Africa Cairo, Egypt - Tourist Attractions

The twin streams of Egypt's history converge just below the Delta at Cairo, where the largest city in the Islamic world stretches across the Nile to the Pyramids, those supreme monuments of antiquity. Every visitor to Egypt comes here, to reel in the masses of the Pyramids and the fatal swarming immensity of Cairo with its bazaars, mosques and the Citadel and the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities extraordinary.

It is impossible, too, not to get carried away by the street life, where medieval trades and customs coexist with a modern, cosmopolitan influences of Arab, African and European.Egyptians had two names for the city, an old and popular, the other Islamic and officials. The foremost is Masr, meaning both the capital and the land of Egypt - "Egypt City" - a city of Ur, which constantly renews itself and dominates the nation, an idea rooted in Pharaonic civilization.

(For Egyptians abroad, "Masr" refers to their country within its borders, it means the capital.) Whereas Masr is timeless, another name for the city, Al-Qahira (The Conqueror) , is related to an event: the Fatimid conquest made this capital of an Islamic empire that embraced today Libya, Tunisia, Palestine and Syria. The name is rarely used in everyday language.The two archetypes still resonate and in monumental terms are symbolized by two dramatic landmarks: the Pyramids of Giza on the edge of the Western Desert and the Great Mosque of Mohammed Ali - the modernizer of Islamic Egypt - smoldering atop the Citadel. Between these two monuments sprawls a city, the color of sand and ashes, different worlds and times, and gross inequalities. Everything is included in an organism that feeds somehow in the hall of the terminal: medieval slums and Art Deco, garbage collectors and suburban malls marble, donkey carts and limousines, and piety "the oaths men exaggerate in the name of God. " Cairo lives by its own contradictions.