(Photo courtesy of Maci Mark)
By Maci Mark
CAIRO – I love old things, anything that is from a different time and place, I just love it! That’s why I chose to study abroad in Cairo, Egypt. In just the two weeks that I have been here I have been absolutely blown away by it.
I am from Los Angeles, California so when I went to Gettysburg I thought that everything there was old, it had been built in the 1830s! That was over 150 years old! Los Angeles was built starting in the 1900s so it’s all very new. When thinking about an old place I like to think about how many people lived there or how many people passed through.
Being in Cairo is incredible because the “old” here is thousands of years old. One of the most remarkable places that I have been to is the Khan el Khalili marketplace. This is remarkable because it is inside the old fortress that used to make up the city of Cairo. Inside this marketplace it is bustling with vendors, visitors, and tourists. The streets are small and winding and we were warned that if we got lost that even Google maps would not be able to help us. This market place is absolutely stunning. One of the streets within the marketplace is lined with mosques, first built by the Sultan Hassan and then mosques built by his son. They are done in absolutely stunning Islamic medieval art. When you step inside of them you feel how sacred of a place it is and how it is the resting place of an important man.
There is something sacred about these places, how a no longer active mosque is upheld for its beauty and legacy. Places like the Khan el Khalili marketplace and the Mosque of Sultan Hassan feel like they will be here forever.
Many places around Cairo feel that way and it is magical to be able to share in it. I plan to explore every one of them and feel incredibly privileged to be able to do so.
This postcard from abroad originally appeared on page 18 of the February 27, 2020 edition of The Gettysburgian’s magazine.
