The Commercial District Near the Pryamids

A reader asked me about the commercial district here and I have been collecting a few pictures to include in this post.  Pyramids Street runs most of the ten miles between downtown Cairo and the Great Pyramids.  It is fairly comparable to the Woodward Avenue of Detroit, Lake Street of Minneapolis, Sandy Boulevard of Portland and comparable streets before suburbia put their Sears and Kresge stores out of business.  Pyramids is shown in red on this map:


King Faisal Street runs parallel to Pyramids and is shown in yellow on the map.  Both of these streets are lined with small shops, department stores, coffee shops, restaurants and most of all, people!  Some stretches of these two streets have a boulevard lined with palm trees, although the sidewalks are as uneven and unusable as most places in the city.  Dary Department Store (visited in an earlier post) and numerous furniture emporiums can be found along Pyramids.



There are some shops with names you will recognize and some you might not.  Etisalat is a cellphone provider and the unlabeled shop to its right is a carpentry shop specializing in doors.



These are three restaurants.  Crunchy Chicken competes with KFC, Mermaid is a fish restaurant and Antar is one of our favorites for kabobs and other broiled meats.  All three offer take-away on the first floor but Antar has the restaurant seating that you see visible above all three.  It is fairly common for restaurants to have the seating on the second floor with the kitchen and take-away on the first.



Here is a shoe store, sitting next to McDonald's.  Notice the McDonald's motor scooter.  Like all other restaurants, McDonald's delivers.  Just dial 19991.