Ancient marvels, tea, sand...oh, and a lot of people.

A street in Maadi
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After twenty-some exhausting hours of travel from Chicago, my buddies and I finally staggered out of Cairo International Airport into the streets of the city. We were met with a blast of hot, dry air, bustling city noises and the unfamiliar sights and smells of a Middle-Eastern metropolis. An exciting car ride later, during which we found out what reckless driving really is, we arrived to the comfortable apartment flat that we’d call home for the next several weeks. We would be staying with one of my buddy’s parents who are American workers in Cairo.

A couple of men enjoying shisha and tea
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Their apartment was located in the foreigner’s district El Maadi, or simply Maadi. Maadi is a relatively affluent neighborhood on the southern side of Cairo that foreign diplomats, oil executives, social-service workers may call home. During our three-week stay in Egypt, the flat in Maadi would be the hub from which we would venture.

We were met with a blast of hot, dry air, bustling city noises and the unfamiliar sights of a Middle-Eastern metropolis.

About a mile walk away from our flat was a "main-street" type area simply known as Road 9. One walking along this road will find vendor after vendor selling the freshest fruits and vegetables (which we Americans could not partake of lest we provoke "Pharaoh's Revenge"), intricately carved alabastar idols, and this years line of touristy junk. We visited Road 9 several times during the visit. Countless tea shops called Awhas lining the back alleys provided us a relaxing atmosphere to spend our evenings drinking tea after our long, hot days in the city.

The slow-paced culture we discovered, created by the prevalence of tea and shisha in the Middle Eastern world is wonderful! At all hours of the day, on any street corner or back alley, one will see groups of hardened middle-aged men clustered around a shabby backgammon board drinking their dark, liberally-sweetened el Arosa tea and nursing the mouthpiece of a sweet-smelling shisha water pipe. This is one example of the Egyptian people's priority of relaxation and enjoyment of one another, a phenomenon that the obsessively-driven Western world would struggle to understand.