A Place To Play

One of the things about the crowded Nile Valley is that there are so few places for leisure activities. Of course, leisure for the boys and men is football (soccer to North Americans) and for this you need a football field. These players are from the village of Abu Sir which is to the left of the photograph. Every Friday they gather on the edge of the desert and have a complete football league that plays in impromptu pitches.  In our little village, a clever land owner has built a football pitch complete with light poles on a piece of empty land. He will rent it out to people wanting to play by the hour, about LE 50 per hour which works out to be only about LE 2.5 per player for people wanting to play a game.

Sitting On Top Of The World

A grandfather cuddles his granddaughter in a niche on the side of the Great Pyramid on a Friday morning.

Where to Go On The Holiday

Not all the visitors to the Giza pyramids are foreigners. During the Great Feast (Eid el Adha) Egyptians have about 4 days of holidays and some of them decided to visit the pyramids on Friday. The guards seemed to have been concerned about crowds and were restricting the number of visitors on the plateau, so we had a lovely time visiting on horseback. Ordinarily, there would have been about eight to ten times the number.

Getting Away On Friday

Cairo is one of the most densely populated cities in the world and unfortunately it has very few parks. Friday being the day that most people have off from work, many families try to get a bit of fresh air and look for a place where the kids can have good time. On the main roads out near my farm there are restaurants specialising in country cooking, grilled chicken, quail, stuffed pigeon, salads and so on. Many of them have some open land where kids can try pony rides, take a ride in a carriage and so on. This is about as close as many children will ever get to a farm or anything other than urban living.