Daily Life Part I

Linda says the blog has become too borrrrring!  Too much Egyptian history and temple pictures.  (I have lot more coming - maybe she is right.)  I am absorbed in a 500 page book about the Karnak temple complex by a retired professor of African Studies, Frederick Monderson.  (Monderson has also written books on Barrack Obama and Michael Jackson - I can see some of my readers cringing already.)

So it's time to blog a bit about daily life - always an entertaining subject here.

People who have been to Cairo and have seen the driving often wonder, "Do they have a lot of car accidents here?"  The general condition of the vehicles would seem to say yes, but we don't seem to see them happen very often.  The other day when I came outside to go up to the pizza shop, there were two cars near our building that obviously come too close to each other.  There was quite a bit of plastic in the street and a crowd had gathered.


By the time I returned with the pizza, all of the plastic had been swept up into a nice pile and only one car remained at the scene.

Another thing one wonders here is "what happens when someone hits one of the many speed bumps  while going too fast?"  This picture, taken down our street in front of the Golden Eagle papyrus store yesterday, shows the result.  No wonder people brake hard when they suddenly see the otherwise unmarked bumps.


Usually when there is an accident or breakdown, men gather around and push the vehicle involved to the side of the road.  You can see the problem with that in this case so traffic is just proceeding around the car on both sides.

This would seem like an appropriate place to link to a marvelous YouTube video that describes the general flow of traffic in Cairo.  Linda discovered this a few days back and it seems like the perfect explanation of why we do not have a car here. This is a "must watch" video.