Hanging Out In The Khan

The other day Maryanne walked in and said, "OK. Enough sitting around. We are going to the Khan." I wasn't really sure what she was talking about, so I asked. The Khan is an area of old Cairo where the medieval caravans from Eastern and Western Africa and from Asia would stop. After a while the entire area became a market area and you can find almost anything there.

That sounded like fun. On the way in to Khan el Khalili (not very easy to say) there were small shops where people were selling hats and scarves and other funny things to wear. I tried on a pink beaded cap with dangly things. It wasn't really me. I looked around at all the different hats that were there in the shop. Finally I found one that I really liked.

We weren't there to buy hats, according to Maryanne, as she led the way into funny little streets barely big enough for a person and a really small moose. We stopped at one interesting shop in a corner that was down some stairs and around the corner from somplace else. If it sounds like I was lost, I was. I had no idea how to find my way out so I stayed really, really close to Maryanne. She seemed to know where she was. The first place that we stopped was a glass shop.

The old man who owned the shop talked with Maryanne for a while, and she watched me very closely to be sure that I didn't move around too much and break some of the lovely blue and green glassware that was all around me. There were plates and glasses, pots and vases, and some wonderful glass balls that just begged to be juggled. I tried very hard to be still and not bump into anything. Even the alleyway outside was so narrow that it was hard not to hit anything. Finally she finished talking to the glass man and we could start moving again.

We did go down a narrow alley and we did both corners and stairs. Finally we were in the best shop in Khan el Khalili....the junk shop! Well, it isn't all junk there. There's good stuff too. There were all sorts of things there. I saw watches, cameras, hammers, tea sets, binoculars, surveying equipment, old telephones and musical instruments. One time Maryanne saw a strange round black metal thing in the shop and decided to buy it. The man said that it was an old way of telling where you are by the stars.

She took the black thing home where we cleaned it up to find that it has amazing pictures carved all over it and that there are a whole set of carved brass disks for it. Now if we could just figure out what it is and how to use it, if it does get used. We didn't find another brass thing but it was really fun to look through all the old stuff in this shop trying to figure out what it would be used for.

But that's really dusty work in Cairo. We decided that it was time to wet things down a bit and headed for someplace to have a cup of tea. There are lots of coffee houses in Khan el Khalili, but the most famous one is Fishawy's. I've never seen a place with so many mirrors that are not for sale. Maryanne had a nice time, but she was sad at the tea shop. Normally Khan el Khalili would be crowded with people but we hardly saw anyone. Recently there was someone (Maryanne says they weren't normal people but kind of crazy)who left a bomb under a bench in the square near Khan el Khalili. Quite a lot of people were hurt by this and one girl was killed, but now all the people in the area are having such a difficult time because no one wants to come there. Maryanne says that bad things can happen anywhere anytime, so you may as well do the things that you like as long as you pay attention to what's going on.

Some Of My Moose Cousins

One of my cousins sent me this video of our family playing. I thought that you might like it.

Visiting Places In Maadi

The other day Maryanne decided to take me to Maadi again to visit a place she calls CSA. Pretty silly name for a place if you ask me. Later I found out that CSA is short for Community Services Association and it's a nice place after all. They have all sorts of classes for people who want to learn to speak languages, or learn to cook or paint. I didn't see any classes in Moose in the languages though.

The people there were really friendly. There was even a little teeny dog who comes to work with her person at the front desk while I was there. We talked a while and the dog told me about the coffee shop where they sell all sorts of sandwiches and treats. I liked that part. All moose like treats, but I haven't been able to find any blueberries here at all. That is sort of sad. They are a moose's favourite treat.

One very cool thing at CSA was the library. It had a lot of fun looking books to read there. I don't know how to read but Maryanne will read to me sometimes. I like books with adventures in them. Cowboy stories are pretty good, but I don't understand any of this space stuff and traveling in rocket ships. I don't think any moose has done that yet. I'm probably the first moose in Egypt. We moose aren't really big on travel. I think that's partly because of our antlers. They don't fit in very many places.

