Homes in Egypt

A couple people have requested pictures of Egyptian houses and/or our house. You should understand before you look at these that we live in a very upscale neighborhood of Cairo.  This is where most expatriates in Egypt live, as well as many wealthy and upper-middle-class Egyptians.  As you will see, there is still poverty here but most of the pictures don't represent an 'average' Egyptian house very well.

We don't know what this will be, but here is a building under construction:

One a little bit further along...

The above building is right next to ours. We noticed that even though it's not finished there are already people living there:

Homelessness is not a big problem here as the family unit is usually very strong.  We've been told that these people are probably the workers completing the building.

These are some typical apartment buildings (for our neighborhood):

These next four pictures appear to be private houses, although it's possible there could be more than one unit inside some of them:

And here are two different tiny houses that represent the poorer side of Maadi. (Sorry the second one is so unclear, I wasn't really sure I should be taking the picture so I did it too quickly!)

This second house is a bit of a puzzle.  From walking past it at night, we know that they have electricity and (at least) a television.  It is also decorated for Ramadan.  What we may never know is why the people are there or why they don't invest in a better building instead of electricity and decorations.

And here are a few pictures of our apartment:

You can see my least favorite thing (the really ugly couches) and my most favorite thing (behind the sliding doors in the bedroom is an iron shutter that completely blocks out the light- the sun rises around 4am!