What Ramadan in Damascus looked like
As many people who visited Damascus during Ramadan before 2011 would recall, the city had always been keen on taking a moment of deep respite to show its best of traditional culture and music. The flaneur inside the city, in areas like Bab Al Amara, Salheyi, Meidan and also Bab Touma would have noticed how the old cafes in Damascus would become theatre-like spaces where one could find a storyteller mounting the stage and donning his red Tarboush while telling love stories about heroic and charitable characters like Antar, Abla, Qais, Laila and King Baibars of the Mamluk period. The audiences, puffing on their Shishas, would look stupefied and wholly taken into the adventurous world of the main characters and into the metamorphosing sound bites of the storyteller.
Source: Your Middle East
In the heart of Fes
The medina of Fes, Morocco’s former capital and third largest city, is made up of a far-reaching network of pedestrian roads – straight and winding, cobble-stoned and paved and gravel. It has busy roads and quiet parts, abundant markets and open squares where artisans keep their workshops half inside, half out on the street. It seems to go on forever, which is almost true – the medina, founded in the 9th century, is the largest car-free area in the world. Fes-born architect and urban planner Sarah Essbai, describes the structure and social fabric of the medinas – and how these ancient and densely populated spaces extend into both the past and the future of Morocco.
Source: Mashallah News
A girl mechanic's perspective of Egyptian society
In Cairo, owners often abandon cars because they can’t afford to maintain or repair them, legally register them, or attain a driver’s license. These discarded cars become so much a part of the city’s landscape that one grows accustomed to seeing them, unprovoked by their presence.
But unlike many abandoned cars across Cairo, one abandoned 1981 Chevrolet Blazer was destined for a new turned over leaf when Lara Hesham El Fouly, 20, decided to spend four years repairing it.
Source: Egyptian Streets