One lady told us to go upstairs to see the exercise rooms because there was a dance class for children up there. We climbed up to see what was up there and it was pretty interesting. One big room had mirrors and a lady was playing in there with a group of children who were running and dancing and jumping with music. It looked like a lot of fun and I wanted to join but Maryanne says that you have to sign up for the class.

Outside of the big room was another exercise place for big people. It had a bunch of running places and some bicycles that people use for getting tired. They seem to think that this is a good idea. I'm not so sure about it myself. Just looking at those things made me feel tired. But it's pretty neat that there is a place like CSA in Maadi for the people who live there. Libraries, treats, and even times when they sell all sorts of neat stuff....Maryanne says that she'll take me to one of those bizarre days some time.

After we'd had fun at CSA for a while I found out why we had come into Maadi. Maryanne had an appointment with her friend Kye, who is a Kyropractor. I didn't know what a Kyropractor is either but Kye offered to show me. She had me lie down on a nice bed and she gave me a massage with this buzzy thing. She said that when I get as old as Maryanne (and Maryanne is OLD!) my back will like having her do something she calls an adjustment on it. I don't know about the adjustment, but Kye can use the buzzy thing on my back anytime she wants.

Da Moose Goes Shopping

Maryanne really likes hanging around on the farm but every once in a while she decides to go into town to do some shopping. The other day she decided that we would go into Maddi to shop and she took me along. The first place we went was a fruit and vegetable store to pick up some of the less common fruits and vegetables, like the ones that don't grow on the farm. Fruit here is really good. In Canada it's so cold in the winter that the fruits and vegetables don't grow, but they have to be brought in by trucks. We were looking at pears, peaches, plums, melons, kiwi fruit, pineapples, apples, and some funny fruit Maryanne called harankash. She said that the pineapples, apples, and kiwis are imported from other places, but most of the rest are grown here.

Inside the store, Maryanne bought some lettuce and some sweet red and yellow peppers because the weather at the farm has been too hot for them. The eggplants and chinese cabbages are big...some of the eggplants are white rather than purple. Maryanne says that the Egyptian women like the white ones to stuff with rice and cook them. They also sell sweet potatoes, zucchini, and big bags of garlic. Nice veggies. We moose are big veggie appreciators.

After doing the fruit and vegetable shopping, we went to a mall in Maadi where Maryanne was looking for some shoes before she went to New York for a couple of weeks to see her kids. We looked at a bunch of shoe stores and in the Nike store I got to try on some sandals, but we didn't buy them. The mall is called Maadi Grand Mall, and it's pretty big, but it's not as big as the big mall in Edmonton in Canada. Still, they had lots of places to buy clothes, some book stores, and a lot of shoe stores. Some of the clothing stores had some odd things in them, like the clothes for women were very different from things I'd seen in Canada.

Many of the women wear scarves that cover their hair. But they still like to wear bright colours and pretty things, so they make their scarves and their shirts or dresses match. But a lot of other people wear the same sorts of things that people wear in Canada too. Most of the kids I see wear jeans and tshirts just like everywhere else in the world.

Maryanne isn't too crazy about shopping and we'd been walking around for kind of along time, so she said that we should have a nice lunch. We looked around the mall to see what we could have. There's a place called Arzak that makes really good fuul and ta'ameya, sort of bean sandwiches that are pretty yummy. There's a coffee shop called Costa Coffee where you can get sandwiches and some pretty good cake or pie or cheesecake. I liked that idea, but she wanted real food. Huh! So we ended up going to a place called Makany. It's a small restaurant with a garden near the coffee place and its name means "my place" Maryanne says. They have good sandwiches and some salads and some cakes too, but Maryanne decided to have sushi. I'd never seen sushi before but it was pretty to look at. Maryanne said that it's raw fish wrapped in seaweed and rice, so I decided just to have some of the lemonade while she ate it all. She said that it was really good, and I think that I will just take her word for it.

Sailing With The Sun

The other day Maryanne had some visitors and she decided that we should all go see the Solar Boat. I liked the idea of going on a boat again. For a moose, I have a lot of boat experience. I've been on the Nile cruise boat, the boat to Philae Island, and the boat with the window in the bottom in Sharm el Sheikh. That's quite a lot of boats, so a solar boat sounded pretty good, whatever kind of boat that might be.

