Back to "Home Base"

We circled back to Cairo so many times that it felt like our home base. Though it's so huge that I can't really picture myself ever living there, it has a certain charm about it that makes it irresistible. Perhaps it's the fact that it's so old, with its fabulous ancient buildings, narrow streets, and its village-plus-city feel (evidenced by donkey-pulled carts). The antiquity of the city is reminiscent of Europe, while the lively streets filled with people and animals take me back to India.

For one of our weekends during our stay in Alexandria, we had to return to Cairo to muddle through tedious visa-processing procedures to get a Saudi residence visa for me and the children. So even though most of our time was spent taking endless taxis to remote places and gathering paperwork that we barely understood, we did enjoy the city a little bit. Above, Misha observes the Alex train station with wonder, getting ready to board our own train for a three-hour journey to Cairo. There's something wonderful about a train station too - almost like you have traveled back in time. That's of course coming from the point of view of an American, for whom trains are something of a novelty!

Misha thoroughly enjoyed the train ride. We rode first class, because the price difference for us was marginal. Misha was perfectly content with his iPod, his coloring pad, and the view out the window:

Back to Cairo! Here is some of that great antique architecture I was talking about:

Misha on a side-street somewhere in Cairo.

A popular square downtown with lots of outdoor cafes.

We found a cute little cafe to enjoy some fruit cocktails that were so beautiful we felt bad to eat them.

We even took a little motor boat spin on the Nile, taking in the city lights.


This photo looks straight out of Peter Pan. We discovered this nice, cheap, nothing-fancy-but-very-friendly hostel to stay in right in downtown Cairo.

Something else we fell in love with in Egypt was the language. Finally, we had opportunities to speak in Arabic everywhere we turned - in the taxi, at the store, on the beach, and even in the visa office. After we finally located the visa office (in an alley, through a non-labeled door, up to the 5th floor where walls were crumbling and the hallways were dark and dingy, and into - magically - the visa office!) we had a very comical conversation with our limited Arabic and the visa officer's very limited English. The officer was extremely friendly, which made everything light-hearted, and he enlisted the help of a computer translator. Let me tell you, computer translators are almost - not quite, but almost - useless when translating between these two very different languages. To answer one of our questions, he typed into the computer and spun it to face us. The screen said something very random like "request the walnut." Trying to make us feel better and not worry, he typed something else into the computer, for which the English equivalent was the amusing phrase, "Harmonious. Expand your chest."

We quickly learned that Egyptian colloquial Arabic differs considerably from Saudi Arabic. So many, many words are not at all what we had learned in Saudi, from "how are you" to the words for "want" and "chicken." Pronunciation patterns also differ. For example, the soft "j" sound in Saudi is replaced with a hard "g" in Egpyptian, making a word like "jamil" (beautiful) into "gamil" and "jamel" (camel) into "gamel." Egyptian drops the throaty "q" sound as well, so the word for orange changes from the Saudi "burtuqal" to the Egyptian version "burtu'an." At first we were disheartened by all the differences within the same Arabic language, but now we are appreciating them and finding out how fun it is to learn colloquial words from various Middle Eastern countries.