Day 80 Thursday October 21st

Waiting in the Hotel’s bar for our car and driver for the day and the call to prayer has just started behind me. I’m travelling with my personal fly-swot and so pass the time trying to reduce their population.
We are first taken to the Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Museum and Village (outside of Cairo, about an hour’s drive) and it’s great. We see the tips of the pyramids in the distance but will have to wait a week to see them close up. We spend an hour and a half there alone (again the tour buses don’t come here) with one of the Directors (the founder’s daughter) and she explains its history and answers our many questions about Egypt as well.
The art center/village was founded by a successful architect/weaver/potter in 1941. He was asked to help the local children. He chose some local Christian children and particularly girls since they had the hardest time getting an education and he insisted that he be allowed to teach art his way. He had them grow plants to make the dyes, taught them weaving, took them around the countryside and the zoo for inspiration and then told them to make wool and cotton tapestries of whatever occurred to them. He kept any instructions to a minimum and didn’t allow them to draw a design first-he thought that would be too constraining. It’s still going today, the children grew up and became successful artists and many of them remain here and work. We saw them at work weaving and also some doing batik dyeing using wax. Young children are added to the mix as space allows. He built the village by first teaching them how to work with clay and then they made these beautiful domed buildings of clay and straw in old Egyptian traditional styles.
Then our driver met us and we visited Old (Coptic) Cairo and visited the old churches and the Synagogue there. It’s a walled enclave for Christian and Jewish churches and heavily guarded, we have to pass through airport type screening to get in. Yoanna, the director at the art center had already answered our question of “how many Christians are there in Egypt?” by first telling us that it’s a secret, the government will say about 5m but she said that there at least 17m and that relations between Muslims and Christians have deteriorated ever since Sadat announced that he was the Muslim leader of a Muslim country. However, she added that she was optimistic that it would improve “Egyptians are tolerant of one another’s religious beliefs”. Then it’s back to our hotel and beers in the bar so I can write this before dinner somewhere nearby. Tomorrow we will be up at 6.00am to catch the bus under Suez and across the Sinai to Hadad. We have changed our minds about Hurghada and Sharme el Sheik after learning how they have been ruined by catering to package tours.