About a week or so ago during a break from class I went out in search of a falafel shop. What I found was a place called Shalabi on a side street in Doqqi. For a falafel shop Shalabi is rather clean and spacious, but more importantly the employees were really friendly. As expected their menu was completely in Arabic. Since I plan on eating at a lot of Egyptian restaurants over the next few years I figured I should take the time to understand exactly what is on the menu so I decided to photograph the menu, take it home with me and translate it into English.

As a gesture of good will, I planned to return to the restaurant and give them the copy of the menu in both Arabic and English and a week later I am happy to say that I finished the menu. It is now online as a webpage and as an image file. When I returned to Shalabi to give them their translation they were quite grateful. I guess it was just something unexpected and different. It was a fun little project for me, and a nice change of pace for them. Perhaps they can even keep it handy for the next non-arabic speaking customer.