The bohemian ambience is rounded off with a craft market, scattered cushions and sheesha pipes.
The clatter of backgammon boards and the smell of apple-flavored tobacco from sheesha pipes filled the room.
Young men, smoking sheesha, throw up peace signs to every foreigner with a camera.
In the evenings, the peasants on the high slope may smoke a sheesha in a patch of meadow and look down on the city lights.
Hundreds of spectators, puffing sheesha and sipping tea, crowd around the raft of televisions and projectors suspended from seemingly every nook of its stone-paved passages.
The trip had broken his usual routine of lounging at summer cottages or wasting time at a sheesha cafe.
I went to the beach where women – skinny jeans and all – were smoking water pipes, swimming and generally having a good time, irrespective of the purported Hamas ban on women smoking sheesha.
Open daily 7am-2am A small oasis of coffee and sheesha shops, whose trail of fruity tobacco scents and brightly coloured seating and lanterns will draw you in from the street.
While every cafe in this sheesha republic boasts pretty much the same offerings – a wide array of sheesha flavours, coffee, tea and jumbo television screens – Katmerler has a loyal customer base and boasts an exquisite melon flavour.
If you have time, go and see some of Islamic Cairo's best bits - such as the mosque of Mohammed Ali at the Citadel - and dine at the fantastically hip Abou El Sid restaurant, where you can smoke bubble gum-flavoured sheesha pipes in decadent surroundings, eat delicious rabbit stew and pretend you are in an opium den.
As crowds huddle before the jumbo screens in clouds of sweet-scented smoke, particularly on football nights, vendors weave their way in and out of the open area, offering slices of fruit, nuts and appetizers as the clicks of the sheesha tongs mix with the roars of joy (or rage).
