Sunday, April 29, 2007

Travel: Comparing the land of Pharaohs to Uganda

A rather good virtual tour of Cairo, seen from the point of view from a Ugandan writer, Eden Kironde. She does touch on Giza and the Egyptian Museum, but the best parts of this piece are the bits that cover areas of Cairo where the tourist on heritage type tours don't usually venture - shopping malls, nightclubs, downtown markets and the new cities built on land reclaimed from the desert:
"In a country where there’s a piece of history in almost every suburb, the grand shopping malls are among the few symbols of the current generation. The Grand Mall in Maadi screams with splendour in the quiet neighbourhood. The mall oozes with such magnificence that all Ugandan malls would be reduced to kiosks in its presence. The six-storied mall possesses all the worldly goods in its enclosure. . . . Certainly in the over 70 million populated nation, not all can afford the prices of the goods in the malls and that is when the Ataba and downtown markets come in handy. Ataba, Egypt’s answer to our St. Balikudembe, has a variety of goods ranging from foodstuffs to domestic appliances at very low prices."
See the above page for the rest of the story.

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