El Khalili, Disney style, the porkiest embassy and friends who speak at hyperspeed. (Cairo)

The next day we were to be taken shopping by two of my friends, but for some crazy reason they had to work. The car they arranged took us far, far away to a brand new mall where they had a smaller version of el Khalili. It was quite surreal.  Imagine the crazy, dirty, exciting hustle bustle of a market.  Now tip it on its side, dump out all the people and bread product head gear, redesign it by Walt Disney, soak it in alcohol, and you’ll have the uptown version.  We had fun. I was on a quest to try on the most outrageous necklace I could find, accomplished impressively by a massive Afghani bauble.

The most extravagant necklace in Cairo

We met a new friend who wanted to be in our pictures.  When he wanted just one more, if you please, of you and me kissing, I politely declined that opportunity.

We were quite looking forward to that evening’s activities. My friend Deb who works for the Canadian International Development Agency in Egypt had invited us to an event at the Canadian embassy. Those familiar with Cairo know that many parts were modeled after Paris, and a good number of buildings, especially around our hotel where there is an abundance of embassies, have a romantic, colonial, and somewhat run down atmosphere, heightened by the overhanging trees and quiet winding streets. As we walked to the embassy, I imagined us elegantly sipping VQA wine, chatting with the ambassador while listening to a lovely string trio in the delicate courtyard. This quickly evaporated as we rounded the corner to a big, ugly rectangle and were greeted by a staff member who gleefully announced “we got ham tonight!!!”  Not just ham, but three kinds of sausages as well (yippee). But no white vinegar for the fries. Some Canadian event, eh? Harrumph. The caterer was a formidably large blond German gentleman, ergo the sausage dominance. They may not have had vinegar, but they did have a giant bowl of fried onions, so I made das poutine, ja. While Deb and her husband Erich tended bar, Alison and I mingled with some interesting characters, including an Australian nurse with six-year long dreadlocks who was shortly off to Darfour with his wife to work for Medicins Sans Frontiers.  The Canadian Pub Night is quite the draw, and the crowd was considerable. Lots of happy ham eaters.

On our walk home unfortunately we had one of those dreadful moments when you can’t see where you’re stepping because it’s pitch black and you too late wonder how big the animal was who walked the same path earlier in the day.  Luckily I had made a water feature discovery on our hotel room’s toilet the previous day (standing in front of it, fully dressed of course), so we had a solution for cleaning our boots. (Those aware of my previous travels know that discovering mysterious water features is a hallmark of my hotel stays.) On the theme of magical hotel room happenstances, I also unwittingly found that if you press 6 repeatedly while listening to voice mail, it doesn’t delete the message but speeds it up so it becomes one long, rapid fire sentence that is difficult for even a native English speaker to decipher. Of course, I didn’t realize this initially and was surprised that I had never noticed what a fast talker Deb was.  I hope the hotel has figured out how to undo it.