Well, I was pretty surprised when we drove up to the Giza pyramids, got out of the car and walked over to a sort of banana-shaped building next to the biggest pyramid. What kind of boat are we going to see up on this rock covered hill, anyway? The closest water is in the bottles that the men are selling to thirsty tourists. We bought some tickets...Maryanne says that there are special prices for a moose...and went into a little room where some men gave us each some funny cloth slippers to put over our feet. This is weird. No one ever gave us slippers on any of the other boats.

There was a little problem for me with the slippers. They don't get so many very small visitors like Da Moose. They could find one slipper that was almost the right size but the other one was a bit bigger. Maryanne said not to worry because there were a lot of stairs to climb and she'd be carrying me. This boat was sounding stranger and stranger all the time. All the people coming in were putting on their slippers and then laughing at how their feet looked so funny..kind of like duck feet. Then we walked into another room that had a lot of pictures of people working around big holes in the rocks and there was a small boat in a glass case. It was a pretty nice looking boat with pointy ends and little oars. Maybe I would fit on it, but the big people were definitely going to be out of luck. There was also a big hole that people were looking into. It had been cut out of the stone and Maryanne said that hole was were they found the boat. I didn't know about that. The hole was too big for the little boat in the case, but how would you fit a real boat into the hole? And where was the water?

Then we walked into the next room and there was the boat! It looked just like the little one but it was really big. Maryanne said that the boat was about five thousand years old and that the people had taken it apart and put all the pieces in the hole in the ground. When other people found it later, they put it back together, sort of like a puzzle, and then they built the banana house around it so that it would stay nice and so that people (and moose too) could climb the stairs, walk all around and see it.

There was a little house in the middle of the boat but no swimming pool like on the Nile cruise boat and no window like on the fish boat in Sharm. Maryanne told me that the boat was made for the pharoah to sail down the Nile to his pyramid, so they didn't need much room on the boat. She said the the really big pieces of wood that they made the boat from came from a place called Lebanon that was famous for its cedar trees even now, but that there must have been much bigger trees back then. The other really interesting thing about the boat was that it was made completely from wood and rope. There were no nails holding it together at all. It must have taken a long, long time to tie all the knots. But the next time we get to see a boat, I want to go for a ride.

Visiting Giza Pyramids

One of the problems of being a young moose is the fact that you can't just go anywhere you want on your own. But Maryanne is pretty nice about taking me places. The other day we went to see the big pyramids here in Giza...really, really big pyramids. These things are the biggest piles of rocks I've ever seen. They are pretty interesting too. So many people come here to see them.

There are signs everywhere to say not to climb on the pyramids, but lots of the visitors climb on them a little bit. The rocks are so huge that kids need a grown up to help them get up and down on them. But to find these big rocks is so cool, who can resist climbing on them? Even grown ups climb up on them and some of them act pretty silly up there too. You can go inside the pyramids, at least some of them, but the tunnels inside are small and crowded. They aren't too bad for kids and a small moose, but most of the grown ups come out groaning about backs and legs and stuffy air.

Almost everywhere you look at the pyramids there are people selling interesting things like little statues of people with animal heads on them. Maryanne said that they were statues of the old Egyptian gods and goddesses. I don't know much about that but they were kind of fun to look at and the guys selling them really seemed to want me to have one or two of them. I didn't think that it was very nice that Maryanne didn't want to buy them for me. I could have come home with a car full of people with animal heads, post cards, and other stuff. Not fair if you ask me.
Other guys had lots of pretty pyramids in different colours and then there were the guys who offered camel and horse rides. There is so much going on at the pyramids that it's almost like a carnival. That's what Maryanne kept saying too. "This place is such a circus!"

The pyramids are really, really, really old. I think that they are about 7 or 8 thousand years old. I can't figure out how old that really is but they are older than most of the things that we saw when we went on our Nile cruise. Apparently, it was like the grandfather or great grandfather of the pharoah who made the biggest pyramid who invented pyramids in the first place and built one in Dahshur called the Red Pyramid. So these aren't the first pyramids but they are the biggest.

