First Full Day in Cairo

Hello everyone,
I decided to do another blog for my ten-month stay in Cairo, Egypt.

For those of you I haven't been in contact with, I have an internship in the American University in Cairo in the Office of Communications & Marketing. So far, all I know is that I'll be writing articles for the school's various publications and helping out in the office in any way I can.

I wanted to post a bunch of pictures from my first full day in Cairo to give everyone an idea of life in Egypt.

The first place we went was Khan El-Khalili, a souk (market/bazaar) created as early as the 1380s.

This picture is of the Fishawy Cafe, which is famous for having never been closed for the past two centuries (except for Ramadan).











This is the outside of the famous Al-Azhar mosque (more on this later).

In the picture above, we (Lauren and Muriel are two of the six other interns) have just been pulled into one of the tourists traps with Abdul, the shopkeeper. (Just for the record, I knew full well what I was getting into here; i wanted to practice getting out of situations like this while I was with friends and in good spirits, so that I could successfully resolve similar situations on a bad day).
This was a cologne/perfume shop tucked away in a little back alley in Khan El-Khalili. We were walking by when the guy came over and started pestering us, asking what country we were from. I wanted to see what was going to happen so we followed him into the store, where he offered us tea, gave us some samples, then tried to charge us an exorbitant rate for the cologne. I got him down to 1/10 of his initial price. I still probably overpaid a little bit, but it was good practice the first time.

The Blogger site is limiting my posts to only 4 pictures so Day 1 will take us a few posts.