LIFE UNLEASHED

Eat Like an Egyptian!

Brad | April 28, 2009

Egypt - It’s not quite the 1st world but after 4 months in the 3^rd world, in the immortal words of Shrek, “It’ll do, Donkey…it’ll do!”. Egypt and Cairo in particular are extremely safe places to be. Yes, it’s not what you expect to hear but in regards to daily life, it’s true. The Muslim culture abhors crime of any sort and the streets are filled with people well into the wee hours of the night. That, and they have electricity, like, 24 hours a day! Incredible.

Cairo is a place best discovered without the use of some silly guidebook. Our Cairo was one filled with little tiny Turkish coffee shops where old men sat smoking Sheesha (Hubbly Bubbly) pipes and playing backgammon, bakeries filled with biscuits and baklava pastries and fast-food takeaway stands with tasty chicken schwarmas and felafals.

Every mourning we would start at a Turkish coffee house. If you have never had Turkish coffee you are missing out. It is long roasted, fresh ground coffee which instead of being filtered is left to settle, creating a rich caffeine laden mud at the bottom of the tiny China cup. Addictive! Combine the strong aromas of the coffee with the beautiful wafting smoke of the Sheesha pipes and you may never want to leave. Sheesha is a fruit flavoured tobacco processed in a way to remove the nicotine from it, yet, everyone in Cairo is addicted to it. My dear friend Asthma prevented us from indulging but I can tell you the smell is alluring.

Our next stop for the day would always be a bakery. We would by an assorted mix of almond biscuits, fruit flavoured cookies and hard biscuits and then…find another coffee shop. Although, at the second coffee shop we would some times order Nana (fresh mint tea). After that it would be on to another bakery to get some Baklava or other sweet pastry for desert. What a tough life.

Since we had to eat real food at some point, we would try to find the best chicken schwarmas (kebab) or felafal sandwiches. Once we even travelled miles across the city, on a tip, to get the best falafel in Cairo. When we arrived at this holy grail of shops we realized that it was the one right outside our hotel that we had already eaten at three times, D’oh!

Oh yeah, almost forgot, we also stumbled into these huge triangle shapes in the desert just outside the city. They were pretty cool. If anyone knows what they are please let us know! And, if anyone knows how to make one please put a documentary on Discovery Channel.