’s one of my favorite places in Cairo, particularly the back areas leading into Islamic Cairo.  The market (next to a mosque built in 1154) has been around for hundreds of years and only recently (last hundred years maybe?) the front area morphed into a tourist trap.  Many of the sales stalls have been in families for multiple generations.  The market is where all of us expats go to buy gifts for people back home.  I have favorite stalls that I’ve frequented and where I know to get good prices – my favorite silver shop, my favorite scarf shop (where my Dad has shared tea with the shop owners while my Mom, sister and I browsed scarves for HOURS), shops where I purchased hookahs and shishas for friends, a fabulous glass-works shop with beautiful Christmas-tree ornaments which I’ve taken more than three different visiting groups into…

I had intended to write this post before the bombing, and feel it’s especially appropriate now.  Whenever violence like this happens, it clouds a persons perspectives of a place.  Below, I’ll try to share just a little bit of my day…my Cairo…

Tonight, Justin and I had a few friends over for a spring-break planning session — we’re going to Kenya with six others.  We were going to cook the crew lentil soup and green beans, and Justin needed some onions and we needed bread, so I ran to the food/market/fruit/vegetable street.  There’s a street near our flat, lined with vendors selling all sorts of vegetables, fruit and bread.  Some are established with prices per kilo posted.  Some are just donkey/horse drawn carts that come and go daily, with a scale and unmarked prices.  I’ve heard some people call the street Suleman…I don’t know why, that’s not the actual name of the street so maybe I’ve heard wrong.

Rarely do I take photos on the street, we’re always trying to belong in our neighborhood, and taking pictures of ‘normal’ everyday things sort of makes one the outsider.  Anyways, Justin took this picture last weekend as we were walking to grab some Yemeni food (delicious!) with a few friends.  Since we were already a group of three foreigners (joke runs that more than one foreigner creates a ‘thing’) pulling out our cameras couldn’t do any harm.  I’d like to get some more photos, this one doesn’t quite do the street justice.

A few of the vendors remembered me from last week so commenced a discussion of the fact that I’m from the state of Arizona.  And when I reminded him I’m married to the man who told him last week we were from Arizona his friends proceeded to guffaw and pound him teasingly on the back.  Sigh.  A five minute conversation with a man selling me garlic is considered of enough romantic interest that it’s worth his friends teasing him when they find out I’m married.  Double sigh. But still, friendly people with beautiful vegetables and fruit…I can ignore the annoying sexual overtones my foreign female face produce today.

Get this, the only garlic I could find is imported from CHINA.  Weird. 2LE so $0.36.

Onions were 3.50LE for a kilo so $0.63.

A stack of Egyptian flat bread, baladi bread.  2LE so $0.36.

A kilo of baladi bananas, my favorite bananas in the whole wide world 2.50LE or $0.45.

Total of 10LE for todays shopping, or $1.79.

What I didn’t get pictures of was the kilo of bright red tomatoes that cost 1.00LE for all six tomatoes or $0.18 and the green beans.  But I didn’t buy those today so they weren’t included in my hasty photography before Justin began slicing and dicing.

So, here’s just a little piece of my Cairo on this beautiful sunny day.

And here’s a random additional photo – self-portrait cuddled up watching John Adams (the HBO miniseries we’re currently obsessed with).