Ramadan

So Ramadan in Egypt causes Muslims here to be night owls to say the least. This is facilitated by the fact that most jobs begin maybe an hour later and end at about three or four in the afternoon, which gives most Egyptian Muslims enough time to go home and catch a nap before eating the first meal of the day. Muslims also eat a small meal right before the dawn at like 3:00 in the morning, since dawn here was at 4:00 A.M. for most of August. Anyway, I don't know if it was the fact that I was turning 25 or whether I was just not sleeping well for some reason, but I had a hard time sleeping deeply. Therefore, I was woken up by the simplest of noises. Although, most suburban Americans would probably disagree with my usage of the word simplest of noises; however, the sounds of Cairo urban life have never really woken me up before at least not in the two months that I have lived here. To help you experience the night life of Cairo during Ramadan I put together a few videos of things that woke me up in the middle of the night. The worst, I have to say was the man reading the Quran over the mosque's loudspeakers at 1in the morning the night before I was supposed to take the GRE.

So this is the man that goes around and wakes up the children in the middle of the night so that they can eat one last meal before the sun rises.

This is what I heard the night before the GRE and it happened probably every night. Sometimes I slept through it and sometimes I didn't. It is important to note that I just laid in bed and turned on my camera so it is not like I went running to the window to make it sound louder than it really was. Also, although the video is less than two minute, this reciting of the Quran would sometimes last 45 minutes to an hour.