You Can't Make Mistakes.

But not for a pig.

I’m on my way to the souq today one last time before leaving the country for the summer. I used to hate going there, but that was before I discovered the real souq. Khan al-Khalili is the very tourist-oriented mess of tiny pyramids and sphinxes made of alabaster and various other trinkets and shiny things. The real souq is the whole area around it to the north and west.

It is excellent.

You can get anything there. Anything. My favorite is the spices market, though. I can’t take it very long before I start sneezing, but that goes for a lot of my favorite places in the city. It’s a dusty, smelly, glorious place.

There is a whole part devoted just to shoes. Another for clothing of various kinds. Fabrics. It seems sort of counter-intuitive that you would have a hundred shops selling the same things all in very close proximity, but for some reason it works. Shopkeeper monger and compete with each other. There is always a throng of people moving through the little streets and alleys like a river of humanity.

The best part is that there are no cars. There wouldn’t be any room for them. Everyone gets merchandise into the alleys on these little hand-carts. In a city with millions of people and millions of cars everywhere, it is not a surprise that a market thronged with people would be a relaxing alternative to a streets thronged with honking, noisy, smelly cars and trucks. Because of the lack of cars in the souq, the air is also a great deal cleaner, which is not even the case in most of the gardens in the city.

I never really go there intending to buy anything, but I always find something cool or interesting, or monstrously strange.

Today, though, I am actually looking for some things:

1. An Egyptian flag. Big, not too big.
2. A piece of jewelry from a baladi-dancing pro shop for a friend back home
3. Some prayer beads
4. And an inflatable baby

The inflatable babies are always out around the holidays. Today is Coptic Easter and this week was Shem al-Nasim as well, so I should be able to find one. They are these creepy, inflated, cartoon looking babies. Ghastly, but I have a friend who I haven’t bought a creepy, inflated object for a while, and he will be thrilled by this one.