Vacationing in Cairo

We had a free day on Thursday, a holiday celebrating Egypt reclaiming the Suez canal. I went to see the Citadel of Cairo and looked around two of the mosques. Compared to a church a mosque seems very open and airy, probably because there are no pews, statues, altars or paintings. The buildings themselves were very impressive.

Stop me if you've heard this one. A Buddhist, an atheist and a Jew walk into the mosque one morning...

Thursday evening the plastic surgery department treated us to a cruise on the Nile. We left the dock about half an hour before sunset. Here's a picture of Dr. Jihan Mohasseb, an Egyptian plastic surgeon living in Germany, in front of the Cairo Tower. The tower was built in the late fifties and is lit up at night.

Dr. Riham El-dasouki, the lady below with the big smile, is one of the plastic surgery residents at Aim Shans. She was charged with making our visit comfortable and she did a marvelous job. From the very first day she anticipated our needs and made sure that anything we wanted would appear. The Nile cruise was her last  function and she made it memorable.

The buffet included lamb, turkey, eggplant and a variety of side dishes. The hospitality in Egypt was the best I've encountered in the middle east.

 We didn't talk much about the revolution but I got the sense that it was very much on people's minds. One of the students from Mansoura went to Tahrir square early on and was attacked by the police. He came home with a broken arm, and his father didn't speak to him for three days. He felt terrible about this when he realized how frightened and angry his father felt, but he didn't regret participating. Another guy told me how his friends would organize a demonstration by telephone when the internet was shut down. I think the mood was generally hopeful about the future of a representative government in Egypt. Everyone that I talked to made it clear they were in favor of a secular state, but some of the Coptic students were worried about the possibility of an Islamist government. I think their concerns were justified by the violence that broke out on the day I left.