Saturday, September 15, 2007

More Mini Chapters on Cairo

So here's my second installment of chapters on Cairo. Now it's pretty hard to post tons of pictures on this blog, but if you want to see all of them, just check out my facebook albums. They have nearly all my pictures. Enjoy.

Horseback Riding at the Pyramids at Midnight


Yup, that's exactly correct. After AUC's Welcome Back Mohammed Noor (Egypt's version of Justin Timberlake) concert, a bunch of us went horseback riding by the pyramids. I'm not going to lie, but that was one of my most scariest experiences alive. Our guide gave all the good horses to the girls and basically gave Dan, Sergio, and I some craptastic horses. My horse just didn't know how to turn left so I kept veering off into the Sahara, scared for my life. Aside from it being nearly pitch black, I slept that night at 4AM with the most sore ass one can imagine. It still slightly stings now. Anyway, enjoy the pleasant pictures. You can kind of make out the Giza Pyramids in the back. They are the three triangular structures in the background.








The Citadel, Azhar Park, The Military Museum, and the Police Museum

The morning after the excruciatingly intense horseback riding night, I was ready and awake for AUC's trip to the Citadel and Azhar park. The Citadel was planned by the great Salahuddin and then completed by his son. It's this immense stronghold complete with aqueducts and all. Then Muhammad Ali, one of the governors of the region built a Turkish style mosque within the compounds. Since the compound exemplifies extreme prowess and power, the Egyptian government also diecided to make it's Military Museum and it's Police Museum within the compounds. Here are the pictures from that morning.






Then, in the afternoon, we went over to Azhar Park for the closest thing I could find to Bangladeshi food. The park was made by the Agha Khan's son. It's beautiful and while there, I was reminded of Omar since he's Ismaili. Anway, here are some pictures from there.



Ramadhan and Some Great Mosques

So the holy month of Ramadhan, in which Muslims fast for a month, started three days ago. So far, I've had a much better anticipated time dealing with the transition to Ramadhan than I expected. There's this place that I usually eat at that treated me so hospitably for Sohour (which is when Muslims wake up before sunrise (~3:30AM) to eat a little before fasting the whole day. Then, when I went over to my friend Shaun's house, the taxi driver didn't want to take money from me. Instead, him and his son befriended me. I also got to experience a very Bangla iftaar (iftaar is the term for the breaking of fast) since I ate with Shaun and his two cousins. They are amazing cooks and I am forever indebted to them for helping me transition so smoothly to this country.

Then, on the second day of Ramadhan, which was a Friday, I went to Jummah prayer at the great Azhar Mosque with Ali and Faria. We were the few international kids that were actually fasting with the rest of this country and not going out to the beach and other resort towns like most of the other international kids this weekend. Anway, after praying in a mosque that was well over 1000 years old (where else can you get that kind of history???), we walked over past Khan El Khalili to the Imam Hussein Mosque. After learning so much about this mosque from our Al-Kitaab textbook, I couldn't believe that I finally got to visit it. I took some pictures of it and it's exactly like the DVD described it, kind of creepy actually. The people inside were really intense about praying for the man and asking favors. It was really bustling compared to the Azhar mosque. People even accosted Faria and stole 20 lbs. from her. So we jetted quickly and waited for my friend Gendy to pick us up. While we waited, we chatted with this really cool 55 year old Egyptian lady with Turkish roots. She prophesied a whole bunch of stuff for us.




Gendy took us the Moattim, which is the only hill in Cairo. From it, you can get a great view of the city. The Moattim basically looks like Hollywood and the California hills with villas and all. We saw the White House, which is the house of Nasr's private pilot, an amazing house. He then drove us to New Cairo, the location of the new AUC, another world of itself. I'm glad I got to go to AUC while it was still in downtown rather than that random remote location. We also drove by GUC (German University in Cairo) and we scoffed at it. Then we came back to the Moattim to get iftaar at this amazing place called Andrea, not Andrea in Mohandaseen but Andrea on the Moattim. For $8.30 USD, I feasted on a five course meal. It was ridiculous. I wished that place was closer to where I lived. After packing up more than half our food to go, I returned home to pass out. Now I haven't uploaded my pictures onto the computer for this day, but as soon as I do, they will be up.




Soccer

Just pictures now, stories later.




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