What does the phrase "street food" conjure in your mind? For each person the thought of food bought from a vendor on the street may involve the following words: delicious, cheap, fast, food poisoning.
I'm always hard-pressed to find people who actually hate street food. Most admit to at least occasionally having to run out to grab something when the urge becomes irresistible.
When I lived in Canada it involved hot dogs, Pogo sticks, poutine and beavertails. I love street meat. Sure, the idea is kind of horrendous - who knows what's in that big juicy "all-beef" hot dog. But once in a while, the salty, fatty piece of meat, slathered with mustard and green garnish, is good for the soul.
Poutine is a type of all-Canadian street food. Hailing from French Canada, the dish involves golden fries, liberally sprinkled with cheese curds and coated in gravy. Mmmm, my heart goes a-flutter when I think of it. Then of course beavertails - flat pieces of dough fried to a perfect crisp and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar - best if devoured while skating on the canal in my hometown in sub-zero temperatures.
No trip in Egypt is complete without a good dose of street food. Because of the poverty here, street food actually makes up the daily diet of many people.
Greasy and heavy, the food is either sold from colourful wagons on street corners, in busy bus stations or small hole-in-the-wall shops with sawdust sprinkled on the floors and people squeezing past each other, shoving their orders under the server's nose.
There are three main types of street fare in Egypt: the basic fuul, a paste made by slow cooking mashed fava beans; and falafel (called ta'meya in Cairo) stands or koshary shops. While falafel is made all over the Arab world, koshary and fuul are the national dishes of Egypt.
Koshary is a high-carb meal consisting of rice, macaroni, lentils, chick peas and tiny pieces of spaghetti, topped with fried onion and a chilli tomato sauce or a sour lemon dressing. Feel full yet? A friend in Egypt eats this a few hours before he plays soccer to ensure he has enough energy for his match. The meal comes in various sized plastic tubs to go, or if you eat inside the small shops it is served on a plain metal plate. The largest normally costs about 50 US cents.
Most Koshary stands look similar. The server works behind a glass pane on a raised platform, behind huge separate bowls of lentils, chickpeas, spaghetti and rice. Given an order, he ladles the ingredients with a number of quick swipes and throws them into a tub, closes the lid and off you go.
There are a couple of excellent places for fuul and falafels in Cairo. One is dubbed "Midnight Fuul" by the expats. The other is a wagon on a quiet street in the Garden City area of downtown Cairo, where you can satisfy midnight cravings for fava bean paste sandwiches, salty falafel mixed with scrambled eggs, or oily omelettes eaten with bread between pinched fingers.
The seats are colourful, mismatched and plastic littered on the narrow road, and the wagon is relatively clean, decorated with corn oil bottles lined all around the top shelf.
But when I just don't feel like going across town, the little corner fuul place by my apartment building does just as well. Comprising a narrow hallway with a kitchen in the back, it has a man squashed behind a tiny booth who writes down your order and takes your money before you join the battle to be served first. Another man takes the scribbled order from your outstretched hand and goes to work, slicing open small pita breads, stuffing them with questionable salad, pickles, crushing falafals into the sandwich or spreading fuul on the sides of the bread, and twisting delicious, wet pickles into tiny plastic bags with a flourish.
The downside to this type of fast food adventure can, of course, be a dodgy tummy. The food may taste divine but the hygiene can sometimes leave a lot to be desired. But Cairenes don't let little thing like that get in the way of their favourite street food. Like all good hardcore street food junkies, they just dust off their stomach lining and line up for the next helping.
Hadeel al Shalchi is a writer for the Associated Press, based in Cairo
Russia's Muslim Heartlands
Dominic Rubin, Oxford
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
ETFs explained
Exhchange traded funds are bought and sold like shares, but operate as index-tracking funds, passively following their chosen indices, such as the S&P 500, FTSE 100 and the FTSE All World, plus a vast range of smaller exchanges and commodities, such as gold, silver, copper sugar, coffee and oil.
ETFs have zero upfront fees and annual charges as low as 0.07 per cent a year, which means you get to keep more of your returns, as actively managed funds can charge as much as 1.5 per cent a year.
There are thousands to choose from, with the five biggest providers BlackRock’s iShares range, Vanguard, State Street Global Advisors SPDR ETFs, Deutsche Bank AWM X-trackers and Invesco PowerShares.
NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
The specs
Engine: 0.8-litre four cylinder
Power: 70bhp
Torque: 66Nm
Transmission: four-speed manual
Price: $1,075 new in 1967, now valued at $40,000
On sale: Models from 1966 to 1970
The specs
Engine: 2.0-litre 4-cyl turbo
Power: 201hp at 5,200rpm
Torque: 320Nm at 1,750-4,000rpm
Transmission: 6-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 8.7L/100km
Price: Dh133,900
On sale: now
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Springtime in a Broken Mirror,
Mario Benedetti, Penguin Modern Classics
Three ways to limit your social media use
Clinical psychologist, Dr Saliha Afridi at The Lighthouse Arabia suggests three easy things you can do every day to cut back on the time you spend online.
1. Put the social media app in a folder on the second or third screen of your phone so it has to remain a conscious decision to open, rather than something your fingers gravitate towards without consideration.
2. Schedule a time to use social media instead of consistently throughout the day. I recommend setting aside certain times of the day or week when you upload pictures or share information.
3. Take a mental snapshot rather than a photo on your phone. Instead of sharing it with your social world, try to absorb the moment, connect with your feeling, experience the moment with all five of your senses. You will have a memory of that moment more vividly and for far longer than if you take a picture of it.
Fight card
1. Featherweight 66kg: Ben Lucas (AUS) v Ibrahim Kendil (EGY)
2. Lightweight 70kg: Mohammed Kareem Aljnan (SYR) v Alphonse Besala (CMR)
3. Welterweight 77kg:Marcos Costa (BRA) v Abdelhakim Wahid (MAR)
4. Lightweight 70kg: Omar Ramadan (EGY) v Abdimitalipov Atabek (KGZ)
5. Featherweight 66kg: Ahmed Al Darmaki (UAE) v Kagimu Kigga (UGA)
6. Catchweight 85kg: Ibrahim El Sawi (EGY) v Iuri Fraga (BRA)
7. Featherweight 66kg: Yousef Al Husani (UAE) v Mohamed Allam (EGY)
8. Catchweight 73kg: Mostafa Radi (PAL) v Ahmed Abdelraouf of Egypt (EGY)
9. Featherweight 66kg: Jaures Dea (CMR) v Andre Pinheiro (BRA)
10. Catchweight 90kg: Tarek Suleiman (SYR) v Juscelino Ferreira (BRA)
BEACH SOCCER WORLD CUP
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