In Our Neighborhood: Souq Bulaq

Behind a bus station on the far side of Dokki, on the edges of Cairo and Giza, up the stairs and just across the tracks of the Egyptian National Railway, you’ll find the market of Bulaq al-Dokrur.

You won’t have any luck if you try looking for it in Cairo Maps, as this authority for finding the more obscure streets and districts in a city where all but the largest thoroughfares seem winding and obscure, shows a blank space in the spot where the market should be. But if you take Al Sudan Street north from the Behoos Metro stop, turn left at the stands of oranges and follow the throngs of people heading over the pedestrian bridge, you’ve reached Bulaq al-Dokrur.

Go down the stairs and you’re in the middle of a bustling crowd of fruit sellers, laughing children, merchants touting their wares by shouting their best offers at the multitudes of passersby as Arabic pop music blares — a veritable explosion of sights, sounds and smells.

Outside a fabric-seller’s shop, brightly colored scarves are hung in a circular formation like a May pole; delicately embroidered robes flutter in the desert breeze. A merchant at a juice stand is squeezing fresh mango and sugarcane juice. People are going about their daily lives here in Bulaq. Ancient white minibuses, Cairo’s most common means of mass transit, skid along on the dusty road, their drivers yelling out names of numerous destinations, from the airport to the Pyramids.

Look down a street and there’s sheep; look another way and there’s a young boy running a pastry stand (ask him for a sample and he’ll be more than likely to oblige). Around every corner is an experience.

The market in Bulaq al-Dokrur is not unique in this bustling city of over 16 million. Most Cairo neighborhoods have street markets, and people go to their neighborhood market and move from store to shop to street side vendor buying the necessities for the day — freshly-cut goat meat; camel kofta!; fish from the Nile, fried to taste; bright oranges displayed in the shape of a pyramid on the end of a grocer’s cart; warm pita bread, just pulled from a stone oven and sold on wooden platforms. There is no Super Wal-Mart here and efficiency isn’t a consideration. The food sold won’t stay fresh beyond a day, and most people go to the market daily, purchasing the day’s meals.

I took my cousin to Bulaq al-Dokrur when he came to visit Cairo. As the hulking 6-foot-tall, white male – a criminal justice senior at a state college only an hour from my Vermont hometown – walked through the throngs of mothers and children sitting beside white plastic buckets of vegetables and old men in long green gallibiyyas selling bread, he remarked, “this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever felt like a minority.”

As for me, Bulaq al-Dokrur is a rush of positive energy. Maybe it’s the honey-drenched Arabic pastries with names I’ve just learned to pronounce or the bright yellow floodlights that line the fruit stands at night and give the pulsing market an eccentric sort of glow into the wee hours of the morning. Maybe the market provides an opportunity for me to lose myself in the pulse of a sheer humanity much larger than me and forget about my worries with the taste of sweet green sugarcane juice. I don’t know, but whenever I feel down in Cairo, I find myself heading over the bridge into Bulaq al-Dokrur.

Welcome to the Cave!

Exhausted from fending off semsars (brokers) and other street mountebank-type-figures pushing substandard, ramshackle housing on us at exorbitant prices, Cakmac and I took matters into our own hands. We found our OWN ramshackle housing in Cairo in the form of what we like to call "The Cave."

(Doesn't it look like a cave? Hi Kerry!)

"The Cave" is a free-standing house in the neighborhood Dokki in Cairo, Egypt. It has a backyard with a tree and with lots of cats that only get in fights with each other around 6am. Our landlady cooks us dinner sometimes, and sometimes we make pancakes at midnight. That's just how we roll in the Cave.

We welcome you to our home, and promise to entertain you with stories, profiles, photos, tours of the neighborhood, and even the occasional cave-drawing. Welcome to "The Cave," and to our daily lives in Egypt.