The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

The hot summer heatwaves make life difficult for Cairenes. This can all be mitigated by the beautiful invention that is the AC; indeed, air-conditioned rooms are sought after, offices absolutely cannot avoid them, and pedestrians sometimes just walk into random shops for the sweet breeze of cold air.

But what about those who don’t have ACs in their homes? Well, despair not, we have brought you simple, yet effective solutions to counter heatwaves. So let’s start with simple stuff and move on to really innovative tricks.

Open Up Your Windows to the World

This one’s really simple so we thought we’d vamp up the title, didn’t work? Any asef (Egyptian pun intended). But this is a bit more complex. You need to keep them shut in the morning, especially the curtains and blinds. This will help keep direct sunlight out of the house to avoid raising the temperature. At night, perhaps after sunset by an hour or so, open up windows to create a smooth flow of air inside your house. Putting up a wet piece of cloth against the window can also help cool up the air.

Keep Your Bed As Cool As Ice

We flip our pillows to enjoy the cold side, but imagine if the whole bed was that cold side. The idea is to refrigerate your bed sheets in order to keep them cool. Sounds insane? It might be insane enough to work. Put them up in your refrigerator for about 3 hours and reap the rewards.

Create A Homemade AC

Hopefully these will work better than homemade pizza. Anyway, these are the ingredients: a few bottles of water, yup that’s it. Put a few bottles of water in the freezer for about 5 hours till they’re frozen solid. Bring them out and place them right in front of a fan. You can’t imagine how well this works.

So there you go, three simple ideas that will prove very effective. Try them out and let us know how they work, Cairenes. Here’s to cool summer nights, and warm winter evenings.