Week Seventy-Two

Our lazy day starts at 11.10, and we carry forward yesterday's resolution and have a cheap breakfast of coffee and biscuits in the room. After that we write and post a number of postcards (Milla negotiates a good price with another Coptic Orthodox shop-owner), before putting in some internet time - more flight prices (S.E. Asia today), updating my Statistics page and sending some information to Lonely Planet. Then we take a long wander along the shore/strip, getting bus times out of Dahab (much cheaper to stop in Suez or Ismailia and change than to get a direct bus to Cairo), and talk to a guy about horse or camel rides into the mountains - it's a nice idea, but the charge is by the hour and it quickly mounts up (so to speak): the operations are more geared to trips along the shore to popular diving sites.
In the evening we wander through a few of the souvenir stalls: it's mostly crap - "Bedou" rugs with badly-executed designs, bits of papyrus with tacky prints on them, T-shirts with not-very-funny cartoons, and so on. There are the usual items - playing cards, jewellery (neat little turtle ear-rings), key-rings, and some great kitsch - perspex pyramids with shakeable "sand" and sphinxes/pyramids/etc. inside; or Tutankhamun ashtrays; glass Red Sea fish. Things we actually like are onyx and alabaster goblet sets (as in Jordan), an amber Anubis head paperweight (only I liked that) and some weird sculpture stuff in an "Africa"-themed shop.

I'm up at 10.00 and write until Milla joins me at 11.15 or so - today, in theory, we'll get totally ready and I'll get the notebook up to day (I'm a few days behind again, but they're pretty short and easy days). Instead, of course, we sit around and play lots of cards and re-discuss possibilities for the route after Egypt, and squeeze in a little bit of packing and writing in between. For tea we finish our remaining supplies, so we don't have to carry them - tomorrow, we should leave. I finish packing, then we both hit the internet place for a final rash of emails, and return to the room arguing. As a result, we go to bed late and, after failing to find a particularly aggressive mosquito, sleep with the light on all night (they're much less active when there's light).

In preparation for leaving today, our alarms go off at 06.30 and 06.45 - we manage to get up at 10.15, hence missing the 10.00 bus which we were intending to catch. Ah well. We have a simple breakfast in, continuing our new policy of spending less on food, and then go out to arrange a camel or horse-ride into the mountains. It's pretty misty outsider, though (half our motive was to get good views over Dahab and the Red Sea), so we abort that plan and head up to Lighthouse Point to sit and build sandcastles instead. Eventually tiring of this we head further north along the shore, to see what's there. What's there, running along a long snorkelling stretch known as the Eel Garden, is a rocky shore with a narrow beach, lined with the Bedou village of Assalah. We wander for ages, passing Bedou kids playing by the amazingly clear water (they're not so good here, asking only for one Egyptian pound, rather than a dollar or euro), a house built around (ie. with entry and exit holes for) a presumably pre-extant palm tree (Milla's particularly taken with this idea, and the idea of living on this shore generally), and a number of dead goats and cats. We collect a number of shells and broken bits of coral, and play with a hermit crab for a while, and skim lots of stones (possibly endangering submerged divers below) and eventually reach a checkpoint where the mountains finally come right down to the sea and there's only a narrow path beyond.

The soldiers seem quite relaxed about the idea of letting us past without our passports (we didn't bring them), but tell us that our two possible destinations Ras Abu Gallum and the Blue Hole are respectively 13km and 8km further. We decide not to bother, and head back by the road rather than the beach, passing a large new hotel and dive centre apparently being built entirely by three guys (or rather by one guy, with two others chatting to him). Going through Assalah is fun - it's much more like an Arab/Bedou settlement than the tourist resort (unsurprisingly) - apart from a couple of tarmacced roads, all the streets are uneven dirt-tracks; there are more sheep and goats, in little flocks, than people around; little heaps of discarded litter, being rifled by goats and cats, line the streets. There are also camels and donkeys standing lazily around in walled paddocks. There's a small huddle of shops, looking pretty run-down and punctuated by the usual coffee-shops with cheap chairs spilling out onto the street: there's also a clean little concrete bunker-office housing some kind of political anti-"Nazi Zionism" organisation. Posters in the windows advise us to boycott US-Britain-Israel, the "True Axis of Evil" . . . maybe later. Kinda ironic for Egypt, which receives tons of US aid since Camp David - the only thing that keeps the economy going and stops the population from starving to death.

