A Visit to the Hospital

We spent a good part of yesterday in the Garden City and Manial district near downtown Cairo. We were visiting a friend whose mother had recently undergone spinal surgery at the large Manial (also known as KasrAlani) Hospital.

This photo from one of Manial's brochures shows a satellite image of the hospital.

The hospital is made up of a complex of buildings that occupy the entire end of an island. The original portion of the hospital is the long series of buildings on the left. Apparently dating from 1827, the architecture consists of a series of U-shaped buildings joined by a long central corridor. The central corridor is close to a half-mile long and the hospital website reports 5,152 beds. A part of the history page on their website describes the hospital this way:

Kasr El-Aini is a quadrilateral building surrounded by beautiful parks and composed of two stories above a ground floor. Each of its wings consists of a double row of rooms on either side. each wing is divided into four compartments, each of which holds fifty beds.

We visited the fourth floor.

After that, we headed out to the nearby well-known Abou Shakra restaurant for dinner and then walked a mile or so into downtown as dusk settled on the city. Abou Shakra proved a good choice. Far better than their branch on Pyramids Road.