An afternoon at the Khan El Khalili; fruitful and not entirely unpleasant

Courtney & I had friends watch the boys this afternoon so that we could go to the Khan El Khalili together. We took the metro to Attaba, looked around at the book market for a while but decided that we could spend the whole day there, and that we should prioritize our precious time. The whole point of our trip was to get as many gifts as possible to bring home to our families this summer. We can look at books any other time. We walked over to the Khan, cutting through the spice market where we picked up some cinnamon sticks, and then we made our way through the little shops until we found the passage that leads up to shops around a roof where our taxi driver Emad took me once. We had ordered a name sign for our door, and managed to find quite a few little things around the shops there to take home. The salesmen are calmer in this area; you can watch them work on the products in their shops, and it’s more relaxing to do business with them. When we came “back down”, we were immediately attacked by more aggressive and younger salesmen – one of them even grabbed my wrist to drag me into his shop; we quickly lost our spirit and left the circus to sit down for a drink. I was hoping we would regenerate enough strength to go back in for a couple of more things I knew we wanted to get, but tiredness along with worry that the boys were overstaying their welcome at our friends house, made us hail a cab that took us back to the metro.

Seeing that it was 39˚C degrees today, and adding that Courtney & I are poor (by relative standards, of course) - we both walk around constantly worrying about money and spending (making this kind of trip quite painful for both of us) - and seeing that neither one of us is very fond of shopping; we did quite well. If I can build up the spirit, we might go back with some friends next week to get the rest of our gifts (although I’m tempted to simply ask our friends to pick up the couple of things we need).