Emerald Green with Envy

(I love peas, but this green-eyed monster is darker than that!) I’m SO Jealous it’s turning my brown eyes GREEN!! But actually, I’m also utterly excited!!! My Dad and Stepmom (Alias: Nestor & Althea) are tripping the life fantastic on their way to Cairo; a year from this fall. How insanely cool is that?!? (Again with the jealousy.) Anywho, it’s Friday and I thought I’d make this blog a bit of a present to the pair of them. I LOVE YOU GUYS!!!!!

Islamic Cairo, Egypt
An amble through this overwhelming medieval microcosm, with what must be the greatest population density in the Middle East, is a remarkable passage through the Cairo of six or seven centuries ago. This ancient quarter of Cairo assails the senses, confounds, and confuses. Amid barely contained pandemonium, oddly coupled with both intense poverty and one of the world’s lowest crime rates, lies the legendary hospitality of the Egyptian people. Meanwhile, chickens, horses, and sheep walk the narrow potholed streets, further congested with men on donkey carts collecting garbage, itinerant street vendors, and people going about life as they always have. The dust and rubble offset the faded architectural grandeur of a city that was once the intellectual and cultural center of the Arab world.

Given a daunting number of sites, start at the spectacular 12th –century Citadel of Salah al-Din; its founder was known throughout Christendom as Saladin, the Crusaders’ chivalrous foe. Perched on a steep spur, this heavily fortified bastion offers a matchless panorama of Cairo’s minaret-punctuated skyline and endless sprawl. The holiest and most awe-inspiring of the city’s places of worship is 9th-century Mosque of Ibn Tulun, notable for both its grand scale and extreme simplicity. The Islamic Art Museum’s Collection, the most extensive of its kind in Egypt, spans the 7th to 19th centuries. The Khan el-Khalili’s maze of bazaars is another mind-boggler for its sheer size alone.


Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Cairo, Egypt
Most tout groups head straight upstairs for the gallery dedicated to the mind-boggling treasures of boy-king Tutankhamen. Others make a beeline for the mummy room, only recently reopened after fifteen years.

Regardless of your viewing strategy, the museum houses such an unparalleled collection of treasures that, allowing just one minute to examine each of its 136,000 pharaonic artifacts, it would take a visitor nine months to see it all. Another astounding 40,000 items remain crated in the basement, evidence of the chronic space shortage that has plagued Egypt’s greatest museum since it was founded in 1858. A visit here is overwhelming, to say the least; so are the crowds. After viewing the 1,700 objects unearthed in 1922 in the small tomb of the relatively insignificant pharaoh Tut and the two rooms of twenty-seven mummified royal pharaohs and their queens, the rest of the museum’s exhibits can seem lackluster.

Khan el-Khalili, Cairo, Egypt
Noisy, wonderful, chaotic, and awash with the smells of spices, incense, and leather, Khan el-Khalili is one of the world’s great bazaars – a sprawling, confusing, enclosed city-within-a-city first set up as a caravansary in 1382. Everyone here wants your business, your money, your time for a glass of mint tea. Whether you’re shopping or not, bypass the tiny stalls and workshops on the most trammeled pathways (which have become highly touristed) and penetrate deep where Cairenes still shop for their dowries, cotton galabiyas, fezzes, and sheehas, or hooka water pipes. This is the place to practice your haggling technique, but don’t expect to win against merchants with thousands of years of practice in their blood. Almost everything is available here. Mini bazaars within the bazaar specialize in such goods as carpets, gold, fabrics, perfume, and cosmetics.

The Great Pyramids of Giza, Cairo, Egypt
Since their logic-defying construction, the Pyramids at Giza have embodied antiquity, mystery – and far-fetched speculation. “From the summit of these monuments,” cried Napoleon, “forty centuries look upon you!”

The pyramids are the only wonder of the ancient world that have survived nearly intact. The funerary Great Pyramid of Cheops (or Khufu) is the oldest at Giza and largest in the world, built circa 2500 B.C. with some 2.3 million limestone blocks, weighing an average 2.75 tons each, and moved by a force of around 20,000 men. Two smaller pyramids nearby belonged to Cheops’s son and grandson. The Sphinx (Abu ‘l-Hol, “Father of Terror”) sits nearby, a strange figure with a lion’s body, a human face, and a royal beard.

All information was referenced from Patricia Shultz’s 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. Published by: Workman Publishing company, Inc, Copy written 2003 by Patricia Shultz. (Pages 345-348)

If you aren’t as jealous as I am… there is something very wrong with you!

P.S. Like I said last night, Nestor, if I don’t at lease get a tee-shirt I’m gonna be peevish. ;D

Enjoy your weekend all!