Most Weird City in the World 2008 Contest: CAIRO

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MOST WEIRD CITY IN THE WORLD 2008

Candidates (Open):Varsovia, Brasilia, Praga, El Cairo, Toledo, Soria, París (Texas), Béjar (Salamanca).

MI VIDA offers Cairo to be elected as the most bizarre city in the world. How come it not? Just read the 19 reasons she gives in what is perhaps the bizarre candidate with more work behind it:

1. City of a yellow colour due to the effect of desert sand storms.

2. City of more than 5000 years of culture and the least cultivated people in the world live in her.

3. The dirty Nile waters, waters that irrigate its lands and that no one cares any more is currently people´s waste dump.

4. Only one of the Giza pyramides is known as "one of the seven wonders of the wolrd", when it´s all of them, plus the one at Saqqare, which should deserve this title.

5. Cosmopolitan city in spite of the strong islamism within.

6. Nothing, I mean nothing, has a fixed price. It all depends on the need of the purchaser and the quantity of cups of tea that one is prepared to drink.

7. The language, although the official one is Arab, the upper classes don´t speak it anymore and the kids resist to learn it.

8. City full of casinos, despite not available for the locals.

9. City where everything depends on neighbourhoods, and the is a bazar for each product, the Camel bazar, the Lamps Bazar, the Wood Bazar, the Clothes Bazar, bazar, bazar, bazar...

10. City that in many sectors looks like a country in war, because of the many unfinished buildings. The government takes away all the land where there is no building, and therefore everyone constructs a building and then leaves it halfway....

11. Only (I think) city in the world where people live in a cemetery with more than 15,000 living people, with schools, satellites, services..."The city of the dead" is a horrible sight of the poverty and the social inequalities.

12. City of a thousand contrasts, the most populated and dense in África, with almost 25 million people (supposedly, since there is no official record, what makes it home to a third of the country´s population)

13. An absurd transport system, even being the only city in Africa to have an undergroung railway system (metro).

14. It has an underground culture of its own, to which religion belongs, to which they try to obtain benefit, as the unique turistic entity it is, as it tries to obtain benefit from all kinds of temples and sacred places, wether they are copt, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, wether they are called curches, mosques, sinagoges....if some money can be taken out, they will

15. I don´t think I have ever seen any other city with as many taxis as this one..

16. The deafaning noise created by the thousand horns of streer traffic, always pointlessly and without reason, and I would say that in 98% just out of habit. You get acostumed, in the end.

17. Is there any other place in the world with a mall dedicated just to sandals & shoes and where you can buy them at 4 a.m. ??

18. El-Fishawi, the mirror´s café, is open 24 hours long and has done so for the last 200 years. Quite a record.

19. The most inusual of Cairo is that it´s a city where you can live easily without leaving home for weeks, months, I would say even for years. All this thanks to the delivery, here everything, absolutely everything, from an aspirine to the supermarket purchases can be received home through delivery,,,,FANTASTIC!!!

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