One weekend in February,
A friend invited me to her family's old villa in the Egyptian delta.
It was about two hours north of Cairo.
We had lunch, walked around the adjacent village, and generally chilled.
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| The Dinning Room. Ceiling was falling down, but food was delicious. |
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| Fiteer, cheese, honey, tea... all so good. |
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| A bedroom, with a gorgeous glass chandelier |
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| Taking photos of old stuff. This villa was made in 1924 by an Italian architect. Egypt used to be so classy. |
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| View from the roof of the villa. Since the revolution, new informal houses (with ultra conservative inhabitants) have sprung up on Laura's mom's land without her permission. |
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| Walking in the villa's surrounding fields. The fields still mostly belong to the Azba (villa) owners. |
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In the village: Old traditional mud brick homes, replaced by cement.
Above: somebody likes MIA. |
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| Kids with cool poses (notice their feet/legs). One of them (second from the right) was terrified for some reason. Most of them had never seen foreigners before. Adults are in the background. |
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| The village Shaykh, trying to calm them down. |
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| Laura, shooting away, while digesting our lunch under the shady breeze-filled patio. |
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| L's Mom and M were looking through the farm's meticulous old records. Stuff dated back to the 30's. Prices have since super-inflated. We even found an entry bookkeeping the purchase of a "Coca-Cola". |
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| I liked the sun/shadows on this part of the patio. |
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| Path leading through the garden |
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| Irrigation trenches for the garden. |
This is a pretty bad representation of what we saw. I only found inspiration to take photos towards the end of the day. I wish I had taken photos of the family portraits, Laura's mom's village community center-in-the-making, more of the house, and more of our ride there and back.
For more pictures of Egyptian rural scenes, click
here and
here.
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