Night Time Adventures

Although Ramadan officially ended tonight with the birth of the new moon, everyone still stayed up. Around 11:30 pm we headed over to Khan el Khalili (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_el-Khalili) with our brokers. We wandered around the markets for a while, stopped in and looked around a 700 year old mosque and stopped for some tea/juice. The market is open 24 hours and it was hopping. Everything you could imagine was for sale. There were people everywhere walking around and socializing. The squares were filled with people just hanging out en joying the night. The mosque was very beautiful, just as ornate as any old European church I have seen.

Ally and I had been invited to a mosque with one of our brokers for the 2nd morning prayer and since we accepted and we had to be at the mosque by 5:30am we all decided to pull an all niter. So after the tea we went looking for something a little more lively. We headed off from the market and found a place blasting Egyptian music. There were a number of men and women sitting around drinking tea, live music and some women dancing. The manager was very happy to see us and wished us all peace. One of our other brokers decided he wanted to dance and when he tried to get up and dance where the women had been it caused a big ruckus. Apparently only women were allowed to dance in the cafe.

After the cafe we wandered a little more and instead of taking a taxi home, we decided to walk through the City of the Dead to get back downtown. The City of the Dead is essentially the cemetery in Islamic Cairo (http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/city.htm ). There are millions of people who live there. People live within the mausoleums for basically free as long as they maintain them for the families. As of last year, street lights were finally provided to some areas of The City of the Dead. The people we ran into were very friendly and most of the kids would start shouting "hallo, hallo" when we walked in their direction. We came across a soccer game in the middle of a square, most of the kids playing were pretty good. Much better than the average American kid. Although some alleys had lights, many did not. The two Egyptians with us warned us not to take the unlit paths alone, but the rest of the lit area should be ok. The unlit areas can be dangerous. There are small packs of dogs, some mugging and there is a cultural belief that you will hear the screams of the dead. Rumor has it that the screams are not coming from the dead, but rather from the very poor who live in the cemetery and are suffering from organ harvesting scams. From my understanding this is a fairly well known and somewhat widespread activity that is tossed under the rug and virtually ignored. Apparently demand for the organs/bodies comes from a wide range of places including universities. Since we were a group of 5 we took some of these unlit paths and we did run into some people who lived outside and in the mausoleums and a few dogs. No dog-packs nor organ harvesters thankfully.