We stop for beer on the way back, pestered by the couple of energetic, randy dogs who, in turn, are pestered by a bunch of local (well, Egyptian) kids - a least until a Germanic woman takes their long stick away: a local guy chases them away with a gun (the dogs, unfortunately, not the kids). After that, and a quick stop at the camp, we decide to eat out in (what should be, again) our last evening in Dahab: our choice, after the last disappointment, is "Friend's Restaurant' and turns out to be a winner. Seriously generous pasta dishes, with heaped plates from an infinite salad bar, it was particularly good value for less than £3 each: we're quite disappointed that we didn't try here before ('cos we could've come back). They even provided little water bottles with pierced holes in the caps for spraying attendant cats - of course, being cats, there were a small number who didn't care, so our meal was still monitored closely by waiting, hungry, soaking wet cats.
We wander back, picking up some supplies for tomorrow's hoped for bus and doing some more souvenir shopping. We go to bed deliberately early at 11.45. Of course, as with last night, there's a bothersome and difficult-to-find mosquito (possibly the same one) and we give up at 01.00 and again decide to sleep with the light on (even though it also means we won't sleep as well).

We get up at 06.45, unlike yesterday, and are ready to leave at 08.30 - which is great, except that the bus isn't until 10.00: we paid the camp last night, so we don't even have that to do. We arrange a taxi, which turns up at 09.25 and turns out to be a little minibus, and reach the "bus station" in Dahab "City" just after 09.30. One of the guys from our camp and Sami, who runs the camp next door, are there (presumably to intercept incoming travellers): they tell us that there's no bus at 10.00 except one to Nuweiba - we should, they claim, have consulted them. Enquiries at the East Delta office reveal that we shouldn't have asked them at all, since there's quite definitely a bus at 10.00: the travel agencies in town turn out to have been equally ill-informed, though, since it goes to Ismailia rather than Suez and costs 42EP rather than 30EP. Ah well - that suits us equally well (except the price) since we'd had some debate over our destination anyway (pros and cons with each).

Anyway - in we get (it's a big bus with working air-con) and off we go: south, oddly, since it seems the major services take the longer but better coastal road. We swap seats (to get better views), get hauled off at one checkpoint by a soldier who has problems understanding that we have a (very unusual) 3-month visa, and spend the first hour and a half of the journey watching the mountainous landscape of eastern Sinai go past. As around Dahab, it's almost completely barren and desolate - there's occasional scrub and the odd tree, but it's mostly rock and sand. Naturally it seems to be populated by Bedou - they have little villages in the middle of nowhere, mixtures of tents and concrete huts, all in locations where no-one in their right minds would start a village. And there are solitary Bedouin, or kids with a dozen goats, just wandering across the wilderness (as if there are places to go out here). Dahab, after a month, ends up getting 2/10 - it took a while finding them, but there are things to see and do, and okay places to eat and drink, and so on: it dramatically improved when all the tourist-types left, after our first week.
We stop at the large resort of Sharm el-Sheikh ("Sharm") from 11.35 to 12.00: it's in a more dramatic location than Dahab, with cliffs, and islands just offshore and it seemed (from a distance) to be mostly high-rise hotels. There's a grim arab settlement just inland ("Sharm el-Sheikh City", perhaps), presumably for the people working at both the resort and the nearby mines (I dunno what they're mining - sand?). And after that we finally start northwards, up the western shore of Sinai. This landscape is quite different, and is possibly the biggest beach in the world - mile after mile of rolling sand down to the blue sea: the mountains we can see far inland all have sand piled up against them, so it's pretty monochromatic. This is real desert, and amazingly dull. To keep us entertained, the bus company puts on an Egyptian film called "Hamam in Amsterdam": thankfully the tape jams during the opening credits. Unfortunately they have a back-up - an Egyptian martial arts movie, which had to be seen to be believed.
Apart from the sand, there are some large tankers visible on the Red Sea, and a number of oil/gas installations. There are also a number of extensive, but apparently deserted, resorts: big luxury hotels (eg. the Hilton, with beautifully-watered and lush gardens), as well as rows of package-type establishments. We stop at one of these for a rest break ("El Basha", I think), and we're spookily the only people there except for some workmen and the people running the little shop/café: possibly the entire coast is only open on a seasonal basis.
It's six or seven hours after starting our journey that we begin to see signs of habitation again (not even the Bedou are overly evident in the huge sandy waste): memories of the Israeli occupation seem strong, since there's a high military presence. Milla's particularly alarmed that the checkpoints are all mined with explosives. We pass under the Suez Canal by tunnel and enter a land of pretty dense vegetation/irrigation, served by large multi-lane roads rendered almost useless by all the (single-lane) checkpoints. Shortly after a roundabout where the bus drops people bound south for Suez, we also pass an extensive missile and radar station.

