The view from my dining table in Midan Hussein, Old Cairo. "Midan" means "square"; the Hussein referred to is the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, whose relics are preserved in the mosque on the right of this picture.
The view in the other direction, with the minarets of Al-Azhar mosque cunningly disguising themselves as chair finials. Al-Azhar is a centre of Sunni orthodoxy which keeps getting mentioned in Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples (a very dense read, which I'm still working through). Hourani is so parsimonious with his human interest that it's good to be able to put a facade to a name.
I hope this shot doesn't give anyone headaches, but it does epitomise the endless round of vendors who throng the Midan Hussein restaurants. That over-laden boy is hawking bread to the restaurants, without much success that I could see. The vendors who did best were those selling luxuries, like music - lute-players (some commenter will correct my musical terminology) will join your table and play your request for a fee. (Those elegant missiles in the background, by the way, are metal parasols which open to shelter the crowds who gather before the mosque on Fridays.)I ate chicken kebab on a bed of some parsley-like salad, and drank lemon juice (lots of it: throughout my trip I must have drunk about three times as much as usual in the arid heat). That meal was the most expensive I had in Egypt outside the five-star conference hotel. It would have been more so if I hadn't insisted on an itemised bill, which brought the price down by a quarter, and then corrected an arithmetical error, which saved me another twenty Egyptian pounds or so. Throughout the negotiations I cast frequent glances over the cashier's shoulder to the tourist policeman on the corner of the square; I didn't need to call him over, but he may have had something to do with the restaurant's flexibility.
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