Egypt: Some Tidbits
Feb. 10th, 2011 01:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deirdreThere's three tidbits I wanted to share, images of the Egyptian people from the two days we spent in Cairo and Alexandria.
First, when we were driving around Cairo, there were donkey-pulled carts in among the cars on the road and the buses. We were alongside such a cart, filled to capacity several layers deep with the roundest watermelons I'd ever seen. There was only the slightest area for a driver to sit (it was an open cart with barely any front and no sides) and the wife was sitting on the bed of the cart. The wind gusted, blowing one end of her bright blue hijab away. She tried to hold onto the cart with one hand and adjust her scarf with the other. While I'd have loved to have taken a picture of that, it would have been disrespectful to do so, so I did not.
When we were in the Egyptian museum (which is right off Tahrir Square), I was sitting outside the King Tut exhibit. An Egyptian couple was there, and the wife was standing and the man was sitting, the wife wanted to sit down and she shooed the husband toward me. I said hello and we were talking, but he was obviously uncomfortable. It was a social taboo for him to sit between his wife and a woman he wasn't married to (even though I was married to someone a few feet away). So I suggested that he swap places with his wife (who didn't appear to understand English), then they could both sit in comfort, which they did. It's funny when you run into social taboos you don't know about.
In Alexandria, we went to the catacombs, which were overrun with a litter of kittehs! So one of the women from our group went across the street to the market to get some milk (and possibly cat food) for the kitties, but the market only took Egyptian currency and none of us happened to have any -- the touristy places we were going took credit cards or dollars or our tickets had already been bought by the tour company. One of the women who worked at the Catacombs, seeing our love of kittens, went and bought the milk herself, and refused accept payment for it.
I kept seeing the same motif in cars in Egypt and eventually I got a usable photo. Pretty much every sedan with a rear deck had a Qu'ran and a stuffed animal there:
If you want to see all the photos from Egypt, start here and click on images to the right. The last Egypt one is the Pepsi cans.
First, when we were driving around Cairo, there were donkey-pulled carts in among the cars on the road and the buses. We were alongside such a cart, filled to capacity several layers deep with the roundest watermelons I'd ever seen. There was only the slightest area for a driver to sit (it was an open cart with barely any front and no sides) and the wife was sitting on the bed of the cart. The wind gusted, blowing one end of her bright blue hijab away. She tried to hold onto the cart with one hand and adjust her scarf with the other. While I'd have loved to have taken a picture of that, it would have been disrespectful to do so, so I did not.
When we were in the Egyptian museum (which is right off Tahrir Square), I was sitting outside the King Tut exhibit. An Egyptian couple was there, and the wife was standing and the man was sitting, the wife wanted to sit down and she shooed the husband toward me. I said hello and we were talking, but he was obviously uncomfortable. It was a social taboo for him to sit between his wife and a woman he wasn't married to (even though I was married to someone a few feet away). So I suggested that he swap places with his wife (who didn't appear to understand English), then they could both sit in comfort, which they did. It's funny when you run into social taboos you don't know about.
In Alexandria, we went to the catacombs, which were overrun with a litter of kittehs! So one of the women from our group went across the street to the market to get some milk (and possibly cat food) for the kitties, but the market only took Egyptian currency and none of us happened to have any -- the touristy places we were going took credit cards or dollars or our tickets had already been bought by the tour company. One of the women who worked at the Catacombs, seeing our love of kittens, went and bought the milk herself, and refused accept payment for it.
I kept seeing the same motif in cars in Egypt and eventually I got a usable photo. Pretty much every sedan with a rear deck had a Qu'ran and a stuffed animal there:
If you want to see all the photos from Egypt, start here and click on images to the right. The last Egypt one is the Pepsi cans.