Visiting "Islamic Cairo"

Let me preface this by stating that the crew is assembled.
TEAM! ASSEMBLE!

Basically Robin showed up.

So our house now has all three roommates. Yay! Robin is a fun person, so I think we do a pretty good job getting along so far. She’s had a different time in cairo then us, basically she’s seen the richer part of Cairo, while we’ve been in the medium poor place for the first week. Maadi is in the nice part of town, but not the richest part. When I say rich, I mean like banquets with women in beautiful gowns.

But thats not what I’m going to talk about today!
No… today I’m going to talk about the weird shops and stores that I’ve run into in Egypt so far. Here is the list -- McDonalds, Radioshack, Pizza Hut, Century 21 (weird), Mobile Gas, Total Gas (pronounced “Toe Taal” its french), KFC, and Subway. There are a handful of interesting branches of banks (and I’d like to point out that many large companies have offices in Cairo, like BP, but thats not a consumer store).
In the general stores you can get many popular American brands, like Fruit Loops, or Pasta, or Pepsi, Wriglys, and Tabasco Sauce!!

Interestingly enough, there a ton if differences. I would have thought that Tabasco Sauce would just be imported, but no! Its actually like a different recipe. There is even an entire Label in arabic. The Pizza Hut is super nice. It is the beautiful sit down restaurant, where pizza takes up 2 pages out of an 8 page menu. The whole push for Pizza Hut to do pasta and not just Pizza was really for their international program because it frees them up to do a lot of stuff that works with the local flavor du jour. So that was strange. Mc Donalds seems to be the only company that kicks the trend. A burger is a burger.
Finally, a little about my day YESTERDAY! I’m a day behind… Yikes.

Ok, so after waiting for Robin forever, we finally just go into town and visit Alison, and Ysmiiya (can’t spell it, sorry), the friend of Alison and Marzyia (I hope I spelt your name right too, I probably didn’t). We went to “islamic Cairo, which, apparently is different from the rest of the city in some weird way. I thought it was all Islamic, lol, but this neighborhood is known for their many AWESOME Mosques. Which of course me and andrew didn’t try to get into. I doubt we could have if we wanted to.

They aren’t quite as impressive as some of the Europe stuff -- in this area -- but old and really quite cool. There are also a bunch of “real” markets that really feel like markets. There are tons and tons of people, lots of tiny little shops that sell almost any cheep piece of crap from China you could imagine. I’m sure some of it is made in Egypt too, but it takes a bit of searching. It depends which part of the markets you’re in.
One thing that did strike me as odd, or interesting was the realness or fakeness of the markets. On one market, you could buy all kinds of cheap goods dirt cheap, and it seemed like a legit market, but then as you wandered it kinda turned into a weird tourism thing, where they’d sell little stone “gaza pyramids”. There was this one store that had a whole bunch of regular metal bowls and stuff, but they had this awesome little halogen bulb that when on, and reflected off this brass stuff, reflected the wavelength of gold in normal light, so the whole store looked like it was full of “gold” even though its not. So, the whole Aladdin scene/marketplace kinda thing. So there is some truth to it, though I can’t say a whole lot of truth to it. It depends on the neighborhood, and it depends on the market. Obviously the markets now sell old tape players, universal remotes, well, basically everything you’d want to buy, but the whole “shop full of gold lamps” doesn’t happen anymore. The real gold is in real stores, behind real theft proof glass with real security guards with real AK’s.

Other fun things that happened to me this Monday -- as I’m writing this at night, the power continues to flicker on and off. The entire city block shut down for maybe 20-30 seconds, but then came on again, and it happened again a little later. Rolling blackouts… uhhghghg. I have to say that for the most part, the power supply has been very solid, only tonight has there been problems, and that for the entire city block. Of course I have to say that this was right when robin plugged in her phone, so maybe I can personally blame her for the entire brownout.
Or maybe its called a blackout, I’m not sure. What is the difference? If I had wikipedia I could tell you, but I don’t, so I can’t. Sorry.