If beans finished, I am not to be responsible. Egypt: Part III.

We arrived in Cairo at ten in the morning without incident, which was a relief, considering we had inadvertently purchased our train tickets through the Luxor black market, and weren’t positive they would actually work.

We dropped our bags at our hotel, and then headed to Cairo’s Islamic Quarter home to the Cairo Citadel and Al-Azhar Mosque, among other things.  Despite hours spent valiantly roaming the streets of the Islamic Quarter, we never made it to the Citadel, but we did explore some beautiful mosques, including the Al-Azhar.

View from our hostel.

Exploring the Islamic Quarter.

Mosque

The last fez maker in Cairo.

Souk.

Cool building we saw in the Souk.

100% Egyptian cotton!

Facade of a mosque.

Climbing up to the roof of a mosque.

View from a mosque roof. Not sure what it was called. Interesting fact: the building that is visible between the two minarets turned out to be the Cairo Citadel, which we spent hours looking for that day.

Cairo: City of a thousand minarets.

Looking down into the mosque.

There's the Citadel again.

After spending time on the roof, we toured the inside of the mosque.

Mosque ceiling.

There were a lot of ornately carved walls and doors in the mosque; mainly because it is forbidden to represent people in art in these religious buildings.

Looking up.

Another ornate door. Mesmerizing.

Another picture of the mosque ceiling.

One of the old city gates.

As we were trying to find the Citadel, we got the feeling we might have wandered a bit outside the Islamic Quarter.

Inside of the church.

Cool stained glass.

This was in the Al-Azhar Mosque.

Ceiling of a library-type room we explored in the mosque.

Al-Azhar.

Inside the mosque.

Al-Azhar at sundown.

Every minaret was lit up at night, usually with green lights, but sometimes with all sorts of colors.

Sufi dancer.

After a quick dinner, we attended a free Sufi dancing performance (not sure if ‘performance’ is the right word) which was held at something called the Wekalet El-Ghouri Arts Center. Sufi dancing is the art of spinning continuously in a circle for a nauseatingly long time (one dancer was spinning for over 25 minutes during our performance), accompanied with traditional Islamic music. This spinning wasn’t always at a constant pace, either. Depending on the tempo of the accompanying music, the dancers would speed up or slow down, or even whip their heads around and around. Supposedly the dancer (also called a Whirling Dervish) is supposed to concentrate on the music and become closer to God. Regardless of whether you believe this or not, the performance was nothing short of incredible. The dancers were clothed in brightly colored, three-layer dresses which flowed out from their bodies as they twirled around. As the dance progresses, they would remove the outer two layers f their dresses, ending the dance with only the bottom layer. I assume there’s some significance to this, but they didn’t explain it, and I didn’t Google it, so I guess we’ll never know.

The dancing was accompanied by traditional music.

This guy was very in to his symbols.

Whirling dervishes.

A very unique visual experience.

Meet Ramses: called a Dhub in Arabic.

 After the performance, we headed to the Souk to wander around for a bit. There, amidst the hordes of venders selling worthless tourist trinkets, we came across a store selling various pieces of preserved animals, including an intact stuffed lizard. Needless to say, I immediately experienced a strong urge to buy this lizard. So, after bargaining the shopkeeper down a bit, that’s exactly what I did. Thus Ramses joined our group. I thought there was no way my night could possibly be any better, and then I found ten Egyptian pounds on the ground.

Thursday, October 19 was our last day in Egypt, and we spent it touring the Coptic Quarter of the city, which was conveniently accessible via the Cairo metro, unlike the Islamic Quarter. There we visited numerous old churches and some cemeteries, all of which featured a lot of paintings/statues/carvings of St. George, the patron saint of the Copts.

Church.

The ruins of an old Roman towaer.

Gate to a church/cemetery compound.

Mosaic in something called the Hanging Church in the Coptic Quarter.

Another mosaic.

Hanging Church.

This is the Hanging Church, the most famous church in the Coptic Quarter. It is so named because of it's location directly on top of a gateway to an old Roman fortress. There has been a church on this site since as far back as the 3rd century AD. It served for a time as the seat of the Coptic Pope, and is home to many ancient Coptic artifacts and relics.

The ornate insides of the church.

Cool doorway.

Another intricately carved door.

The church was richly decorated.

There were also some cool stained glass windows.

Very cool.

The Church of St.George.

St. George, or Mar Guirgis.

Inside the church of St. George.

Lots of gold going on in this church.

An incense burner, one of many hanging in the church.

Cacti.

A tomb in the Coptic cemetery that we toured. The language on the tomb is Coptic, which is based on Greek, but includes several characters from Egyptian hieroglyphics.

This is where I imagine vampires would live, if they existed. I got lost in this cemetery for twenty minutes, and I can tell you that it's creepy even in broad daylight.

Tomb statue.

A tourist store in the quarter that we walked into. So much stuff.

Some graffiti we saw in the streets of Cairo as we were walking back to the center of the city.

More graffiti. Very interesting.

  After spending several hours in the Coptic Quarter, we returned to the center of Cairo for dinner, then to the Islamic Quarter to spend the last of our Egyptian pounds. Finally, we made our way to the central bus station to catch the bus which would take us back across the Sinai to the border crossing at Taba.

PS: To explain the title, it was taken from a menu of a Cairo restaurant that we ate at. The menu claimed that the restaurant's founder originated the famous phrase: "If beans finished, I am not to be responsible." The actual meaning of this remains a mystery.