I'm back!

Hello all! After many long days away I am returned to the blogosphere. To make up for my complete failure as a blogger I am going to try to add some pictures to this one. I don't know what exactly Bill has written about. but two weekends ago we went to the Khan ElKhalidi, the biggest market/souk/craziness in Cairo. It was really cool and completely overwhelming in the best kind of way. It is located in Islamic Cairo (which is just a term signifying when that piece of the giant jigsaw puzzle that is Cairo was founded/built) an absolutely beautiful part of the city, retaining a fair amount of medieval architecture that makes for a welcome change from the rather modernist and utilitarian architecture that dominates downtown and the neighborhoods west of the Nile. The Khan is basically a huge labyrinth of alleyways and unpaved streets (this doesn't stop giant whales of tour buses from pushing their way through it) filled with shops selling everything under the sun. Everything from local spices to mass produced clothing from china or somesuch. In some ways it is very touristy in that it is quite a spectacle, but it is actually a real market when tons of Cairenes love to do their shopping. It is apparently always packed, but is particularly impressive during Ramadan. At the center of the Khan is a tea shop called Fishawi's that claims to have been open everyday for over 200 years. It was predictably crowded, so we went to the edge of the Khan and got "Egyptian pancakes," which are somewhere between a funnel cake and a crepe and are incredibly delicious.

Anywho, this weekend the government apparently decided to make a new holiday, or move a holiday, or something, and so we have an unexpected long weekend this weekend. This a really exciting for a number of reasons. We had originally planned to go to Alexandria this weekend, but then we had sort of canceled that because our amazing and wonderful Egyptian Colloquial teacher invited our class over to her house for a real live Egyptian Iftar on Friday. Now that we have Sunday off, however, we are thinking of going up Saturday morning and coming back Sunday evening. We will see what happens. Iftar is, as well as being the word for normal "breakfast" is also what they call the breaking of the Ramadan fast after the sun goes down. It's a big exciting deal--if you walk down the street just before sundown you see tons of tables set up along the streets filled with yummy looking food and surrounded by very hungry looking people. It's a big social event, but since we don't really have any Egyptian friends yet we haven't been able to experience it. I will be sure to write all about that. Until then....