In early February, just gone, I spent three days in Cairo
researching my upcoming mystery novel,
The Cairo Puzzle. Cairo is an
extraordinary city, the largest between Mexico city and India, far larger than
any in Europe.
Twenty million people in the metro area makes for a dense
and bustling space, filled with beeping cars at all hours of the day and night.
My main reason for going there was to get inside the Great Pyramid to visit the
King’s Chamber, which I succeeded in doing. To see the small, claustrophobic
main passage inside the pyramid in 360VR, possibly the first such view ever, click
here.
We stayed in the Rameses Hilton, a stone’s throw from the
Nile and a little down the river from the Antiquities Museum, with its
unmissable treasures of Tutankhamun.
The giant self-service breakfast bar at the hotel served a
tasty beef bacon substitute along with an array of almost every type of
breakfast food you would find in any major hotel on any continent. There were
lots of Middle Eastern and Far Eastern visitors filling the restaurant from
early in the morning and plenty of coffee and fresh orange juice top-ups to get
us started for the day.
But my favorite food item at the hotel was the lemon drink
served in the lobby bar downstairs. My wife tells me that’s because they mix a
lot of sugar with the lemon juice! See what it looks like below.
Apparently, this is a traditional drink in Egypt. I loved
it. The hotel served it in style too, as you can see from the pic.
For lunch, one day, an
The Abou Tarek restaurant is famous for one thing; Kushari.
This is a mix of rice, lentils, and macaroni with optional spicy tomato sauce
or garlic vinegar, with a topping of chickpeas and fried onions.
I was hungry when I arrived so I ate most of mine quickly.
It was also about seventy degrees outside in early February and
after a morning visiting the pyramids a good lunch was just what I needed. The
amazing thing, for me, was that this dish was all they served in the restaurant
for lunch.
You could get it topped with slightly different layers, but
that’s it. That’s what you get at the Abou Tarek. The other thing that was
interesting was the aluminum tables and the 1950’s feel of the restaurant. We
ate on the tightly packed upper floor surrounded by tables full of Egyptians.
See the lunch we received below. The metal bowls in the
middle of the table are the spicy sauce.
We also visited some western style restaurants and the hotel
restaurant, but the most memorable food items on our short trip were the lemon
juice and the Kushari.
I love visiting the cities I feature in my novels and eating
with the locals. I’ve been to London,
Istanbul, Jerusalem, Cairo, Nuremberg and
San Francisco, where my novel coming out late in 2017 is based.
I enjoyed every second of my Cairo trip, despite the traffic
we had to dodge through, the sandy dust in the air and the constant beeping
from the streets, which reached us even in our tenth floor hotel room.
Thanks for stopping by to share your food for thought, Laurence!
You can find Laurence here:
Laurence O’Bryan is a
traditional and self-published mystery author, and the founder of the Dublin
Writers Conference, which you can also attend online. See
details about that here. For a 25%
discount on all the options for the conference use this coupon code on
checkout: shelley1
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