Belly Dancing = Paaaartay

Last night a bunch of us decided to go see a Belly Dancing show. According to our trusty loney planet we had one of two options: classy and expensive show at one of cairo's 5-start hotels, or cheap and sleazy with egyptian locals. One of the american girls who was coming with me was on a low budget so we defaulted to cheap and sleazy :)

So at 11pm, 5 of us hit up a place called Palymra. Unfortunetly, when we arrived we were told the show starts at midnight but we were invited to a bar next door. This was the begining of one of the most bizzar/fun nights i've had in a long time. This little bar was so tacky, you could call it cool. The place was decorated as it it was someone's birthday (think coloured ballons lining the walls). The locals in this pub were ultra friendly, they would come up shake our hands and introduce themselves. But the best thing about this bar was the service. In general, i've found the service in egypt to be quite poor...for example, i've been to a nice bar where you have to place an order for beer a few times before it comes. At this place, the moment the word 'Stella' starts rolling off your tongue, there's a guy running to the fridge to get it for you. Ashtrays immediately are replaced after every cigarette. Anyway around 12 we moved onto the Belly Dancing bar which slowly filled up until it was full around 1:30. There was a live band, singers, and a new dancer every half hour. Now for the bizzar bit. At one point one of the audience members decides to go on stage and shake his fat belly along with the dancer...cool i think. But at the end of the dance, he reaches into his pocket and takes out a stack of cash and proceeds to through large sums of real money into the audience. At this point i thought it was part of the show. But then the next song another guy gets up and walks up the the first guy (who is sitting at his table smoking shisha) and pours money onto his head. Anyway, more guys get involved in this money pouring fiesta and the place is alive. The dancers are happy of course because all the money that is thrown around ends up in their pockets...there's a guy who's sole purpose is to collect money from the floor - I wonder what he writes on his resume. To cut long story short, a few hours, many beers and a couple shishas later im on the dance floor with the belly dancers pouring money on an egyptian guy's head (i made friends with him earlier as i was sitting next to him)...which of course was kindly recipricated later :)

This morning, i woke up with a wicked headache and spent the morning in bed trying to make sense of what happened last night. The afternoon was spent in the famous Egyptian museum...the highlight was of course the mask of king Tut.



Shake it like a polaroid picture