A walk from Khan El Khalili to the North Wall

I loved opening my mail this morning! Look what a good friend sent me!

With instructions - print, shred, and add milk!

I have been chuckling for hours!

We went for a walk yesterday. Cairo is cooling down now and it is bearable to walk longer distances, and pleasant to meander. Mind you - the temperature did not really stop me going out before, but there was a sense of girding up my loins and bracing myself as I walked into the wall of heat. There is nothing elegant about being sweaty and I hate it.

The papers, for some time, have been printing stories about 'Thoroughfare' - a walk which many of us have been doing for ages, but which Cairo has been putting real work into. the road has been dug up completely, new drains inserted, and repaved! Usually in Cairo these things get about halfway through and stay that way so for the next few years people are avoiding large mountains of earth which become the dumping ground for garbage.

Anyway, we took the morning to have a look. It was inferred that lots of things which have been closed all of the time I have been here are now open. Well - most of them weren't, though they are undoubtedly cleaner and clearer to look at the outside. I have been looking forward to such to the Textile Museum, but now it seems that there will be no hope - it is still firmly closed for reconstruction and when I complained that they had had three years the girl smiled and said "Maybe another two?"

Anyway - this is a photo essay! Long essay - longish walk and I could not decide what to cut out! I cannot believe I have not even talked about Libya and Tunisia either!

It is early, and a Friday morning, and most of the shops are still closed in Ramadan at 9.30am

This door was on an old Wikalat behind the little gold souk off to the side of the main walk. We were wandering down quiet alleys, delighting in the fact that people were few and those out still looked sleepy. These little doors inside a big one allowed camels to be kept inside and people to move in and out.

A junk shop was putting out is treasures, and I loved the little blue bedhead. Oddly enough we saw another one later.

I liked the pattern in this grill on the mosque at the beginning of the walk. I know swastikas have such unfortunate connotations now - but liked the way they reverse in this pattern. Note the name of Allah repeated in the centre.

Another grill, with the bars plastic wrapped, Christo style!

And a really stunning door, brass clad. This mosque was closed. I have heard it is the most beautiful of all - the most spectacular internal space - so I have my fingers crossed that the two weeks they assured us was the opening date will not stretch into six months.

This is the minaret for the Mosque, madrasa and mausoleum mentioned above - Al-Nasir Mohamed (built 1304). The detail is the little bit to the right of the base - simply blown up from a shot I took from the other side of the road and about three storeys lower! It is stunning carved fret-work.

Door of the next mosque and a detail - to show the beautiful silver inlay

...the shelter over the pool

.. and another beautiful door off the courtyard

...lamps and shadows

...the window over the door

...looking out from inside

...and up!

...lamps in the entrance

Tired, and Ramadan is hard - detail is just enlarged from the original

The sabil-kuttub where the street divides - these beautiful buildings are distinctive for Old Islamic Cairo - the well below, the school for young children above. Mothers can bring their children and take water for the home, then return to collect them and another load of water.

Big door to a large wikalet, now mostly gone - and a detail

Apartments

...home among the onions

Copper tips for minarets, and blood on the wall from the last Eid

Hessian bags from the supplier

The tinsmiths

...people and produce

...sweet potato roaster and onions

and still more onions

A tiny gem of a Fatimid Mosque - note the curling grapes and leaves on the text, and these shapes are distinctive for Fatimids.

Because I liked the compositions

More junk

Sidecar in front of another sabil-khuttub and shadows on stone

Stacked cardboard boxes for shoes

Doors -and windows

That is it for now. In the interests of all of us I edited - a lot - from the 187 photos I took. It is so hard to take a bad photograph in Cairo. Well done if you made it this far.

I wish - that there was a website which offered a service to print off an entire blog and mail it to me!

I want mine, and my son's! I would love to have both bound as books!

Check out Sam's - now finished but a great read.

http://tourbilon.blogspot.com/

I have searched but cannot find such a thing.

I wish also that the business I have considered starting - called www.faults on me.com or www.meaculpa.com - was being operated somewhere.

This business will mail gifts, or send flowers to those you have loved and forgotten. When you contact them in panic they will organise the gift along with a very apologetic note that claims the flowers (or gift) was actually ordered two weeks ago and went missing in their computer system - or an employee was on leave and no-one checked his mail - or whatever - but THEY take the blame.

Wouldn't that be a terrific internet business??

But - I really really want the printing service. I am scared Blogger will die one day and I will lose a lot of the early posts that I did not copy to my mail as I didn't know how then!

Jenny

Goha and the Donkey Walk.

There are stories all over the Middle East bout the 'wise fool' - a man portrayed as a rather dull and bumbling character with a huge store of wisdom. In Egypt he is Goha, in some countries he is Mullah Nasruddin.

One of the pieces I took with me to France with the tentmakers was a Goha children's story. I have just had an email from a friend asking me to send an image to someone who wrote to her about it, knowing that she was the reason we were invited to France.

I have written it up, and thought I would blog it since I am in heavy-blogging-mode today.

Goha decides to teach his son something of life. He tells his boy that they will take a walk withthe donkey.

Goha rides, and the little boy walks behind. They meet a man (represented only in the bottom corner - but you need to imagine him in every image) who is horrified. "It is shocking," he says, "that such a lazy father could exist - that you would allow such a little boy to walk while you selfishly ride the donkey." It reads as a circle clockwise!

Goha is embarrassed and gets off so the little boy now rides while he walks behind.

Another man is shocked that the father should walk while such a little boy adds almost no weight to the donkey. He points out, "the donkey is a very strong animal and both can ride on it. What is the point of owning a donkey if you insist on walking?"

Both get on. The donkey's head is down and he is puffing.

