Egypt: Day Six, Part Two

After the Pyramids, we run the gauntlet of vendors and our bus takes us to Abu Shakra for lunch, which it’s been serving since 1949.  It’s the usual grilled meats with rice - which Ahmed says is safest so none of us comes down with Nile Belly - but it offers a great view of the pyramids nearby from the picture windows in the restaurant upstairs.

     Once lunch is finished, we head back to hose off the dust of the millennia and dress in our finery to take tea with Jehan Sadat, the widow of President Anwar Sadat.  She lives in the very ritzy Dokki neighborhood in Giza, near the Nile, amid tall trees and embassies, carefully guarded, lo these many decades.  Her husband was assassinated before her eyes in 1981 by Muslim extremists during a military parade commemorating the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel.  (Strangely enough, Mubarak, then Vice-President, was seated right next to Sadat but was only lightly wounded in one finger, although others died with the President.  One could wonder whether Mubarak knew, or was even part of a plan, given how long he ruled once he came into power.  But that’s just my fertile imagination.)  Mrs. Sadat has been given this house in Giza until her death, and protection to go along with it.
       She greets us personally as we arrive.  She notices I’m carrying her book, “My Hope for Peace” (as we were told she’d be signing them).  I reply that I also have her other book,  A Woman of Egypt, back in America, and read it many years ago.  She seems pleased.  We’re ushered into her living room, where armchairs have been set up.  She spends about half an hour telling us a few stories about her life with Sadat, and then invites us into the dining room where we’re served tea or coffee and a selection of many kinds of pastries.  The house is filled with photos of her family and we’re allowed to walk around, including into the study where she says Sadat did most of his writing.  She is most gracious, and still beautiful in spite of her 83 years.




       After a group photo, we pile back on the bus - our books still unsigned (more about that later) - and head back to the hotel for dinner and an early bedtime.  Tomorrow we’ll get our wake-up call at 3 am for the flight to Luxor, so it will be a very short night!