my favorite day in Cairo!

Today was hands down my favorite day in Cairo so far. We got to sleep in for the first time in SO LONG and I got up in time to have a leisurely breakfast which was so nice. Then Katie and I went to Bab Zuweila which is like a little bazaar that's less tourist-y than Khan el Khalili across Sharia Al-Azhar. A lot more of the locals do their shopping there, and they were just so much more polite than the people at Khan el Khalili. They're still curious about you but they just say hello and ask how you are instead of shouting out stereotypically American phrases ("Howdy doody?") or inappropriate things.

We walked around and saw all of the fruit, vegetable, and meat vendors, along with a lot of local people just going about their daily business. Three little girls ran up to Katie and I and were asking us all sorts of questions in English and Arabic and it was adorable. I found that I didn't take a lot of pictures at Bab Zuweila because I was just so busy looking around. We also got to see the tent-makers (Katie got a really tiny tent with a little camel in it) and a ton of handicrafts. I don't want to put up any pictures because I have a surprise that I'm bringing home :)

We went into one shop where the owner didn't really speak any English, so I spoke a lot of Arabic with him and he actually understood a lot of what I was saying. I can't begin to explain how fulfilling that was. It's frustrating when you try to speak Arabic with someone who knows Arabic AND English because as soon as you stumble over a word they just start talking to you in English.

Anyway, at one point we were in another shop and we saw the children's book Goha the Wise Fool, which we had talked about several times in Arabic class here and at Northeastern. We pointed it out to the shopkeeper and it turns out that he illustrated the book! I couldn't believe that my Arabic teacher at Northeastern had used the exact pictures in class that this guy had drawn for the book. I thought it was the coolest thing ever!

Katie and I also went to a photography shop called Lehnert and Landrock, which had a lot of cool photos of Egypt from the early 1900s. I bought some postcards so those should be going out as soon as I find some time to write them!

For dinner, we went to this little tiny restaurant where you have to sit outside at a table in a sort of alley. The whole menu was in Arabic so we just asked them to bring us some Egyptian dishes of whatever they thought was good. They brought out A LOT of food, and it was all delicious and really inexpensive.

1. I left smiling: The illustrator of Goha was SO nice. We were looking for certain colors of what he was selling (it's a surprise mom!), and he took out so many different things from around his shop to show us. We were there for almost 2 hours and he put up with A LOT of indecisiveness. He also answered some questions we had about other things at the bazaar and gave us directions to get to the photography shop (granted, these directions were "walk until you get to a big street with lots of cars. Then ask somebody for directions", but he tried), and left his shop to walk us all the way to a more main road to point us in the right direction.

2. A couple of pictures from the market:
Hany, the illustrator of Goha the Wise Fool!!!!!!

3. two random observations: FIRST: Every restaurant or little hole-in-the-wall place in Cairo delivers. This is not an overstatement. They all have they're little delivery vespas that you always see weaving in and out of traffic. SECOND: We've seen a vespa driving around with four people on it. FOUR. Sometimes there are 2 adults and 2 little kids on them. It just seems really unsafe. Cars are always tightly packed too. It's crazy here!