I struggled to sleep again last night and had to force myself out of the suite around 10am, luckily I stumbled onto a great coffee shop and spent an hour there getting my head together.

I didn’t see a name on the coffee place but it’s really cool, tucked around a bend in an alley that looks like nothing from the street, I only noticed it because there was a small sign near the sidewalk showing a coffee bush.

Downtown is beautiful and completely deserted as it’s Sunday, it’s a national holiday and yesterday was election day.

I’ll probably write more about the Maronite’s at some point, a really interesting Christian sect, very old, they are not considered Catholic but they are led by the Pope.

Yup, more of the empty downtown, pretty though.

Beirut was a Roman city for around 700 years, some Roman ruins, like these baths are visible but most of the city has not been the subject of any large dig.

The city is quite hilly, stairs are there every time you turn around, my left knee is starting to ache a bit and stairs are bothering it so I tried to pace myself today, I walked for a few hours and covered a lot of ground but eventually called an Uber to go back home rather than walk more.

I need some clothes properly cleaned so I looked up laundries near my Airbnb, one was highly rated so I packed my stuff and called an Uber. The driver dropped me at a semi-hollowed out crumbling industrial building…. I wandered for a while until I saw men loading trucks with what looked like bags of clothes, I held up my bag and asked “Laundry?” one guy said “No English, come” and led me to a rusted out of freight elevator with no doors or walls, he motioned me to get inside, pressed a button and jumped out.

The lift slowly crawled up the shaft and eventually stopped where I could see men ironing clothes in a huge industrial area, I wandered amoung them a bit, one man approached me, said “No English…”, I made washing motions, he got another man with a little English who tried to explain to the idiot Canadian that this is an industrial laundry. I started to leave and he stopped me, shrugged, took my bag of clothes, said “Tomorrow morning” and walked away. No receipt, no number, no ticket…. tomorrow morning should be interesting.

The heat finally broke, it’s 28c today and I have walked and walked and walked, enjoying the manageable weather and exploring more of the city before I leave tonight.

Cairo has been so lovely, not what I expected, much crazier, much dirtier, much louder, but so lovely, everyone nice to me (except maybe the pickpocket). Today while walking 3 different people started chatting with me, the most common thing I heard is how badly tourism is doing, two different men said to me today “when you go home make the good propaganda about Egypt”.

Bananas seem to be a big deal in cairo…

 

While walking I stopped for one last bowl of koshari, I’ll be trying to recreate it when I get home.

 

 

 

 

Most surprising thing about Cairo: I have adjusted to the heat. It’s been around 40c most days and not even that “dry” of a heat, usually around 50-60% humidity. yet I can function for a few hours at a time in that heat and when it comes down to around 32c by 7pm I feel fine outside. This is surprising.

I had my first English speaking Uber driver (actually first English speaking person period, outside of guides) of my time in Cairo, we talked about a lot of different things (because Cairo traffic is insane and it took 40 minutes to go 4kms) and he was saying how the climate has changed in the past decade, how much hotter and dustier it is all the time, he said Cairo now has Gulf weather.

 

Cairo has the only major subway system in Africa, three lines, Mistubishi rolling stock, full sized trains and tons upon tons of people. Also it’s the most “locals only” subway I’ve ever seen, in a week I did not see a single other tourist on a train.

It was also the friendliest subway I’ve ridden anywhere, people saying hi, offering me their seat, their water, over and over.

The system is also, despite having only three lines, the most confusing I have ever ridden. The English signage is either totally nonexistent or completely inconsistent. For example signs that tell you this train is going “West” or to “Giza” or to “El-Mounib” or to “Al-Moniq” or to “Al-Mounib” are ALL the saying the same thing. None of the stations colour code the signage in any way nor are the lines named. Eventually I just had to start memorizing things and figuring out the Arabic signs.

Who could find this map confusing?

Yup….

 

Line One:

Line Two:

The only time I saw stations empty was late morning, the city steadily gathers steam all through the day, peaking around 10pm.

The oldest parts of Cairo are the Christian parts, they predate the city itself by about 400 years.

Walking downtown Cairo is… a skill. The sidewalk is taken over by vendors so you have to walk in the street, dodging in and out of lanes of traffic, waiting for an opening between two buses to shoot between them, it’s the most insane street seen I have ever seen many times over.

I was walking around the bazaar for a few hours today, the crowd you see in the picture above was pretty typical and I was keeping myself pretty aware of my surroundings.

After about an hour of wandering I suddenly felt a tickle on my right front pocket, I figured out right away what was going on and I knew that pocket was empty so I waited a second to see what happened, I felt fingers reaching inside, I reached down and grabbed his hand and squeezed hard, he yelped and hurried on ahead of me. I’m pretty sure he was using the allen key in his hand to open pockets a crack and then slipping his fingers inside, he was really bad at it though.