By the time we reach Ismailia's outlying modern bus station it's dark, and our attempts to find a map amid the stalls there are fruitless, so we take a taxi (everyone we talk to says the centre is kilometres away). Our favoured option is the Youth Hostel on Lake Timsa, but our attempts to explain this get us to the Timsa Hotel in downtown Ismailia. A search along the lakeshore (also a large distance from the centre, in the opposite direction from the bus station), lead us only to a place with chalets which seems to accommodate students. We return to the centre, after almost 50 minutes in the taxi, and end up in the Lonely Planet-listed Nefertari Hotel (Ramses II's wife, rather than Nefertiti, Akhenaten's wife): the rooms have damp, peeling walls and a number of cockroaches already resident. Super. We dump our bags, spray the place with insecticide and go out for a wander.

Central Ismailia's on a grid pattern, it turns out, with the railway line and a little auxiliary canal forming the long sides and our street (Sultan Hussein) forming one of the short sides. We grab a shwarma and make three unfortunate discoveries: firstly, as in Jordan, the shwarmas contain very little; secondly, in Egypt, they seem to come in a regular roll/bun; thirdly, Dahab wasn't hugely over-priced for food after all, but about right. Goddamn. Also, Ismailia doesn't get a lot of tourists - hardly anyone has any English, and in three hours of exploring we're the only (obvious) foreigners that we see.
The town's nice enough: there are lots of long streets of colonial architecture (it looks like old photos of New Orleans), and some wonderfully verandahed buildings which are mostly a bit dilapidated. There are also a couple of large stone churches (ex-French/British, or Coptic?), and a nice square overlooked by the main mosque. The little service canal is, of course, full of rubbish.

We return to our room (now full of dead and dying mosquitoes and cockroaches) and crash out - we'll have a better look round tomorrow morning.