They meet another man who is very shocked that they should risk exhausting such a brave and honourable animal. "Get off and give him a rest," he says. "He is so tired."

They get off and as they walk away the man calls out - "by rights, you should be carrying that wonderful little animal for all the good service he has done for you in the past. Then you will understand what it is to carry a burden all your life."

Goha picks up the donkey and carries him the rest of the way home. The donkey is smug and smiling.

When they reach home Goha says to his son, "I hope you learned a lesson from this."

"Yes", says his son, "I learned that it would save a lot of changing places if we just carry the donkey in the beginning."

"No, says Goha - "You learnt not to listen to anyone, but to make up your own mind, and to do things in the way you wish to do them without the interference of others. Listening to everyone and trying to do what they all want will make no-one happy except a donkey."

Tiny Shoes

I have the most exquisite new shoes. Perhaps I should say I have the most exquisite old shoes.

My husband gave them to me for my birthday, and I cannot believe how well he knows me, and what a perfect gift they are, and that a man who will eat weevils with his breakfast rather than throw out perfectly good breakfast cereal (see the last blog) would spend so much on such a fanciful and evocative and useless gift.

They are Syrian wedding shoes, almost eight inches long and made of wood, and camel bone, and inlaid with mother of pearl and low grade silver metal. The soles are raised above the ground - not just at the heel, but at the toe and the heel. This was to make the bride taller and more visible. In somewhat more recent pairs the shoes are bigger and the stilt sections are very high. My tiny shoes are only two inches higher.

They are held on with a single strap, which was deep red velvet, rich and lush, It is embroidered in couched gold thread, now worn and dull, and the red velvet has faded to a soft greyed ashes-of-roses pink. The sequins look like celluloid, and are curled with age, each attached with a single stitch through a tiny clear bead. Under the sequins in a few places is one jewel-like spot of red.

They are the most endearing shoes. The little bride must have been all of eleven years old, pre- pubertal, innocent and a child. My grandchildren at the same age probably know more about sex and marriage than she did.

For one day she must have been so special. She would have been dressed up, put into the most beautiful clothes and shoes and fussed over. Her younger sisters might have envied her. She might have had every hair taken from her body, and the hair on her head washed and scented with rose water or orange-flower. Her mother would have brushed it, proud of her daughter and perhaps given her some advice on marriage and the handling of husbands. She probably advised her daughter on how to cope with him once she was ready for a marriage bed, because I have been amazed in the past about how explicit advice on such matters are in the Middle East. Perhaps her mother cried.

The little bride probably, like the child-wife of the Prophet, was not expected to share her husband's bed until after she hit puberty. She probably married a cousin - as he would be known to the family, and also it was a way to keep the large amount of money and jewelery that the groom had to pay to her, and her parents, in the family. From that day on she lived with her husband and his family, and was possibly an unpaid servant and kitchen hand to his mother. I hope her mother-in-law was kind and patient to such a young girl, but that was not always the way.

I do not actually know any of this, but I can hold those shoes in my hand and there is a lump in my throat for the little girl who wore them.

Hear no weevil, see no weevil

My husband loves Weetbix Multigrain. He has at times begged visitors to bring packets from Australia, but they are heavy, hard to carry, and his supplies are getting low. I tease him about it from time to time. He would have given our children a very hard time if they had insisted, in postings in Syria and Malaysia and Jordan, on having a particular cereal. Here he is so fond of these that he has been known to hide the packs in the back of our storage cupboards so visitors will not find them and eat them - even if they have just carried them out from Australia.

He is down to the last pack. He only has these because I had tucked them so well into the back of the deep cupboard under the toaster at one point with about five in the house some months ago - that he could not find them and opened one of his last new packs. They were forgotten - and unknown to me - started to grow.

A couple of weeks ago I pointed out that I had found his Weetbix - an almost full pack with only a few missing. He was thrilled. I noticed he was using them - they were left on the top bench (no visitors just now) and the pack was slowly going down.

Today he confessed. They are infested with weevils. He said that it got a bit hard by the third morning to make himself eat them with so much wriggling going on. I cannot believe he ate them wriggling for three mornings.

So - he microwaved the packet.

"It wasn't a good idea," he said in a thoughtful way, "it rather brought out the flavour of the weevils in a most unfortunate way."

For two more mornings he had struggled with his favourite cereal, microwaved and now strangely leathery, reeking of steamed weevil, and with small bodies floating - all sizes of grub, and a few crunchy brown ones at the beetle stage, absolutely determined not to throw out something he loved.

This morning the conversation started as I was bemoaning the difficulty of deciding what to eat for breakfast. Ahmed, our lovely Egyptian chef, had chopped a mango for me yesterday, but I found it after dinner and ate the better bits out of the bowl. Egyptians do not mind mangoes that are dark and transparent when you cut them open - and almost at the slithering-out-of-the skin stage. I like them firm and golden and opaque. This was a compromise mango - some of the outside was firm and golden, and I ate these bits and even shared them with Bob. I tasted one of the dark slimier bits and didn't like it.

This morning I mentioned that it was a pity the rest of the mango was not good as it would be nice for breakfast. I commented that we had put it back in the frig but I would chuck it out and tell Ahmed not to bother with mangoes at that stage as neither of us liked them. I was almost out the door when Bob said "Don't throw it out."

I turned and asked why not as I knew he didn't like it that way either.

He said, "the rotting mango drowns the taste of weevils quite well."

So - this morning, he finally confessed, he had eaten leathery Multigrain Weetbix strongly flavoured with weevil, with rotten mango to drown the taste! What is worse - he was prepared to do the same tomorrow when the mango was worse.

And to think I was complaining that I didn't know what I felt like for breakfast!

So for those who think ambassadors live a life of luxury - I thought this might change your mind. Mind you - not all ambassadors are like mine.