Yet another Cairo day

This morning after breakfast across the road at a café called La poire - which has THE best coffee (and even has flat white!!), even including Italy, so that is a real compliment….we all met in the lobby (actually not Sally and John) and Amr and I shepherded the herd across the road to the museum. It is just a stone’s throw from the hotel, but does entail crossing a busy road. It is Friday, which is like Sunday here, and there were many people visiting the museum, and many large groups. We felt smug to be individuals wandering round, and could dart to where there wasn’t a crowd. Arranged a meeting place and we all wandered and had a lovely time, filling in the gaps from the last visit when we went as part of the tour.

Then we all met at 3 as Omnia invited everyone to her apartment for “high tea”, and some of her friends came too. It was lots of fun and a highly successful but the stressful part (for Amr) was getting people there and back. We are used to walking there in the past, but it is too far and difficult (with the road crossings and uneven potholed paths) for most of our friends, so amr organised 3 carloads of people….had to explain where (addresses are hard to explain here apparently, as the government changed street names which muddles Google - I think that was the problem, or some difficulty when there wasn’t an Arabic speaker in the car!). It is all an adventure, but stressful for Amr trying to make everything run smoothly.

We all got there safe and sound, and it was lovely to see their apartment again, which we hadn’t stayed in since the early 90s. Omnia has done great renovations and it looks very good. Then we had the same procedure for getting home to the hotel…this time a complication as the first Uber with Evie, Robin, Sally and John went to the wrong Steigenberger hotel - or was on its way to it, way out near the pyramids!!! They realised something was amiss when they found themselves driving out of the city and fortunately it did get sorted out before going the whole way and they were delivered back to the city central one near Tahrir Square!! Phew…but Amr was stressed even more and once it was over we sat at the bar by the pool with Peter and Louise and had a bottle of wine. Now finally settling down and unwinding….Read more