Day 99

Sunday April 27th

Today we decided to do another walking tour. After all the fun with last one we decided to take a tour called the Path of Empires in Lonely Planet, that took us to the prominent sites on the Golden Horn. This meant Mosques. We checked out a number of Mosques, all of them big and decadent. The biggest name on the tour was the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent. However, we were disappointed to find out that the Mosque was under repairs and we only had access to a very small part of it. We continued on the path eating the 1 kilo of turkish delight purchased at the beginning of the tour and continued rubber necking. There wasn't really anything too spectacular, but we did kind of get a feel for the ebb and flow of daily life in Cairo. The one nice thing is that we were not harassed as much by the local vendors. This was a welcome change from the streets of Cairo, where everybody is trying to rip you off. Here, I felt like people still wanted to get you into there stores but they didn't want to scam you. We had two interesting experiences with people like this. The first was as we were finishing the Path of Empires, this guy came up to us and said he knew of these special cisterns that were just found and were still being repaired. He seemed like a pretty nice guy and so I decided to humor him, and see if the cisterns were actually there. If it looked like he was taking us somewhere weird I would just bounce. It turns out the cisterns were there and they were free. He didn't want any tip for showing us it, but he want us to check out his carpet shop which i obliged too. I didn't have the money or desire for one of the carpets, but I took one of his cards and if I changed my hand I would head up his way. The second experience came from another carpet salesman who always tries his gambits on us when we pass by. This time he just said, "here, I have something I have to show you." And then had us look through the door to his shop, where five our his friends were doing a line dance. It was actually quite hilarious and if I wanted a carpet I might have stopped and at least checked them out. I thought it was a funny and perfectly benign attempt to make a sale. I did not feel the same sort of pressure that all the Egyptian salesman put on us. I was quite pleased to not always be on the defensive. It restored my faith in the idea that people were not selfish creatures who desired nothing else than to scam you for all you are worth.