Egypt: A Quick & Dirty Guide

I've explained the main sites to see in Egypt a couple of times. Now that someone asked me about it again, I decided to commit it to writing.

Disclaimer

I should start by saying this is not a substitute for proper planning or a proper visitor's guide. I mainly go to Egypt to visit family, and stay with family. My site seeing is (relatively) limited and my home town is Alexandria, not the capital, Cairo.

What Egypt Is Not

Egypt is not Europe or North America. It's a poor country. Some places are dirty and disgusting. If you're not careful, you're likely to get sick and ripped off. The people are poor. They will see a dollar sign on your head. Some people will try to rip you off. You need to know how to negotiate well.

In general, Egyptians are friendly and hospitable. I've told you the worst. It really shouldn't be that bad, insha' Allah.

Egypt is not Sinai. Yes, Sinai is a part of Egypt, but so many Jordanians claim to have visited Egypt while going no further than Sinai. Claiming that you've visited Egypt after seeing Sinai is like me claiming I've seen Turkey because I've been to Jordan. (Jordan used to be a part of the Ottoman Empire.)

What to See

Egyptian history can be divided into three main time periods: Pharaonic, Greco-Roman, and Islamic.

Pharaonic

1. The Pyramids & Sphinx. Location: Giza, close to Cairo.
   
2. The Egyptian Museum. Location: Cairo.
3. Saqqara. Location: close to Cairo.

Greco-Roman

1. The Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria. Check to make sure it's open.
2. The underground catacombs of Kom El-Shouqafa, also in Alexandria.

Islamic

1. Muhammad Ali's citadel. Location: Cairo.
2. Al-Azhar Mosque & University, the oldest university in the world. Location: Cairo.
3. Al-Hussein Mosque. Location: Cairo.
   
4. Khan Al-Khalili market. Location: Cairo.
5. Abu Al-Abbas Mosque. Location: Alexandria.
6. The Gates of Ancient Cairo. Location: Cairo.
7. The Citadel of Qaitbay. Location: Alexandria.
8. Al-Rifa'i Mosque. Location: Cairo.

There are also innumerable scholars and saints buried in Egypt, such as Imam Shafi'i, Zakariyya Al-Ansari, Al-Shaarani, and many prominent Shadhilis.

If you're a big modern history nut, you might want to also see El Alamein, where Germany and the Allies lost thousands of soldiers in battle during WWII.

Natural Beauty

The best time to visit Egypt is in late April or early May, when the weather is nice and the tourists are few. In the summer, Egypt can be rather hot. In Alexandria, the humidity is high and you'll feel the sweat roll off your body even at night time during the peak of the summer. If you're by the seaside, then you'll be fine.

If one of your goals is to enjoy Egypt's remarkable fresh fruit, such as mangoes and guava, then you need to go in late summer or early fall.

Here's what you have to experience while there:

1. The Mediterranean Sea. Best seen in Alexandria. Catch a boat ride from the Montazah, King Farouq's former palace. While you're by the corniche, make sure to ride in a horse-drawn carriage. If you have time, go fishing. You can also check out Mersa Matruh, towards the Libyan border, where you can find some secluded beaches.
2. The Red Sea. It offers great fishing and snorkeling. That's what I hear, anyway. I've never been there on the Egyptian side. (I've only been to the Red Sea via Aqaba, Jordan.)
   
3. The Nile, of course. Catch a boat ride in Cairo. If you're adventurous, you may want to catch an extended ride down south into Upper Egypt. Tread with caution.

Food

I really go to Egypt to connect with my inner stomach. I love (most) Egyptian food. I don't have an eating problem: I eat, I get sick, I take medicine; no problem! Don't drink the tap water or anything that's made with tap water (e.g. juice) unless it's been boiled; e.g. tea or coffee.

