Tahrir, Feluca, Koshuri, Sunset and a Stella

 As you can see from the above image, I walked around downtown Cairo today, which included a trip to the world famous recent home of the Egyptian revolution, Tahrir Square.  The square has largely been cleaned up - the army came in last week and forcibly removed lingering protester and thusly, there aren't a terrible number of street vendors selling January 25th memoribilia.  The Square still has some visible markers of the revolution; many sidewalks were chipped away by Revolutionary fighters to use as stone ammunition against the government thugs.  These sidewalks are now just swaths of sand, which is odd and quite the visual reminder.
Since it takes forever to upload pictures and then write, I'm doing a photo essay instead of writing a lot today!

The KFC Casualty Center in Tahrir, where people were brought for medical attention during the Revolution.  They fixed it up good.  Incidentally, KFC is hugely popular here - for the food not the medical attention. 

Damaged buildings behind Tahrir with graffiti.

I totally got yelled at by this Marine for taking this picture.  Whatever soldier, I'm a club member too!

As we were heading to the felucca port, we overheard this protest and walked over to see what was being protested.  If you notice, it's all hotel workers.  The employees of the Four Seasons and the Grand Hyatt were out en masse, petitioning for higher wages!

Zoom in on this one if you can.  Yes.  That is a Gold's Gym on the banks of the Nile.

Koshari - a delicious staple of the Egyptian fast food diet!  Basically, it contains six different noodles, rice, lentils, some tomato saucey thing, chickpeas, fried onions, etc.  You add some vinegary garlic mix and devour.  Seriously.  SO GOOD.

Becky and I at Al-Azhar park to watch the sunset and hear the evening calls to prayer across the city.  An excellent video occurred, which I will have to figure out how to upload from my phone later.  Let's just say I learned out to say some filthy things in Egyptian as a result!

Stella - 500 ml of Egyptian brew. 

Other highlights included devouring sushi for dinner (my stomach hasn't turned on me yet!), purchasing train tickets (a multi-hour endeavor) for an overnight trip to Luxor, trying not to die in insane Cairo traffic (the painted lanes? Total afterthought), and realizing that a remix of the theme music to Last of the Mohicans was playing in the sushi restaurant.  I can't make this stuff up!  Anydoodle, it is another beautiful day in Cairo and I'm off to enjoy it!