An American Professor in Cairo: Dinner downtown and AUC faluka ride

On Thursday night my excellent tour guide Scott took Mike and I downtown to meet some other AUC faculty at a restaurant right in the middle of downtown Cairo, near the old AUC campus. Scott & Mike are here as Fulbright scholars. They both study religon, Scott from a political science perspective and Mike is a sociologist. They let someone from the business school tag along in hopes of enlighting me on something.

We took the metro from Maadi to downtown. Here is a picture of the Maadi metro station:

and here is a picture of the mosque adjacent to the Metro station:

This is a clock at the station. I just get a kick out of the Arabic numbers!

This is a picture of the original AUC campus. The campus was in the center of downtown, which was great in some ways, because it really connected you with the city. On the other hand (so I've heard) it also connected you with traffic, smog, noise, etc. So most are happy to be in the new campus, which was built in large part (at least, I have been told) with a grant from USAID.

We had dinner on the roof of a hotel (sadly, I cannot remember the name) downtown. The nice thing about hotels downtown is that the food is good AND they serve beer, which is kind of hit and miss at other restaurants in Cairo. The view was spectacular, although you can't tell it from these pictures. You could see a large part of Cairo all the way to the Nile.

I took a picture of the group at dinner:

Here is the view from our table:

I ate until I was stuffed and we all had a couple of beers. The food was terrific, very mediterranean. I don't know what all of it was, but we had humus, bobagonoosh (however you spell that!), breads, some meat dishes of which one was chicken livers (fried and salty). I tried it all. Our bill for all 7 of us totaled a whopping 550 Egyptian pounds, so my dinner, beers, and tip cost me about $17 in US dollar terms.

Here is a picture on the street downtown on our way back to the Metro station. This is the month of Ramadan, so observant Muslims obstain from food, drink, tobacco, and I don't know what else from sun-up to sun-down for the entire month. Which means that at about sun-down the entire city shuts down as everyone stops to eat. Then everyone is out again later and they stay up late, I think so they can eat again before they go to bed. So everything closes in the late afternoon, and then opens up around 8PM and stays open until about 1am. We were walking home around 9PM, so the city was very busy. The picture doesn't capture the energy.

On Friday night AUC took all the new faculty out for dinner on a Faluka in the Nile. The food was terrific and the views of the city from the boat were great, but it was dark so none of the pictures of the city came out very well. Here are some pictures I took before sundown:

The falukas ready to board: