High culture

With Japanese financial support, Cairo built a grand opera house 20 years ago to serve as a venue of all types of performance arts. We had been thinking about going for a while and finally did this past weekend. Tickets are heavily subsidized by the Ministry of Culture -- $7 for the best seats in the house! (We should go more often.) We went an hour early to get tickets, but the ticket booth wasn't open until just before the show. Not that you really need to book in advance; it was only half full at most.

We had thought it was the Cairo Symphony Orchestra performing that night, but it turned out to be a string-less wind ensemble. We still enjoyed it very much. The marches and concertos reminded me of stuff I used to play in the high school band (though they were a bit better). They even played music from Indiana Jones! Not the place we expected to find John Williams, but it was great.

Since we were dressed up, we had planned to make an evening of it and go to a nice Thai restaurant. Unfortunately, it was closed -- too early in this evening! By the time they opened at 7:00 we wouldn't have had enough time to eat. Our nice dinner will have to wait for another night.

So instead we sadly walked around looking for food near the opera house, finally finding... KFC. We might have stuck out a bit in our operatic attire...

(Interesting sidenote: this KFC was staffed entirely by deaf employees! They took orders through pointing and hand gestures, and actually communicated pretty well. There was some miscommunication, though, about being charged too much, which required the manager to emerge and actually talk to us. But, all in all, a laudable enterprise.)