June 25 - A bazaar day

OK, so today I celebrated my 32nd birthday by NOT going for a run at 7AM like I had planned the night before. It was Friday, and I guess the weekends here are Friday/Saturday, so it was very quiet (something I honestly did not think possible in Cairo) when the Dan, Emily, Joe and I stepped out to go to the local coffee shop that was open. The coffee shop was buried in a decrepit but somehow cool tunneled out area below some tall buildings across the street from us. I'm no theologian, but Emily pointed out that there was Christian art in this little shop with outdoor tables, so perhaps that is why it could be open so early on the Muslim holy day of Friday. We all ordered Egyptian coffee, which is actually Turkish coffee, where the beans are ground up in the glass that you are drinking from before they settle to the bottom.

Next, we wanted to go shopping, so we headed to the Khan al Khalili Bazaar. Upon arriving in a taxi, we were a bit disoriented, so of course a friendly Egyptian offered to show us around. His name was Hashim, and he told us: "Welcome to the land of confusion, welcome to Alaska." This was only one of four or five times I'd heard an Egyptian refer to Egypt as Alaska. In any case, he assured us he had lots of money (by showing us a huge wad of cash) and that he needed no "baksheesh" for his troubles. This was a sure sign that he was a guy looking for baksheesh, but not from us, from the merchants he was going to bring us by. Hashim was what I like to call a personal shopping pimp. It was not the last time we would encounter one of these guys. He implored us to come with him to the "Egyptian" side of the Khan al Khalili, as opposed to the "tourist" side. On the Egyptian side, we walked through a maze of alleys of tiny shops, with stagnant puddles, trash, and cats eating large piles of animal innards everywhere. That is not to say there wasn't interesting merchandise to be had over there, but it was the kind of place you might think you'd made a wrong turn into if you didn't know better.

In any case, we managed to shake him off after looking for a while at some substandard inlaid boxes, and we continued over to the tourist side of the bazaar. Except we made a wrong turn somewhere. And we ended up in one of the most frenetic, wild, full of crappy goods, crowded and local markets I can imagine. We walked around this tightly packed maze of streets for about a half an hour until we escaped. At the end of the street, a man was leading some kind of chant as people around him ripped open t-shirts out of plastic bags and tossed them around like some kind of t-shirt stock exchange. http://www.facebook.com/seanlarrett?v=app_2392950137#!/video/video.php?v=10150228828585057 People were trying to sell us shirts for less than 20 cents US.

After all that, we were naturally hungry, so we started looking for food. The guidebook recommended a restaurant called Gad, so with the help of some almost exclusively Arabic speaking locals, we set out to find it. After walking in circles for maybe twenty minutes, a nice man led us to a local spot based on the one word I told him: koshary. Koshary is a dish that contains macaroni, rice, lentils, garbanzo beans, fried onions and tomato sauce, and may include some meat. We never found Gad, but our new friend took us to a typical koshary restaurant, where they serve koshary and nothing else. He refused baksheesh. We sat down, didn't order, and instantly there was a tin, army-style bowl of koshary in front of us. The place had good koshary, and after eating it, we paid about $2.50 for four big bowls and left. It was a great experience, and there were nothing but locals inside, which made for an interesting eating experience for us and them, I'm sure.

After all of that, Dan and Emily departed Joe and I to go south up the Nile and take a boat cruise. After that, as this is nominally a World Cup blog, Joe and I wandered downtown to watch Spain beat Chile 2-1 to secure passage to the next round. Until next time...