Islamic Cairo, and awesome burgers

Saturday: 5-24

After about 4 hours of sleep from a late night, we wake up just in time to catch the bus for a tour of Islamic Cairo. Grabbed a little bit of breakfast and then loaded up the vans for a tour of 3 different style mosques. The first mosque was the mosque of Ibn Tulun, and it was a mud brick mosque with very bland and basic design. Very peaceful and quiet. We walked up the minaret and had a beautiful view of all of Cairo. Our tour guide was very proficient but she was fairly annoying. She kept treating us like we were really dumb, and kept asking annoying rhetorical questions…but I just tried to tune her out and enjoy the peace and quiet of the beautiful places we visited…the next stop was the Mosque and School of Sultan Hassan. This was more modern than the first. There were more decorations along the walls, just generally more aesthetically interesting. The best part of the tour here was this room that was acoustically engineered perfectly for singing the prayer. One of the Sheikh’s took us into the room and he showed us around. Then, out of nowhere, he began to sing the prayer…this was unbelievable. I have never had the hair stick up on my neck like this before. Listening and watching him sing, with the sound echoing so perfectly throughout the whole mosque was a total sensory experience…unreal…we exit this mosque and load up the busses and head to the last stop of the day, the Citadel of Salah al-Din and the mosque of Muhammad Ali. This mosque was much more modern than the previous 2. It had a marble open area as you first walk in, and then the inner part of the mosque was absolutely beautiful. It had monster high ceilings with stain glass windows. Lights were hanging from the ceilings on these old rickety chains…very cool. When we exited the main room, we had the most amazing view of Cairo. The Citadel is up on a hill just outside the city, so the panorama view was awesome. The sandy hazy smog covering the shamble towns in the foreground with the highrise building of downtown in the distance. And if you looked REALLY hard you could see the outline of the Pyramids way off in the distance…super awesome.

Back to the hotel and head to lunch at pizza hut…back to the hotel, did some blogging, and then decided to go bowling…I was very excited. We take a cab to the lanes which was difficult because no one knew where it was. Get to the lanes and they look decent. Start bowling, and there is no wax on the lanes, so my curve ball wasn’t moving like it does back home at Ravena Lanes…o well, it was still a lot of fun. Back to the hotel, and we head to Vivant to hang out and meet up with Omar, another student I met at the dialogue. He gets there and say to Sean and I “You guys aren’t really going to eat here are you? I'm gonna take you to the best burger place in Cairo”…how could we object…so we head out and hop in his car…yea it’s a BMX 3 series…SO sick! He starts driving, and says I don’t usually drive this car crazy, I leave that for my Mitsubishi. So we start cruising and he starts driving about half as crazy as Mohammed did the previous day. But the fact that we were in a BMW, just made it so much better. So about 30 minutes of cruising, flying down the highway, we arrive in Maadi and get to the burger joint. He shows us the size of the burgers and our eyes almost fall out. They are about 6x6 inch square patties...absolutely massive. So we order them up and eat like gods. The meat wasn’t like an American hamburger but it was close enough…back in the car, and another cruise back to the hotel and pass out…

Peace

-Al