We're up at 08.45 and out at an amazing 09.15 after an okay night's sleep, disturbed only when the entire hotel shook every time a freight train passed. Ismailia's pretty deserted compared with last night (Thursday evenings are always chaotic in the Arab world), so we get a good look round the city today. We wander past the litter-filled canal, crossing over the disused locks, and have a better look at the formerly grand buildings that look over it. The churches seem to be open this morning (so they're probably Orthodox, this being Friday), so we check out a few - they're pretty full. The first church we see has very stylised, almost minimalist, icons: the larger second church (possibly a cathedral?) has more traditionally-styled icons - the highlight here is a ritual where they clasp hands (palms together, over each other), pull their hands back and then kiss the tips of their fingers. Very strange - Milla's never seen anything like it either, and we have no idea what it symbolises. We leave, still unsure whether Copts are more orthodox or catholic, or maybe come as both (the cathedral was labelled "catholic" somewhere in its name).
After a quick coffee/biscuit stop at the hotel, we set out for the bus station at 11.30, attempting to retrace our dark taxi-ride of last night. Outside the centre, Ismailia rapidly descends into broad streets of concrete blocks and we're soon lost: we stop for directions, and are misdirected (why does that always seem to happen in Arab countries?), and end up trudging through an aimless suburb of half dirt-streets and unfinished buildings of the concrete-skeleton-filled-with-red-bricks type. We follow this so far that we end up hitting what appears to be the ring road, which we then follow in the direction that we see buses going. One more enquiry at a petrol station, followed by a lift from a lawyer who was filling his car, gets us to the bus station (on the next east spur of Ismailia from the one we emerged along) at 12.35. Confusing enquiries of the non-English-speaking staff finally get us two tickets for the 12.30 to Port Said which, equally confusingly, leaves at 12.45.
The road is just as checkpointed as the route south (from Suez) was, and just as flanked by verdant greenery (I don't understand why it should be - surely the Canal's salt-water and useless for irrigation?). For most of the journey we drive alongside the Canal, but disappointingly see almost no ships - there's a white cruise liner and a couple of container vessels, though they're some way off when we see them. The Suez Canal, unlike (say) the Corinth canal, is pretty much at ground level so the ships seem to be sailing across the flat landscape. Just before reaching Port Said there's an immense suspension bridge over the canal - like the canal, it seems to have virtually no traffic. And then, after about an hour, we reach Port Said.
Lonely Planet lets us down (again - I guess it's just getting too out-of-date) in claiming that the bus station is close to the centre of town - actually, there's a new one on the outskirts. Believing ourselves to be close to the centre, though, we set off on foot towards where we can see the nearest major road ending, on the basis that'll be the canal. Actually, that'll be the desert, and in this case the desert is on the far side of a shanty town. Still, walking through the shanty town proves interesting, past ramshackle mud-brick and corrugated-iron houses, horse-drawn carts, cheap fruit barrows and little coffee stalls with five or six broken plastic chairs outside. Hey-ho. We eventually run into a non-English speaking local standing outside his shack (his two daughters look on), and ask for directions to the "ferry terminal" (which we know is in the centre). He manages to communicate that it's miles away, so we end up reluctantly taking a taxi. The man also turns out to be an ex-policeman, presumably an honest one (otherwise we reckon he'd have ended up in a real house). The taxi takes us all the way back to the bus station (ah, well), and then along Mohammed Ali street (not the boxer), and 23rd July Street (as in Romania and most other places I've seen in the last six months, they name streets, bridges and even towns after dates), and eventually to the ferry terminal. The streets seem to be full of shops, many of which are quite upmarket (Port Said is a Duty Free zone, so many Egyptians come here to shop), and the "ferry terminal" turns out to be the docking point for the half-dozen little green car ferries which continually ply back and fore across the mouth of the Suez Canal between Port Said and its sister city Port Fu'ad. We opt to save that little trip for later, if we have time, and instead admire the white police station at the end of the street and then set out for the Canal Authority Building (the famous white one with the green cupolas), which we can see just along the shore. Unfortunately it turns out to be closed, unless you have specific permission to visit from the police (which would be for the next day), but the guards let us in for five minutes when we plead: they still don't let us take photos, though.
We wander through the rows of streets back from the canal, mostly big run-down nineteenth century affairs with wooden balconies - very scenic and picturesque, but perhaps neither safe nor hygienic. Me? I'd love to stay in a place like this - it's a pity we hit Ismailia as our base for seeing the canal cities, since I'm sure Port Said would have been more interesting and cheaper - and you get much better views of the ships. The shopping seems the best we've seen since Turkey, though we don't actually spot any of the stuff we're looking for (a particular deodorant, padded envelopes, hardback notebooks, a new element, etc.). We do find a large Catholic church and orphanage, which is well-kept and peaceful inside, despite a rundown and shabby exterior with broken windows.
We return to the shore, looking for somewhere to have a coffee and watch the ship traffic (it's chaos out in the canal, with little boats continuously nipping around in all directions), but there doesn't seem to be anywhere. Thankfully the little green ferries turn out to be free for foot passengers (cars pay a toll on the Port Fu'ad side), and they leave every few minutes. As well as an imposing mosque overlooking the arrivals, the far side also seems to boast a couple of places on the shore with coffee. We perhaps don't choose the best of these (it's full of kids), but we do get a good seat opposite the Canal Authority House. Meanwhile, after 17 months of faithful service, my Platypus expandable water bag finally springs a leak and has to be discarded - goddam. Useful because it only takes a little more space than the water you're carrying (regular bottles obviously stay the same size even when mostly empty), it seems unlikely that I'll be able to find a replacement out here.
We set off back a little before 17.00 (the last bus is at 18.00), wander back through the ageing streets and broken charm of the centre (picking up an element en route), and start for the bus station at 17.20. We reach it at 17.50, find the pretty packed bus, and are on the road at 18.00. Port Said gets 5/10 because I liked it, even though there isn't much to do there except a.) shop , b.) look at the buildings and c.) watch the ships go by. We get back into Ismailia at 18.55 and set off confidently on foot (ever optimistic), equally confident take a wrong turn and incorporate a half-hour detour in what should be a twenty-five minute walk, and then head straight for Pizza Hut.
It's above KFC, just off Midan Orabi, opposite the train station and (I believe) the other (West Delta) bus station (which only serves Cairo and Alexandria), and is a popular hangout for Ismailia's youth (the area, not the too-expensive Pizza Hut). I'm unimpressed with the watered-down ketchup we get (it comes in a misleading Heinz bottle), Milla's unimpressed with her egg topping, and we're both unimpressed with the $13 price-tag. Ouch.
Back at the hotel we talk, take notes and argue (my fault) over our exact itinerary tomorrow. Hey-ho.

