Things we ate on the street: Egypt

Admittedly, keeping up this blog has proved far more difficult than we had hoped. Power outtages, painfully slow connections, limited access to computers, and other forces beyond our control have prevented us from being able to write like we would like. But we're still going to try and send word when we can. And we'd like to add two new features: Things we ate on the street and Eric's haircuts around the world. This is because we're realizing that these two experiences are some of our richest and most memorable.

In Egypt, our favorite street snacks were sucre kassap (sp?) and mango juice. Sucre kassap was where they ran sugarcane through some sort of contraption that mashed the cane into a pulp and just extracted the juice. Somehow the coils that worked this magic also made the juice incredibly cold without adding ice (which would have been murder for our fragile American bellys). Our friend Daniel, who was studying Arabic in Cairo, introduced us to this treat, and we raised a toast to him everytime we took a swill of the murky brownish delight.

Our other favorite was the fresh mango juice. You had to drink it standing up at the corner of some sidewalk stand, where they would simply mash the mango into a drinkable form and pour it into a glass that you hoped would be clean. This treat saved us from heat stroke returning from the pyramids and restored our good humor on many an occasion! Three Egyptian cheers for fresh mangoes!