Tracking down my first home in Cairo
I was born in Cairo, Egypt, but left (with my parents naturally!) when I was just three weeks old. For some strange reason I’d never felt any particular desire to return to my native country but I was bitten by the Egypt bug on my trip down the Nile (see previous post). That had left me a little frustrated because we’d flown directly to Luxor skipping Cairo altogether and I really wanted to see the museums in the capital and, on a more personal quest, see if the building where I had spent a few nights as a newborn still stood.
And so it was that I found myself in Cairo a few months later in November with a travelling buddy, staying with a very kind family whom I found on my favourite home exchange site: People Like Us.
Note how the painted lanes are basically just being ignored!
The first thing that struck me as we drove from the airport to their home in Maadi -- the residential neighbourhood in the very south of Cairo favoured by expats and embassies -- was the density of the road network that looks a little bit as though someone had just dumped a plate of spaghetti down and declared "this will be our road system”. The traffic is dense but reasonably fluid and the skill of Egyptian drivers is extraordinary. They manage to squeeze in six or seven lanes of vehicles on a road designed for four, driving with one hand almost permanently pressed down on the car horn whilst dodging pedestrians who walk down and across the highways as though they were simple streets. The cars’ proximity sensors beeped quite regularly!
Even in Downtown the pavements are in a sorry condition.
I was curious as to why so many pedestrians walk in the streets until we sauntered to the metro station: that's when I realised the pavements are basically unusable: they change every few metres from nice flat marble slabs (rare) to uneven stone ones (common) via pot-holey ones (even more common!), flora-covered ones, café table-and-chair covered ones or simply just not there! It’s a problem that Cairenes complain about regularly. There are even academic studies about the state of Cairo’s pavements!
The second thing that struck me was the extraordinary kindness of the Egyptians we met. One late afternoon we were pondering how to cross the road near Tahrir Square (traffic lights are few and far between) when a young woman and her mother smiled at us, took my friend by the elbow and said in English “just follow us” and led us across the street. The trick apparently is to stare the driver in the eyes and V-point with your index and middle fingers to your own eyes and then cross determinedly!
The stepped pyramid at Saqqara, 33km south of Cairo
Those drivers who spoke no English communicated with us via WhatsApp using the translation feature which I discovered during this trip. Our hosts kindly lent us their non-English speaking driver to take us to the Saqqara necropolis (which I found more interesting than Giza and once we started exploring beyond the Step pyramid we had the place to ourselves) but didn’t see time go by and got a worried message from our lovely driver asking us if we were OK.
We took the very efficient metro quite frequently to get from Maadi to Downtown riding in one of the two carriages (always the 4th and 5th central carriages) reserved for ladies. We were the only Westerners in the carriage but instead of just staring at us at least one or two charming women struck up conversation every time, keen to practice her English and tell us something about her city. We were also endlessly entertained by the vendors in the carriage, generally extremely well organised with their wares stored in an accordion of plastic pockets which unfolds when they hook it onto the overhead hand rail, displaying whatever they are selling that day. Amongst other objects: children’s underpants, hair-clips, make-up (“which I’d never buy as it’s very poor quality” one young Egyptian woman told me) and something which we could not place. Highly amused by our puzzled faces one older lady explained it was a vegetable scooper. Next time I’ll buy one.
You have to purchase a ticket every time you travel on the metro. There are some vending machines but it’s much faster to buy from the human vendors. For those of us accustomed to transport prices in Western European cities, the Cairo metro is extremely cheap. To travel up to nine stops costs E£8 (€0.14), between 10 to 16 stops costs E£10 (€0.17), between 17 and 23 stops costs E£15 (€0.26) and more than 23 stops is E£20 (€0.35). These prices were valid in November 2024.
Contrasting attire in the ladies’ carriage in the metro.
The women almost all wear trousers and long sleeved shirts, but then again this was the middle of November and although we found the temperature very balmy the locals were clearly beginning to find it a bit chilly, and the vast majority wear a scarf on their heads. Only once did we see a woman completely hidden… but her abaya did have a funky pattern!