We're up at 08.45, Milla showers, we pack and have coffee and then head out for something to eat at 11.00. Suitably stocked up with provisions, we collect our rucksacks at 11.45 and take a taxi (a strange Lada-Fiat mix - did they have some kind of joint manufacturing?) up to the bus station where we find a 12.10 bus (actually 12.15) for Suez. We had a bit of a debate over whether to a.) leave our bags in Ismailia and return for them, or b.) take them to Suez and hope there's a Left Luggage, and then go on direct to Cairo. We've eventually opted for the latter, so off we go: Ismailia gets 2/10 - it's a bit upmarket and expensive, though dirty, but has some nice buildings.
We pass the radar/missile base, and then the end of the tunnel under the Canal, and then (just inside Suez), the bus briefly stops at a busy junction and most people get out. We stay on until, after a few kilometres of industrial estates and residential blocks, the bus eventually stops at another new bus station (Lonely Planet deceived us again), shared by East Delta and Superjet. Great. We're clearly miles from the centre of Suez and (in fact) miles from anything. Enquiries reveal that there's no Left Luggage facility - even better! With no knowledge of anywhere to leave our stuff in town, and no desire to carry two heavy rucksacks around Suez in the early afternoon sun, we have little option but to just buy onward tickets to Cairo. Ten minutes later we're pulling out of the half-empty bus station and heading west into the desert: Suez behind us doesn't get a mark because we didn't actually see it.
Away from the inexplicably fertile strip around the canal, the landscape quickly reverts to type and becomes desert: that, coupled with the Koran from the loudspeakers (we got that in the internet place in Dahab too) dulls us both to sleep for the journey. We wake, as we did in Istanbul, in the outer suburbs and they're the same as everywhere else - wide streets over-packed with cars, acres of residential blocks and the occasional monolithic public building: there are some good mosques as well, with more onion-shaped domes than the Ottoman type, but much more ornate than the Syrian type. Were stopped for ten minutes, waiting for a high-speed convoy of bikes, black cars and vans to whizz past, and then it's on to the centre. We eventually stop at more of a bus-stop than a proper station, just south of the main Ramses train station: everyone is ejected into the seething mass of people and vehicles, with their bags, and the bus disappears.
Trusting my compass and map, we set off along a smelly, dirty wide road underneath an overpass: on many of their busiest roads in Cairo, the Egyptians have just added an overpass layer on concrete pylons to double the capacity - unfortunately, each one creates a dark, dirty, litter-filled slum area underneath. We also discover, as we walk, that the pylons are normally used as public toilets (we have to weave around pissing guys) - we switch to a cleaner, parallel street after a couple of blocks. We reach our destination - a block of three very cheap hotels just off the shopping street of Talaat Harb - in twenty-five minutes or so: the block's on a narrow, incredibly busy lane of fruit and vegetable stalls (all at good pries compared with Dahab). The three hotels are spread over three floors of a run down 6-floor block with no elevator, graffiti on the walls, a partially-missing roof, treacherous stairs, and a curiously Dante-esque feel. After looking at rooms on all the floors, we take a 6-bed "double" room on the first floor for the negotiated price of 20EP (just under $3). We dump our bags, check the padlocks, and immediately set out to find somewhere else to live for the rest of our stay in Cairo.
The single advantage of skipping Suez (unless Suez is really bad) is that we have time this evening to check almost 20 hotels, pensions and hostels at our ease. We're starting towards the northern end of "Downtown", the European-styled area dating from the mid-1800s after they drained the big marshes to the west of the original city: it's all wide boulevards, filled with chaotic honking traffic (mostly without lights), thousands of weaving people and every street is lined with shops. All the hotels we look at are between the third and the seventh floors, though most have elevators (usually the old cage-type). Prices range from 25-50EP in our range (though obviously go up to over 1,000EP), and you pretty much get what you pay for. Our one surprise is that we run into Tim (Beirut/Bosra/Dahab): he's been here a few days at the Dahab Hotel, which we didn't like (it's a travellers-only place, a collection of concrete huts on the roof with bare mattresses on the floor - all the discomfort of Dahab, without the beach).
We go as far south as the Nile Hilton at the bottom of Talaat Harb (we didn't bother pricing it), and then zig-zag back up to our grotty place. Despite the marked prices, it turns out that the stallholders won't sell their produce at that price to foreigners - at least, not in the street where we're living. We have a coffee and some cheapish pastry we found ($2 per kilo), and Milla fixes her jeans, and we play backgammon (Milla found a set a few floors upstairs), and wonder when the market downstairs closes.
The noise level, of shoppers and stallholders and coffee stalls and cats and dogs and traffic and tape decks continues, seemingly just outside our window. At 02.00 someone puts on loud, loud music and the background noise becomes "Orchestra punctuated by ducks": eventually, they all seem to bugger off at about 03.00, and we get to sleep after a mosquito hunt.

