Let's have something to eat before we go to the Giza pyramids. This donkey is feasting on food waste brought back to Zabaleen. Meat is expensive and most Cairenes can't afford to eat meat except on festival days and other celebrations. They eat a lot of eggs, 'the poor man's meat'. A lot of things are subsidised in Egypt, otherwise they can't pay for it with the low wages there. This keeps the populace kind of docile so they won't riot, as one author puts it.
There's lots of these puffed spheres of wheat bread available, they're sold everywhere for very little money. So no one starves. Let them eat bread. Egypt don't grow any wheat for the bread, this is imported and heavily subsidised.
They eat a lot of 'fuul' which is fava bean paste. We didn't try any. So I don't know how it taste. One thing we did try is this in the picture, 'kushari', a vegetarian dish of Macaroni, lentils, fried onions in a spicy tomato sauce. We asked one of our taxi drivers what he was having for lunch. He said, 'kushari', asked if we like to try it. We liked it.
One problem in Cairo is finding some place decent to have dinner, a meal that we, Westerners would appreciate. There's a couple of restaurants in Zamalek that serves serviceable food. One of them 'Abu Seid' is the best for Egyptian food. We ate here twice, it's always full, both of locals and visitors. Mint tea is always served in this old enamel pot, very traditional. We took a liking to drinking sweet mint tea and drink it throughout the day like the locals.
We loved this traditional Egyptian dish of stuffed pigeon. It is so good. Another I liked is stuffed grape leaves.
And of course, the Baba Ganosh, an eggplant paste made from roasted eggplant. It is so good and I loved its smoky flavor.
The remains of the meal of stuffed roasted pigeon. Mmmmmmm good....
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