Khan El-Khalili | Step into the Arabian Nights of a thousand and one nights

Egyptians speak of the story of Khan El-Khalili with historical reminiscence and pride in their national essence. Cairo's old city's Hussein Square is situated between the sacred Al-Azhar Mosque and the Imam Hussein Mosque. Historically, this was one of the urban centers during the Mamluk era! At that time, Cairo was exactly at the crossroads of the trade route extending from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea! In the 14th century, Egypt's rulers chose this geomantically auspicious site, ordered the demolition of nearby cemeteries, concentrated the country's folk artists and various craftsmen here, and according to the division of each industry into its own street and alley, built what would later become the famous traditional craft market of Egypt known throughout the Middle East and the world. To this day, the alleys of Khan El-Khalili still retain their original names. Even today, this market with a strong Islamic ambiance is still composed of thousands of individual small shops distributed along dozens of small streets and alleys. The market still retains the shopping environment and atmosphere of the Middle Ages in its narrow paths. The goods sold range from gold and silver jewelry, copper plates, stone carvings, leather goods to traditional Egyptian handicrafts, offering everything one could wish for, not to mention those tacky toy camels and pyramids and sphinxes made of alabaster. The very popular archway can navigate to the Omkalthoum Bar & Restaurant, just around the corner, but don't have too high hopes for the scenery and portrait photography. The attitudes of the owners of these two shops are very unfriendly, they will chase away and block tourists who are taking photos. Actually, I don't find anything wrong with this behavior at all, after all, different people have different ways of doing business and attitudes. I thought that buying something from their shop would allow me to take photos, but it wasn't the case. After we made our purchases, we thought we could take a few photos, but the shopkeeper still refused to move away. Not only did they refuse to move, but they also had a very unhappy look on their faces. But that's okay, they never said that buying something entitled you to take photos. In the end, I took a few shots with a telephoto lens. But what's more outrageous is that the item we bought was fine when we looked at it, but after the shopkeeper packaged it and gave it to us, we found it was broken when we got back to the hotel, and the broken part was glued back together (proving it wasn't damaged on the way back to the hotel). To be honest, if you want to take photos and check in, you can spend an evening browsing around, but if you want to buy something, I wouldn't recommend coming here~ Khan El-Khalili Market