It so happened that three weeks before our arrival the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), which is just 2km north of the Giza necropolis, finally opened almost all of its galleries to the public. I’m not going to write about the GEM in this post because you can read what I wrote about it here for Lonely Planet and see the photos in the gallery at the end of this post. But we did spend two days out of our five-day trip there!
Triangles play an important role in the design of the Grand Egyptian Museum
The first day we were accompanied by the Egyptian Tourist Authority in a chauffeur-driven car with a guide and I concentrated on taking photographs as I’d been awarded a rare photo permit (necessary if you want to take photos with anything but a mobile phone). But I’d not been able to concentrate on the exhibits so we decided to return a couple of days later by public transport. Sadly, it’s impossible, unless you’re adventurous enough to take one of the innumerable micro-buses which criss-cross the city. We are not! So we opted to take the metro to Cairo University which seemed pretty close. And there, as we stood puzzling whether we should take the exit down to the road which was either being built or demolished… we couldn’t quite decide which… or down the other side onto the six-lane highway, a young man – clearly a student - with limited English tried to help us. We called an Uber but it couldn’t find us so our charming student told us to go to the main gate of the University and call another Uber from there. We tramped along the busy highway for 10 minutes, our Uber found us and drove us the nearly 16km to the GEM. We might as well have saved ourselves time and trouble and just taken a taxi from Maadi!
Even in November the Cairo Museum of Antiquities on Tahrir Square was mobbed
We spent another full day at the GEM. There are restaurants to eat, places to sit, shops to browse. The museum is vast, airy, extremely well curated and a real joy to visit. It will be able to absorb thousands of visitors. Which the old museum, the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, on Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo cannot. We went there too. It was mobbed, even in November. It’s very old-fashioned (it opened in 1902), a bit dusty, a bit confusing but is still full of objects even though the most iconic are now in the GEM (which fully opens with the Tutankhamun galleries on 3rd July 2025). But this old museum will reinvent itself, showing more recent discoveries from continuing archaeological digs and some of the many objects which have been in storage for ever because there was no space to exhibit them.
And the building my late parents lived in is still there! I’d found the address amongst the extensive correspondence they’d maintained with their own parents so I knew I was looking for a 20 storey-building opposite a church. They were the first tenants for the 18th floor apartment in what was one of the first tower blocks to be built in Downtown, around Tahrir Square, which was the preferred location mid-20th century for expats. Sadly the building looks somewhat dilapidated and is now a dusty brown instead of the white I can see in the only old photograph I have. But then most buildings in Cairo are dusty brown: a combination of sand blowing in from the Sahara desert and pollution from the millions of cars.
One of the recently restored 19th century buildings in Downtown Cairo.
But perhaps not for long, at least in the Downtown area. Most of the buildings in this area, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, date back to the 19th century and the entire urban layout built on orders of Khedive Ismael in the 1860s was heavily inspired by Paris which had undergone a radical transformation under the direction of France’s Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891). The Egyptian National Organization for Urban Harmony is leading a €178.6 project to restore 537 of these historic buildings and their surrounding spaces. We had a cooking class in one of them so can vouch that this is not just a face-lift job. The interior of the building, including the lovely 19th century wrought-iron lift, had been lovingly restored.
Restaurant with a view…and comfy chairs to enjoy it from.
And did we see the famous pyramids? Of course we did! We had lunch at the 9 Pyramids Lounge (I only counted six: the Great Pyramid aka Cheops or Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, and three smaller ones!) and you need to take one of the new electric buses (private cars are now banned from the site) to get there as it’s forbidden to walk the 600m across the desert to reach the venue. The lunch itself was nothing much to write home about but the view was breathtaking and there were far fewer people than at the foot of the Great Pyramid.
I also wish I’d know that seeing the Sphinx in the evening with the pyramids as a backdrop instead of the town of Giza is not smart: the sun sets behind the pyramids so I couldn’t actually see the Sphinx as I was blinded by the setting sun! When I return I’ll go in the morning.
