The Quest for­­­ the Waffle

A few weeks ago, my friend Sara and I decided to go on an adventure of rediscovering Cairo. We’d planned to go to the Coptic museum and maybe visit some of the ancient religious sites in the area of Masr-El-Kadeema (Yes we are very adventurous, we go to museums!!). The day was set, we had a plan, we got the directions from google, and we got up early in the morning – 9 am is very early for Saturday morning – and we set off. But first, breakfast! We were going to have waffles.

Since this was a very important day, I’d researched where we could get the best Waffles in Maadi. There was a shop called Waffles & Shakes which seemed to get some nice reviews. Sara and I are both Maadians to the core; we knew it upside-down, inside-out. We still got lost! We kept going around in circles through the streets of Degla and we just could not seem to find the damned restaurant. Sara finally convinced me to use the navigator on her cell phone. The woman in the phone with the thick british accent was amazing, she kept telling us to go left after 100 meters, and slightly right after 200 meters, and take the third exit after 500 meters, which meant we had to number the streets coming out of an intersection or a square from left to right (or was it from right to left? Who cares it was still confusing!). We finally got through a lot of very small streets and we were there! It was a small shop, right in front of us with a cute sign hanging on top of it. We parked, we got out of the car, we walked 10 paces forward while staying slightly right (still under the influence of the navigator), and it had closed down! We stood there with our mouths open and decided that after looking for the place for 30 minutes, we absolutely had to take a photo of it just to remind us of this amazing adventure (you can actually see the two frustrated girls that were us in the reflection of the shop’s window, and the CLOSED sign would have been very cute under different circumstances). We got back in the car only to find out that the shop was in a small street that came out of a very very VERY well known square in Maadi!!!

Oh well, at least we got to use the navigator and listen to the lady with the british voice. We thought we’d go for safe breakfast (famished by now) at Spectra or Roastry which we knew for a fact had not gone out of business. We went to Spectra, went inside, and they were actually cleaning the shop (beyrosho mayya) and told us to come back later. We went to Roastry, the friendly alternative, and they had problems in the kitchen that day and breakfast was out. Apparently the gods of waffles did not like us on that day.

It is probably a byproduct of being graduates of the Computer Engineering Department at Cairo University that we would not give up on a good breakfast; however we lowered our standards to maybe a cinnamon roll at Cinnabon down at Road 9. We went down there only to find it has also packed up and gone to hell. Good thing we were on Road 9 though because Lucille’s, which had the best breakfast ever, was just down the street from where we were. As we drove past it looking for a parking space, we saw it had a waiting list all the way to China. Apparently, it was the gods of breakfast who were not happy, not just the god of waffles! By then, my stomach was growling, quite loudly I may so shamelessly add, so we parked anyway and walked back to Good Ole’ Beeno’s for some pancakes with maple syrup, butter, and nutella, and a very bad cup of coffee. By then it was 1 pm and way too late to go to the museum, so we went to see a movie instead.

So maybe the day hasn’t turned out the way we planned it, but since when does life turn out the way we plan it? We still had breakfast, a good time, and got to see a really good movie. Lessons learned: get breakfast at home!