Construction in Progress - 2019

When I went to bed late last night, I noticed one of the familiar sounds of Cairo.  "Varoooooooom" - a few seconds pause, then "Varoooooooom."  A sure sign of new construction.

I showed you the details of interior construction just about four years ago in this blog post.  There I featured the rough shell of apartment buildings that look like this as they rise about 8 to 12 stories in the air.


The interior surfaces are finished with a sand/cement mixture to form smooth surfaces and the floors covered with ceramic tile.


But how does all of that sand and cement get to the higher floors?  There is no freight elevator.  A construction crew working on, say, the fifth floor sets up a baby crane on the balcony (almost all apartments have a balcony) and lowers a bucket to a crew at street level who load up the bucket.  Up goes the bucket, out pours the sand.  Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

When I woke up this morning, the crew was still moving sand so I made a video.  Click on the triangle in the center to play it. The five-man crew has this process running very smoothly.

Thursday night is an ideal time to begin this sort of work on a busy street.  This is the beginning of the weekend and there will be no traffic on Friday morning to cause problems.