I am so honored that Mohamad asked me to be a guest author for his Around the World category. I’m a little intimidated. He is one of the greatest bloggers I know and he is very generous with his time and experience to new bloggers like myself.
When most people write about their cities, they have a lot of pictures of famous buildings and lavish architecture. You won’t find that here. You’ll see scenery. It’s all we have and for most of us, it is more than enough.
Mohamed kindly asked me to write a guest post for his blog and I thought you might enjoy some tales from my time in Cairo. My husband was given an overseas posting to Cairo, Egypt in the fall of 2002. It wouldn’t have been my first choice but my mum had died that year and an overseas posting seemed like an answer to my grief. His American company was particularly hopeless at finding us accommodation so I went out and contracted my own realtor who found us a beautiful villa to rent on a quiet street in the suburb of Maadi. Maadi means ferry crossing and the town was on the banks of the Nile at the southernmost edge of the huge city of Cairo. When we lived there, it was still on the edge of the desert and filled with wildlife. We had buzzards, foxes, Egyptian fruit bats and endless birds on migration.
Lucca is one of my favourite cities in Italy. One of the things I like most is that it is still a living Italian city. While many tourists visit Lucca, Italians still live and work here making a visit a true Italian experience.
Launceston. It’s not the biggest city of beautiful Tasmania, but it is literally, the heart of the state. Located in the centre of the uniquely shaped Australian state, visitors to the Apple Isle would do well to stop in for a few days and visit Launceston.
Launceston – LON-cess-ton
Steeped in a rich industrial history of shipbuilding, the city of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, has undergone a facelift in recent years. Now a top destination for the finer things in life, Newcastle is a hub of premium restaurants, specialist bars and vibrant nightclubs. Art galleries, cinemas and museums further contribute to a fantastic, family-friendly destination saturated in culture.
I’ve always seen a similarity between Italy and Syria (mainly Rome and Damascus). People, food, weather, buildings, streets, alleys, shops, cafes, … I wish that someday I’d be able to better picture the similarities to make a real comparison. I’m sure those who were able to visit both will feel it too.
