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After the Khan el-Khalili bazaar, Sharia Abdel Khaliq Sarwat - the first major street you reach after the Midan Talaat intersection - has the city's highest concentration of jewellers , particularly around the Midan Opera end, where a street of goldsmiths called Sikket al-Manakh leads off to the south. Because their marked prices are higher, canny shoppers can use them as benchmarks when haggling for lower rates in the Khan. The vast Edwardian neo-Gothic apartment block at the junction of Abdel Khaliq Sarwat and Mohammed Farid frowns its northern face upon Sharia Adly . Heading east along this street you'll find a buff, temple-like edifice with Central Security guards posing on a Cecil B. de Mille-like stairway. The arborial reliefs on its columns represent the Tree of Manna whence Heaven's bounty fell upon the Israelites, for the building is Cairo's last working synagogue . Discreetly open on Saturday mornings, its opulent marbled interior receives few worshippers these days, the city's Jewish community having dwindled to around fifty, all aged. For Rosh Hashana and Passover a rabbi is flown in from Tel Aviv; otherwise, there's only the melancholy custodian and his Christian friend. One block along is Cairo's main tourist office , with the tourist police sited above; for details of both. Across the road, Garden Groppi's spacious patio and panelled salon are in contrast to the Groppi's on Midan Talaat Harb. During World War II, this was one of the few posh establishments open to ordinary British troops - "other ranks", as they were called - who the military top brass had decided should not mix socially with officers. Its high prices nonetheless ensured that officers, Egyptian pashas and their fur-draped Levantine mistresses predominated. Nowadays it's frequented by courting couples, journalists and bourgeois matrons. Another colonial institution that bit the dust still survives in moribund form north of Sharia Adly's termination at Midan Opera. Before World War I, tourists could buy "anything from a boa constrictor to a fully grown leopard" outside the grandiose Continental-Savoy Hotel - where one scandalized missionary insisted on providing trousers to cover the genitals of a performing baboon. Orde Wingate, the eccentric military genius who liberated Abyssinia from Italian rule for Emperor Haile Selassie, attempted suicide in his room here.
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