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After explaining everything to my relatives, I put on army-style pants with a sandy camouflage texture, a T-shirt, a jacket, charmed myself to maintain a comfortable temperature, put on a white cap, glasses, and muggle-repellent charms, and off I went!
It's funny to watch a bunch of different dark-skinned Egyptians now and then try to fool the breakaway tourists. No, really, they're just amazingly enterprising and talkative people, but then again - they didn't become like that from a good life.
The hike to the magical quarter was exhausting. The problem was not the people not noticing me or the hot summer weather, from which even the charms save mediocre. The problem was the ambiance of Cairo itself. I have been to many tourist cities in my past life, but Cairo breaks all records-even the abrupt transition in quality of life and terrain. There everything is smooth, from good to bad. Here, it's abrupt. Walking through the slums, you look around the corner - a green park and a high-rise business center twenty meters across the street.
From the map printed on the brochure and the sparse names of signs and streets in English, I reached the spice store "Aid Alsheikh." The most seemingly ordinary shop. On the sides of the entrance were trays with various kinds of food, and inside were sacks and bags of colorful powders, roots, and other obscure things hanging from the bottom.
The shop owner, a dried dark-skinned old man in a turban and a sparse white beard, immediately saw me and looked at me attentively.
"A foreigner?" he asked me in fairly clear English.
"Yes, hello," I bowed slightly.
"Well, you look normal," he scratched his chin. "Your papers?"
I handed the old man the documents. He looked at them briefly, and without any wands, levitated them back to me.
"There are a couple of rules. Be polite, don't go into the green quarter, don't disobey the wizards in burgundy-red clothes, show them your papers. Show restraint in looks and words. The entrance is that way."
The old man pointed toward a small arched door that I'd never seen before. Interesting.
"Thank you," I bowed, and the old man nodded back.
Carefully I passed between the counters and pulled aside the incomprehensible ingredients hanging on the strings with my hands. I opened the door and stepped inside.
The noise and commotion engulfed me as soon as the door closed. There were no smooth transitions-it was like being thrown out of a dark box into a pool in the middle of a party.
Here and there were people walking around in all sorts of long clothes made of lots of fabrics. The colors were predominantly light, but the shapes varied considerably. And there were hardly any people with exposed parts of their bodies-just a few light-skinned people, obviously tourists.
Much more impressive were the few streets that opened up into the passageway. They started from the entrance behind me, and along each of them were a number of different pavilions, with or without colored awnings, with many colorful artifacts, fabrics, ingredients, and other small things. There were ready-made clothes, tools, bags of spices, and fabrics of different colors and sizes stretching from one booth to the next to shield the visitors from the heat of the sun.
There was even an awning of some kind above me. When I looked around, I was astonished. I was amazed that the door was in the pedestal of some kind of wizard statue, and beyond the statue continued these very streets. Again there were shops and pavilions of various sizes, and about three hundred meters away, the white walls of a large building, so similar to the English Branch of Gringotts, were visible. Should I go there? No.
With confident steps, I stepped down one of the roads, looking curiously at the various wares. However, no matter how much I walked, I didn't find anything really interesting. There were various amulets against evil eye and spoilage, mountains of jewelry, accessories, souvenirs, various figurines, and stuff. It was rather interesting to look at the local magical fashion, but as it should be in an eastern country, it was rather strict about it. It is strange, though, because closed clothes are regulated by Shariah, not Koran, and... No, I don't know the history of that religion. I am not good at history. In general, it is strange. For some reason, I expected to see something like the Aladdin cartoon. Seriously. And I saw a bunch of colorful cloaks.
On the other hand, every single thing here looked outlandish, unusual. For example, the interesting magical lamp in the form of a hollow flask, inside which memories literally float: three-dimensional, beautiful, and no bright colors. And there were a lot of such useless but beautiful things here.
Also, every now and then, you could find yourself an adventure. Seriously. There was a strange dark alley between the shops, in which something glittered mysteriously and interestingly, and a suspicious old salesman, who kept trying to slip me something. Funny, but there is even a European-looking girl who has already caught my eye three times unobtrusively and looked the way a person looking for help is supposed to look. Except that a pair of bearded grinning peddlers stood nearby. Probably some kind of local magic swindler.
I returned to the room a little tired and full of various contradictory impressions when I had had a good walk and had not spent a single galleon because I did not take any money.
"How was your walk?" John turned to me at once.
He and Sara were sitting in armchairs at the coffee table. John was reading some kind of book, and Sarah was reading a magazine. What was interesting was clearly a technical magazine.
"Not bad, and how are you doing?" I answered, taking off my cap and renewing the charms on my clothes.
"We went for a walk, too. It's pretty interesting if you stay inside the hotel grounds."
"By the way," Sarah looked away from the magazine. "There's a very nice pool complex here. I recommend you go. The girls are pretty, too."
At that, Sarah winked mischievously and smiled.
"I think I'll refrain from doing anything rash at my age."
"You're too boring, Max." John pretended to be sad and put the book aside. "You can at least pretend to be a little embarrassed."
We talked some more about who saw what, and then we went to dinner. Afterward, I spent half the night on the roof of the hotel,
looking at the city.