We get up pretty late and stay in, having a leisurely breakfast: we meet a group of South African guys in the kitchen, who've just come up overland through Sudan and have lots of good things to say about it. Unfortunately, they've already disposed of their relevant literature. They have mixed feelings about Ethiopia - great place, horrible people (the kids) - and got robbed at gunpoint in Nairobi (their taxi stopped to ask directions at a restaurant, mid-raid): hm. We leave them to their breakfast, pack our bags and head out around 11.00: our destination is the Pension Suisse - they were pretty clean and had a nice double room with a big balcony. Also, they're a few floors up and have a working elevator (both of which we now appreciate the need for) - it's also further down Talaat Harb and closer to the museum. Outside, bizarrely, a dust cloud has engulfed all of Cairo (presumably in from the desert): the locals who are out and about have their scarves wrapped round their mouths and visibility is down to a couple of hundred metres. When we get to Pension Suisse, all the balconied rooms at the front are taken: we see a little room with no balcony, and agree to take it for 20EP until one of the front rooms is free - we also negotiate a better rate for the front room, for when we get it. Happy that we've sorted the accommodation situation, we dodge the cleaning woman (gosh, a woman!) and head over the street to Thomas Cook to check their rates. The artificially-maintained "official rate" for dollars has been re-pegged since January, it seems: from 4.60 to 5.50, which is a better rate than we were previously getting on the black market. All the other currencies have followed suit, which means that Egypt has (overnight) become 20% cheaper. Excellent.
It's early afternoon (we're taking today lazily), and Sunday seems to be a sort of weekend day in Egypt, since a lot of the shops are either closed or closing. We visit the Egyptian Museum, which is both open and pink (yes pink, like Hagia Sofia - odd, because I though the Egyptian Museum was yellow). They seem to have scrapped their infamous fee for cameras (and video cameras) presumably to help lure in tourists in these lean years (though, as with the reduced entry fees in Jordan, you can't find this out until you've already decided to visit), and are also open 09.00-18.30 - we'll come tomorrow, probably. We can visit their shop without buying a ticket, but it's full of tacky and over-priced stuff: as in Istanbul, we're looking for a good guide book, but they don't have any. A couple of blocks from the Museum is the AUC Campus (American University in Cairo - what's with this concept?), and they apparently have an excellent bookshop (there are lots of excellent bookshops in Cairo, but they're mostly in Arabic). The security guards at the gate let us in and give us directions, which we obviously misunderstand because we wander around lost for ten minutes before finding it. It's a good selection (the best since Western Europe), though quite expensive: as well as a whole bookcase of Cairo/Egypt guidebooks, they have the last Douglas Adams book/collection, which I haven't read (I read half of it there). We spend well over an hour inside, and end up buying the AUC's own guide to Egypt (with a big section on Cairo), check out the over-priced campus cafeteria and leave to find something better value to eat. Over the road are the usual fast food places (KFC, McDonalds, Hardees, etc. - by the way, who are Hardees? I've never seen them before this trip), and we opt for a KFC before heading back into Downtown in late afternoon.
What is there to say about Downtown Cairo? It's basically a grid pattern with a couple of long diagonals (like Talaat Harb) to confuse people, and made up of 6- and 7-storey buildings with narrow lanes in between. Most of the streets are one-way, which makes it easier to cross except that they have right-on-red (a rule which they give more priority to than, say, letting pedestrians cross): there are traffic police as well as lights at every junction, and they normally have to walk out in front of the mass to cars to stop them (rather than just whistling or waving their arms). The traffic policemen all have little notebooks, which they seem to be continually scribbling in (perhaps they're all working on great novels). The cars are all ages, with a lot of old Fiat and Peugeot and new Chevrolets, and taxis are black and white.
