Bad week but cheap alterations

This week at work has been exhausting combined with a lot of nighttime events - some fun and some just work. I can say that one way this week has been good has been the availability of an on-site dry cleaning service that does alterations. Our Embassy is having a formal party next week and I ordered a bunch of dresses from Nordstrom figuring one of them would a. fit and b. be attractive. One of them was attractive but it also assumed the wearer was 6 feet tall. I was able to get the dress - which has elaborate fabric layers altered and pressed for the party for $8 and it was done in less than 24 hours.

Islamic Cairo

After the Cairo Citadel, we stopped at a couple of Cairo's must-see mosques

At the 14th century Sultan Hassan mosque we admired this, the oldest known exiting Koran reading stand, which is still in use. The wood carving and inlay were beautiful - I'm not sure if the picture does it justice.






















Here more pretty light fixtures at Sultan Hassan. (It was nearly empty of visitors)























Plastic lights and gawdy Eid decorations adorn the tomb of the important Sufi Sheikh Ali Al Rifai at Al Rifai mosque (only a century old), just next door to Sultan Hassan.



Al Rifai is also the burial spot for the last king of Egypt and (pictured here) the final shah of Iran. The shah received medical treatment at Duffy's alma mater George Washington University (just like Reagan and Cheney and Dan!). The shah's room was filled with beautiful marble panels in creams, greens, and browns. It also had an exceptionally nice Persian carpet left by his widow.

Vote for the Queen

Last summer, you had the opportunity to vote for Petra as World Wonder. Now here is your chance to vote for Queen Rania as most inspirational guest on a CNN International tv show. Deadline December 3rd.

Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha at Cairo Citadel

Day 2 brought us to Islamic Cairo. First stop was Mosque of Muhammad Ali, showing the Ottoman influence of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. It sits atop the ancient hilltop citadel and is visible from all over town.



























Behind us is the brass clock tower presented to Muhammad Ali by King Louis Philippe of France in 1845. Egypt gave France the Luxor obelisk (now standing in Place de la Concorde in Paris) in return. Egyptians are quick to say it was a raw deal: the clock stopped telling time less than a year after its installation.



The original alabaster ritual washing station.




The gorgeous interior of the mosque...




...and the smoggy view outside.

An afternoon at the Sphinx and Saqqara

Day 1. Again, us at the premiere pyramid - sphynx site before heading south to Saqqara to see the earlier prototype.



It was quite crowded on this day, but somehow we got this desolate shot.



Zoser's pyramid, the first Step Pyramid and the first pyramid of the Pyramid Age, at Saqqara. The "beginning of architecture".


Frieze of cobras at Saqqara

City + pyramid picture

Justin asked for a better city + pyramid combination shot. This is not a great picture primarily because of the haze of dust and air pollution. It was taken from the Citadel - which I will describe when I get to loading the pictures of our second day in Cairo but until then...

Our Trip to Cairo - A Morning in Giza

Our first morning in Egypt was spent at Giza the site of the three largest of the pyramids. Apparently there are over a hundred pyramids in Egypt - these at Giza are the biggest and among the oldest. Eventually the pharoahs stopped wanting pyramids because they were basically an advertisement to graverobbers "there is a lot of gold here!"

Here's me in front of the pyramid of Cheops the biggest - and you can get a sense of the size of the stone blocks by the people along side of them.

In the pyramids' prime they were covered in limestone so they were smooth rather than looking like steps


Giza is genuinely a suburb of Cairo and its one of those suburbs like Arlington or Evanston that are right next to the city so you can't tell where one begins and the other ends. In Giza however the suburb then suddenly ends and there are pyramids. While National Geographic takes pictures that make you think the pyramids are in the middle of nowhere - they aren't and this city skyline was taken from the pyramids.
The other thing about Giza that is weird is that it is spelled with a letter that in the Jordanian dialect is pronounced "J" - so as we were driving to Giza and I was reading the street signs I kept seeing "Jeeza" and wondering what that was.

Here is Dan in my attempt at the NatGeo shot where we and the pyramids are near nothing. In fact we were surrounded by hundreds of tourists - most of them from Europe but some from Asia and America too.