A Trip to the Market

Friday was Sharon's final day with us in Egypt so we finished her tour with a trip through our nearby market street.  This narrow road, about a mile from our place, is lined on both sides with vegetable, fruit, meat and fish vendors serving the local neighborhood and any others lucky enough to stumble upon it.  Plug "29.982846, 31.159572" into your Google search bar to locate the south entrance yourself.

Delicious red tomatoes and fresh mandarins (known locally as Yus-Effendi or mandarine - see previous post here) are among the colorful fruits.






This merchant on the left was filling telephone orders for delivery. (He has a very nice glossy business card with three phone numbers) and invited us to sit down and wait so he could talk.  He had a nice 1 kg weight for his scale, so I took a picture to include in the Scale set on Flickr.  The fellow on the right, deep-frying felafel and potato chips was equally anxious to show his technique. 



Everyone was eager to show their product or just chat for a while.



We stopped at the local baladi (native) bread bakery for a while to watch the loaves dropping from this ancient band oven.  This 2009 article in the New York Times about baladi bread will tell you a lot about life and politics in Egypt.



(To be continued)