Here are things you must eat or drink:

1. Mangoes. zOMG, Egyptian mangoes are awesome. I don't know if they're very good earlier than August, though.
   
2. Guava. These ripen even later than mangoes.
   
3. Pastirma: fried with eggs or alone, in sandwiches.
4. In general, most Egyptian meat and dairy is very good. Try water buffalo (gamoosa) steak.
5. Egyptians do poultry very well. Treat yourself to some duck and stuffed pigeons.
6. Rabbits in mulukhiyah. If you can't get it with rabbits, eat mulukhiyah (e.g. with chicken) anyways.
7. Fresh juice, at the stands. Make sure they make it with bottled water. You should also drink some of the ultra-refreshing sugarcane juice. If you get it in a bag and take it to your hotel, it will go brown if you don't drink it very soon afterwards. If you drink from their cups, you risk getting sick. (One of my worst illnesses to date was after I drank sugarcane juice from an improperly-washed glass in Amman; I had a high fever for one solid week.) Take your own portable mug and have them fill it for you. Hey, they already know you're a foreigner and are ripping you off anyways, so you might as well be sanitary about it.
8. Gateau. Egyptian gateau rocks. You want to make sure the shop you go into is air-conditioned. If it isn't, they're probably not using fresh dairy cream.
9. Other good Egyptian sweest include: baklawa and kunafa. Make sure to get it from a high quality place that uses real dairy butter and crunchy, freshly roasted nuts.
   
10. Although typically a poor man's food, kushari is delicious and satisfying nonetheless.
    
11. Seafood. You can buy zillions of types of fresh fish and shellfish and have them cooked for you on the spot in the better restaurants.
12. If you're not used to Middle-Eastern coffee, you might find Turkish coffee a nice treat. Make sure not to try to drink the sludge at the bottom.
13. Safe bets in all Middle Eastern countries include: grilled kabobs and kufta, shawerma, felafel, and hummus. The last two are good for vegetarians and those on a budget.
    

(Note how I've written more about food than any other topic.)

Check the comments section of this post for updates.

Raising, Slaughtering, and Cooking Rabbits

I've had mixed experiences with rabbit meat. I once purchased (prêt-à-manger) rabbit meat from a halal butcher in Waterloo, and it was very much like run-of-the-mill chicken breast: white, dry, and with little flavour. I also had a similar experience when someone here in Jordan cooked rabbit for me. (She baked it in the oven.) The result was dry and with very little flavour. The rabbits of my childhood, which my father raised himself, were succulent. Their meat was pink (brown when cooked), they were full of tasty, mildly gamey flavour, and they were tender. Not only that, but they also had minimal fat reserves on them. The rabbits I ate while visiting Egypt, which my mother's fellaheen neighbours hand-raised were also succulent and pink. I thought the issue was simply a matter of how the rabbits were fed.

I spoke to a neighbour here in Amman, who raises his own rabbits, about these issues. He said he has never experienced dry rabbit meat. The problem, according to him, was that either that whoever butchered the rabbit tried cooking or cooling it (in the fridge) immediately after slaughter. He told me to hang the carcass for an hour or so before attempting to cook it. Another issue, apparently, was that rabbits had to be cooked in liquid; their lean flesh does not lend well to dry cooking methods.

If you want to buy uncommon, live animals in Amman, the time and place is early Friday morning downtown. I went there with a friend and his two sons. We picked a couple rabbits, which I named molokhiyya and saniyya, after the dishes I was planning to cook them in. My friend's older son (age 5) wanted to come by and watch me butcher them. Being a sassy little boy, he decided to name the rabbits after my daughters. (The gene for being impish must rest on the Y chromosome.) I butchered them, one after the other, in the bathtub, to control the spread of the blood. I then took them to the kitchen, skinned them, and hung them up from my cupboard handles. After a couple hours, we took them down, rinsed them off, cut them up, and soaked them in a mixture of water and vinegar. After another couple hours, we threw them into a pot and cooked them into a molokhiyya dish. (Unfortunately, one rabbit is too small to feed five people.) The aroma of the cooking rabbits was scrumptuous. They took a little longer to cook than chicken. The meat was pink when raw and light brown after fully cooked.

The net result was very good, being definitely better than chicken, but not quite as good as the rabbits that my father raised or the ones I had eaten in Egypt. However, these Ammani rabbits were not home-raised and fattened before slaughtering, so it's not a fair comparison.