Visiting pyramids is fun. There are so many people running around, kids coming up to you saying "Hello. What is your name?" even though they don't seem to know what to answer if you ask what their name is. There are horses with people riding them, horses pulling carriages, camels with people riding, camels alone...maybe Maryanne is right and it really is some kind of circus.

Visiting Fishes in Sharm

Well, Sharm el Sheikh was pretty cool. We went to a big hotel next to the ocean and sat around in the sun for a morning. The hotel had a huge swimming pool but I forgot my bathing suit and no one was sure if a moose was allowed in the pool. The people were saying that this is a real vacation place. As far as I can see that means that no one here goes for long walks in temples or tombs or anything. A lot of people were just lying around in the sun and sleeping.

Some people were in the water playing and then someone who works for the hotel came and started some music so that the guests who wanted something to do could play some games and do some exercises. It was pretty interesting to watch but looked like you could get pretty tired. They jumped up and down in the water a lot. I guess that my people weren't bored because they drank coffee and ate ice cream instead. A lot of the guests in the hotel were from France but also a lot of them were from someplace that Maryanne called the Gulf. I haven't seen the Gulf before but I heard of France.

While everyone was watching the people bouncing in the swimming pool, I was looking around to see what else interesting was going on. All of a sudden I saw this guy on a big white horse come walking by the pool. Well, I thought, maybe the horse is going swimming. If horses can go swimming, then maybe a moose can too. But it turned out that the horse didn't go swimming. The man was nice though. He works for the hotel and it turned out that Maryanne knew him. They have horses there that people can ride so he let me sit on the horse for a picture. Maryanne said she didn't see why she would pay to ride a horse when she can do it for free at home. Oh well.

One of the things that people do in Sharm el Sheikh is to look at fish. We went to the shop for people who want to look at fish or go to the mountains to see what sort of fun things we could do. Some people wanted to go to see a place in the mountains called St. Catherines. It's a monastery where monks live. They had to explain that monks are nothing like monkeys..if they were it would be much more fun. But it didn't matter because the monastery was closed and we couldn't go anyway. Everyone thought it would be too cold to go swimming to see the fish, even though I thought that I looked pretty good in the mask to see fish with. So instead, the next day we went on a boat with a window in the bottom. Everyone said not to worry because no one was going to open the window while we were in the boat.

The next morning we went down to the beach and there was a boat tied to a dock. We got into the boat and there it was...the window in the bottom of the boat. Wow! It was very cool. While we waited for everyone to come to take a ride on the boat, we looked at fish that were swimming by the beach. Fish are really amazing. They slide around the water very gently and then flash! They are gone. The fish in Sharm are beautiful colours. Some of them are blues and greens and yellows, every different shape and size and pattern. Stripes, squares, big spots, fish with long fins, fish that are big and small...everything.

After a while the boat started moving and we very slowly went around the water in the bay looking through the window at the fish and at things that looked a lot like plants growing in the water. The plant things are called corals and they come in all sorts of sizes and shapes and colours. The fish seem to like to live near them and some of the small ones even seem to hide in the corals. It was really fun to look at the fish and the corals. I hoped that maybe we would see a shark or a whale but the fish weren't all that big. There were some fish that looked like Nemo in the movie though.

One of the people on the boat with us wanted to go swimming with the fish and the boat stopped by some corals so that he could swim. The rest of us just sat around on the boat and bobbed up and down for a while. The sun was warm and the breeze was nice so I decided that sitting on boats is a good thing to do. This boat wasn't nearly as big as the Nile boat, but I think boats are a good idea. It was much better on the boat than it was on shore because unless someone has planted something green in Sharm el Sheikh, it's all rocks and sand.

Later that day we sat on the balcony at the room of the hotel and watched all the boats coming back from visiting fish out at sea. A lot of people in Sharm go out in these boats all day long and they jump in the water to visit fish. It sounds kind of strange to me. They could just look through the bottom of the window boat.

copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani