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Concluding Cairo: Time To Move On
Having visited parts of North Africa and the Middle East before, we know how common it is to see people spend a whole evening at an outdoor cafe table and only buy one mint tea all night, but here in Cairo there is another custom which has taken us by surprise: bringing your own food. Friends or families will occupy a cafe table all evening, order minimal coffee, tea or even just water, while tucking in to a bagful of food they’ve brought in from the bakers or from a takeaway, or even had delivered by courier to their table. How do these coffee houses make any money!? And as…
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Cairo, Saqqara And The Pyramids
It’s obvious as soon as we wake up that it’s quieter, Cairo’s volume levels have been ever so slightly reduced. It’s Friday morning, the working week here is Sunday to Thursday and today is of course the weekly day of prayer. Traffic is lighter and the streets are quieter, though as we were to discover later in the day, the respite is to be short lived. Absorbing ourselves into Cairo life has meant abstaining from alcohol – much as we enjoy bars, beers and nights out, we have been determined to do things the local way as much as possible. In truth, it’s pretty easy to do here, with the…
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First Days In Cairo
It’s somehow passed us by that BA are no longer providing meals on short haul flights, and it seems a 5-hour flight is classified as short haul. So there’s nothing, and by the time we make Cairo we are living up to our hungry travellers moniker. Cairo isn’t a traffic jam, it’s a complete gridlock, a gridlock of drivers who possess neither patience nor any lane sense and it takes well over an hour to inch and nudge our way from airport to downtown apartment. Dusk arrives on the way, and the air fills with the echoing and haunting call to prayer from the multitude of mosques around the city,…
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Farewell To Cornwall: Next Stop Cairo
As ever, we have loved this visit to Cornwall. Spring seems to have dawned before our eyes, colours have intensified, and Padstow, the estuary, the coast path…have all been as wonderful as ever. We always feel so at home here. We conclude our time here by climbing to the top of Brea Hill, the highest point in the area and consequently one of the best places from which to view the estuary. As we climb, we are again at low tide, vast reaches of golden sand either side of the river’s narrow channel where in just a few short hours water will stretch right across the divide. Windshields and windows…