The buildings themselves are very 1850s European, though pretty dirty and rundown - as with Bucuresti, there seems to be a trend to prefer new concrete blocks, so no-one wants to live in Downtown and no-one takes care of the place. As well as an extensive local population of pigeons, the side lanes are mostly filled with litter: like mobile-phone watching in Helsinki, you can stop on any corner and see someone discarding litter within a minute - of course, it doesn't help that there are no bins in the streets. There are thousands of shops, mostly of the one-room type (which, as we've observed, tends to reduce the diversity of available products), and they mostly sell cheap crap (including a huge amount of Chinese imitation stuff, from Mammalex food mixers to Danhell and Dafduff perfumes). We look for, but don't find, a suitable replacement kettle - all the ones here are too big to comfortably carry in a rucksack. Among highlights in the shops are the mannequins in clothes shops' windows: those for younger women's fashions often have punk hairstyles, snarling lips, tongue-studs and so on - we also see a combination mother-holding-baby mannequin.
The pavements are lined with stalls selling ties, hand tissues, socks, lighters, underwear and other small items - the police occasionally patrol, presumably checking licences, which causes sudden flurries as the stalls are quickly folded up and hidden away in the lobbies of nearby blocks. Pavement etiquette is the worst yet, mainly because of groups of women walking tortoise-speed, often with arms linked and blocking the entire pavement. That's coupled with the little groups of men just standing about talking, and the tendency of anyone (not just old people) to just suddenly stop without warning. On the subject of people, many women aren't wearing headscarves here (lowest rate since Beirut), there are only a few with veils and we only spot one or two completely covered. That said, there are still a fair number of men with bruised foreheads (the mark of a devout muslim).
We price some photo places and drop off one (test) film and then hit Tourist Information, where a woman gives us a wodge of leaflets but isn't that knowledgeable - she can't tell us exactly when and what days the "Sufi Dance" (Dervish) show is on at the Citadel: we're still trying, after Konya and Aleppo. Pressing further north-east we reach Midan Ataba, which pretty much marks the boundary between Downtown and "Islamic Cairo" (not "Old Cairo" - that's a different district): there's a park to the north of it (locked, like most parks in the Islamic world always seem to be - in somewhere like Cairo it's probably the only way to stop them becoming rubbish tips), and behind the park is the second-hand book market. We fail to spot that we can get there directly by an underpass/metro station, and instead walk all the way around the park. The market is all little rows of concrete stalls with metal shutters, and is 90% closed a little wandering turns up Scott Wayne's 1990 Lonely Planet Egypt/Sudan: even 13 years out of date, it's still as good as the book we bought earlier today (damn) and we pick it up for a fraction of the cost. Interestingly, even though he's not credited, many of his lines still show up in Lonely Planet's current Istanbul-Cairo volume.
We return to the hotel (everything's closing) and have a long discussion with the young guy at the desk there about marriage customs: he's Christian (Coptic, we assume), but the whole buying gold for the bride tradition seems to hold for them too. The main difference seems to be that his wedding ring is gold, whereas muslim men don't wear gold, only silver. The evening is spent mostly reading our new literature, before crashing out early. Tomorrow we plan to spend the whole day at the Egyptian Museum.
A little note on Egyptian Arabic - they seem to have two letters which we haven't seen before firstly an "H" with three dots underneath, which they use for "J": the normal Arabic "J" is an "H" with one dot underneath, but in Egypt that letter is pronounced "G" (eg. Gebel Musa, rather than Jebel Musa). They also have a little bar with three dots underneath for the hitherto elusive "P".