I am amazed at the endless construction in Cairo. There are very few areas of the city where the buildings are not in various levels of construction. Well, to be honest, there are no areas I've seen in Cairo that seem completely finished. You may think it's finished, but then get to the end of the street and notice a huge pile of rubble or dirt or just general trash. The other day there were guys at work at a building near our flat and I laughed at the cement they mixed up right there on the sidewalk. No silly containers getting in their way. Just a pile of wet cement and various piles of construction materials like tile and glass in the middle of the sidewalk that us pedestrians are required to just walk around or over. The materials, minus the cement, are all still sitting there a couple of weeks later actually. I trip over the tiles just about every time I walk by.
The piles of trash, debris, or rubble are huge in some areas of the city. One of the other teachers at my school joked that she was so tired the first night, she thought there was a pyramid behind her apartment building. When she woke up the next day, she realized it was just a pile of dirt! One of the roads to the mall near our flat looks straight out of Mad Max. I HAVE to take pics of this road.
There are also hundreds and hundreds of buildings around the city that look like the outer shell was built and then everyone just abandoned the project. I wonder how much of this is related to the revolution and how much of it is just Cairo. I think it's a combination of both. Our tour guide explained that there was a weird tax loop at one time involving construction that caused builders to avoid paying taxes as long as the building was still in some form of construction. So you see buildings all around that have struts coming out of the top of the building just waiting for floors to be added. Supposedly they added a law with a time limit, but that still left a lot of buildings around that seem to be just waiting for a construction crew.
The piles of trash, debris, or rubble are huge in some areas of the city. One of the other teachers at my school joked that she was so tired the first night, she thought there was a pyramid behind her apartment building. When she woke up the next day, she realized it was just a pile of dirt! One of the roads to the mall near our flat looks straight out of Mad Max. I HAVE to take pics of this road.
There are also hundreds and hundreds of buildings around the city that look like the outer shell was built and then everyone just abandoned the project. I wonder how much of this is related to the revolution and how much of it is just Cairo. I think it's a combination of both. Our tour guide explained that there was a weird tax loop at one time involving construction that caused builders to avoid paying taxes as long as the building was still in some form of construction. So you see buildings all around that have struts coming out of the top of the building just waiting for floors to be added. Supposedly they added a law with a time limit, but that still left a lot of buildings around that seem to be just waiting for a construction crew.
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