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Girlfriends on the Nile: Egypt for R&R

After a few months of work in Baghdad, I was ready for a break and decided to visit Egypt with my friend Tina, who is the Baghdad Bureau Chief for the LA Times, and New York friend Linda.
 

Linda then came into town before Tina, and Linda and I went around Cairo together for a few days. One of our favorite excursions was to the City of the Dead, the sprawling cemetery in northern Cairo which houses over 50,000 people, living in amongst the tombs. We drove in and around the streets, noting the satellite dishes on the roofs. Eventually we got out and walked around, and found a sweet old man who obligingly opened several of the tombs for us to look at.
 

Cairo’s City of the Dead

There were men in the street spinning thread on mysterious machines which looked like a large bicycle wheel. We wandered through old Coptic Cairo with its beautiful old Coptic churches and the ancient Ben Ezra synagogue. We took a long walk through old Islamic Cairo, whose many mosques seemed to be under restoration and therefore unable to be visited. But we loved walking along the tentmakers street, full of people making applique tent cloths, tablecloths, fruit markets, while gaggles of giggling school girls followed us shouting ‘hello! How are you! Where you from? What’s your name?’ and just dissolving into hysterics if we actually answered them.
 

The day before Tina arrived, Linda and I drove out to Saqqara, the site of the oldest pyramid in Egypt, the step pyramid. They recently uncovered a new tomb in this area, right now there is one which can be visited inside, with the bas reliefs and tomb decorations still visible.