Earlier today, I went to a park in a neighborhood in Old Cairo, where UNICEF and a few other NGOs hosted a carnival for kids — many of them living on the streets of the city — to have an afternoon of fun.
Here’s a photo my sister took of me caught in the act, looking up at the ruins of Madinet Habu, on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor.
I forgot to upload this shot earlier, taken in an alleyway during my walking tour the other day, but I like the shot so I’m posting it now.
Unlike some of the malignant personalities I’ve met over the years. I wonder if it make sense in Arabic? Honest advertising after they opened a second branch? And, this store in Cairo, which I won’t show on a family blog, but will link to anyway.
Valentines Day is quite the holiday here, and the stores in my neighborhood are going all out with the stuffed toys, flowers, chocolates and red and pink gift items. There’s even fancy and naughty lingerie for sale in some storefronts. These photos are of the Monte Carlo store on the corner opposite my building, where …
On a walking tour of Islamic Cairo today, we strolled among the alleys filled with homes, madrassas and mosques built from the 11th to the 17th centuries. We began at the Bab Zuweila, an 11th century gate of the old Fatimid city wall (circa 1092 AD). I climbed up in one of the minarets for …
Wanted to share some more images of Medinat Habu, the extraordinary ruins of temples built by Rameses III, Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III in the New Kingdom, from the 1400s to the 1100s BCE. It was one of my favorites of the temples we visited. The crowds were smaller and the temple still had so much …
When Abu Simbel was first seen by the Swiss explorer Jean-Louis Burkhardt in 1812, the heads of the pharaoh Rameses II were barely visible above the sand. The sand was excavated five years later by Giovanni Belzoni, who was the first European to enter the temple and see the statues and reliefs inside. There are …
Finally, some video evidence of the traffic I put up with every day in Cairo (with a tip of the hat to gadling.com for pointing me to this youtube video): Ain’t it nuts?
LEBANON’S SOOTHSAYERS In the last of the video stories I produced in Lebanon, New York Times reporter Hassan Fattah and I met with a TV astrologer and a well-known psychic who are among numerous soothsayers and fortune tellers followed closely by the public there. Clairvoyants have become Lebanon’s unlikely political players in a country …