Of Mountains and Speeches

I thought that seeing the sun come up between the dangerously ominous peaks surrounding Mt Sinai was exactly the kind of momentous occasion I'd wanted out of my last days in Egypt.
I was wrong. More than wrong in fact.

Highlights from Mt Sinai:

Ben exhausted after our long climb. (Mt Sinai's altitude is 2285m in height, the camel trail which is what I climbed is a 7km trail to the summit).

On our way down from the mountain- the sun's morning rays illuminated everything beautifully.

I shot this photograph while pausing to take a breath halfway down the mountain. "Let's take stock," I told Ben. "There's no way we climbed that thing."

I'm not going to say Mt Sinai was a letdown. I'm still repeating my favorite catchphrase from the event that I got to see a sunrise of "truly biblical proportions" that I may have stolen from LonelyPlanet. But, in the last few days I spent in Cairo, the few glimpses I witnessed of the city that never sleeps, on the eve and morn of Obama's visit were probably the one memory of a city that I love from the bottom of my heart that I'll always hold on to.

It's as though all of Cairo was a abuzz with the news of the president's visit. While most articles I've read on the subject (having returned to a world with internet access), making Cairenes sound bitter about the costs and benefits of the U.S. President's visit, what I witnessed was a sweeter kind of respect, a similar one to that of his win during elections.
These men weren't complaining about the cost of bread, about the amount of money spent on security.
As I stood trying to take some mediocre photographs of a cute man selling little teracotta pots outside my favorite souq on Sheikh Rehan, everyone told me "Bokra Obama," the afternoon before his arrival, as though recognizing the white color of skin of my companions they wanted us to note that they too were enthused.
A cab driver, dropping us back our hotel asked us of our opinion, immediately comparing the charismatic president to Bush, and Musharraf (noting immediately that I was infact a "Muslimah from Bakistan).
On Bein al Qasrayn, on the outskirts of Khan El Khalili market, in front of the mosque of Sultan Barquq, an enterprising vendor (who Jack Shenker seems to have run into as well) held up a white t-shirts with a familiar hieroglyphic rendering of King Tut. Below it the words "Obama, the New King Tutankhamun"
In the Mall of Khan El Khalili, we stop to look at a television screen depicting a stone mosque with three/four layers of tiered muqarnas. "Sultan Hassan?" I ask one of the guys there. "Dilwati, henna. Ba3d 3ain, al Haram" told me the man. Apparently even Obama deemed my favorite mosque worthy of a visit, along with the Pyramids.

Of course finally eating dinner at the Birdcage was pretty pleasant as well, as far as last things in Egypt go.