We took a strange day tour of the Delta. Tourists just don't go to the Delta, so we grabbed the chance. It's like taking a tour of the central valley of California. It's farms. It's famous for being boring. It just felt strange to live here in Egypt for so long and not have any idea what happened in the Delta, where some huge fraction of Egyptians live and almost all of the food is grown. Here we are driving in the morning fog. This is only an hour or so out of Cairo, but we don't get fog and hardly get clouds in Cairo.
First stop was the town of Damanhur. There wasn't much to see here, and especially because it was Friday noon, the equivalent of arriving in a small middle-America town on a Sunday morning. Everything closed, most people out going to prayers. It wasn't nearly as poor as we'd expected, though, and this was one example of nice architecture, though admittedly most of it, like most in Cairo (and most in the world, I'll venture) was boxy and basic.
Here are the boxy, basic, crowded buildings - but they still seem cleaner and in better shape than the majority of Cairo buildings.
Damahur was very proud of their newly renovated opera house. It was very beautiful inside and outside, but we were not allowed to take photos inside. It is supposed to be a pretty decent replica of the original one.
Typical Egyptian furniture looks just like this - very rococo and uncomfortable.
Tanta was our next stop, the biggest town in the Delta, but still about 5% of Cairo's population. It also had more nice colonial-era architecture than we expected.
While hummus, dip made mostly of chickpeas, is virtually unknown in Egypt, chickpeas, which are hummus in Arabic no matter how they are prepared, are popular in other formats, especially toasted into something vaguely resembling nuts. Health-food freaks will identify these as similar to soy-nuts. These are eaten as so, or suspended in sugar and honey as a brittle.
The center of Tanta is the mosque. Every year it hosts what has been probably the largest Mawlid in Egypt for the last few hundred years. (A Mawlid is a pilgrimage and festival devoted to a saintly figure generally held where the figure lived.) We went on an average calm Friday, not during the festival, but the mosque area was popular nonetheless, particularly with people from the surrounding countryside who come to pay their respects and do some shopping along the way.
Tanta is known for sweets, though they didn't seem very different from the sweets we find in Cairo. There were a lot of gummy, nougaty, turkish delight-like sweets. Also, there was quite a bit of halva and coconut treats.
There was also a lot of plastic for sale. I guess the folks who live on the outskirts of town on the farms need to come to town to get the plastic conveniences.
Rachel outside the mosque.
Folks milling about and hanging out outside the mosque. What never ceases to amaze us in comparing what we see of mosque culture in comparison with church or synagogue culture is the large amount of hanging around that seems to happen at mosques apart from praying. Inside a few people were napping, a few kids were running around, and numberless groups were quietly sitting and chatting, absently admiring the architecture. Outside was much the same, sans napping. Especially with the loud volume of Egypt generally, a mosque makes a nice place to chat quietly, rest, or collect one's thoughts where one can be assured that no one will be yelling, selling things (at least inside), or driving a car.
These young men asked that I take their photo. They led a small band and crowd into the mosque soon after.
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