Visiting CityStars in Cairo - shopping, Burger King and Horton Hears A Who

Yesterday we went to CityStars in Nasr City/Heliopolis. We had heard a lot about this huge, new, American-style mall, but put off by the distance and traffic that lies between Heliopolis and Maadi, we hadn’t dared to venture out there yet. It wasn’t as far as I thought, about a 35 minute ride without traffic jams, and our taxi driver there was young but cautious and handled the road well. We entered the mall somewhere in the middle, and well; it’s huge. Overwhelmed we walked around for a while, rode the glass elevators up a couple of floors, got a map and sat down at a Starbucks for rehydration. Scanning the list of stores I noticed there were two huge H&M’s, a Vero Moda, a Body Shop, a Toys’r Us, an Inter Sport, a Virgin Mega store and of course a ton of other interesting looking shops. Excitedly we rushed over to the H&M section only to find that it doesn’t open until June, and the same went for the Body Shop and the Toys’r Us. What a disappointment! I have to mention here that I’ve had terrible trouble finding clothes in Egypt that accommodate my style, size and price range. H&M always did all of the above for me, anywhere in the world. In fact, I’ve barely bought any clothes since we got to Egypt, but since I wear clothes every day – obviously – some of my garments have been worn out and I’m running low on just about anything; blouses, light pants, underwear. It was fun to look in the Vero Moda shop but the prices were well above the Swedish, which says a lot. I found a couple of blouses in Esprit as well, but they were all between 450-600 EGP and there was no way I could justify a purchase like that. Willing to spend a bit more on a swimsuit, which I needed right away, I did find a very nice one that I bought, and one of the toy stores had reasonably prized large sized packs of Batman underwear for the boys. For the rest though, Courtney & I walked around wondering who shops at CityStars. Even if we did have a lot more money, we could go to any city in Europe and buy all the same stuff, probably for less including the plane tickets.

We had heard that some of the independent restaurants in CityStars are really good, but when we saw that there was a Burger King on the first floor our minds were set. Of all the American fast food chains, Burger King is the one we like, and it’s the only one you can’t find in Maadi. The Whopper was good.

We didn’t try the indoor amusement park (our friends the Four family did though, and you can read about their adventure here) but went to see a movie instead. We hadn’t been to a movie theater in Egypt yet, and when we realized we could go in the mall, we didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity. Tickets were 25 EGP/person, and the theater was nice, they sold sweet popcorn which was a real treat, and the movie, Horton Hears A Who, was good fun.