Claire, Libbi and I woke up bright and early at 4 am Tuesday morning (March 20) to catch my bus from Cambridge to the Luton airport and was greeted with a lovely wet snow as my departing gift. Made it to the airport and had plenty of time to read the latest issue of the Economist (my fellow travelers would later make fun of me mercifully for this. apparently the Economist is not on the list of cool magazines to read...craziness) and eat some breakfast before meeting up with Anna and checking in for our EasyJet flight to Paris. We arrived in Paris (Country #2) late morning where it was cold and gloomy (Weather Change #2) and had little trouble, in fact we didn't even get a passport stamp! For those of you who haven't traveled around Europe since the advent of the EU, it has apparently streamlined travel so much so that there's not even a need to go through customs if you're coming from another European country.
Went from the Paris Charles De Gaulle airport to Paris ORLY where we met up with Aileen and caught our Iberia flight to Barcelona (Country #3) and then our flight to Cairo (Country #4)! We effectively spent over 20 hours flying in and out of 5 airports, 4 countries, and almost all of the seasons (as we arrived in Cairo to beautiful early summer like temperatures). Utter craziness.
Arriving in Cairo was a little more confusing than it needed to be since we'd been traveling so long and were a little slow on the uptake. But we soon had bought our visas and got a sweet Egyptian stamp in our passports, picked up our luggage (all there!) and were soon driving through the Cairo streets with our driver from the hotel. We arrived at the Ramses II hotel in one piece, and after going to get some Egyptian pounds from the ATM to pay our bill and basically planning our stay with the hotel manager, we got to our beds. Those semi-clean beds with shade maroon coverings could never have looked so beautiful to us!
The next morning we woke up and met Adam, a friend of a friend who is studying at the American University of Cairo and who offered to show us around for the day. (Amazingly all of our "meet ups" and various connecting points throughout the entire spring break trip happened with fairly little problem, which is good since we never really had any true back up plans!) We started off exploring Cairo - we went in the Citadel of Salah al-Din (which some tour guide calls the squat mosque, but its huge!) and went in the Mosque of Sultan Hassan and the Mosque of Al Rafai. It was cool to go into the mosques because for some reason they're not quite as open to visitors here in Morocco. We visited the Cairo marketplaces...both the touristy one and the more true Egyptian one accidentally. It's pretty funny, no matter where you go, shopkeepers have their specially crafted phrases...in Egypt they attempt cleverness: "let me help you spend your money" "free to look" plus the simple "Welcome to Egypt" Welcome to Cairo" Welcome foreigners" which we heard over and over and over again within our short stay.
We also went up in the minaret of Bab Zweila which I think was one of the old city gates/mosque...either way it was cool, though a little scary once we were up at the top. We basically paid our fee and started up without anyone else around...up and up and up the winding uneven stone stairs (reminded me a bit of going up in Blarney Castle in Ireland) and you end up at the top where there is just a drop off where you could fall/hold on and look out at the city. I'm glad I didn't think about how high up we were going to be until after we were at the top! Though, the scariest part was actually problem descending the minaret when parts of the winding staircases were shrouded in complete darkness...awesome when you're never sure how big that next step is going to be!
Anyway, we made it down alive and got some excellent Egyptian food called koshary with a light tomato sauce over the top....SO GOOD! Energized, we spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the huge collection in the Cairo Museum which is sort of like an art history major's best and worst nightmare all collected in one building. There's artifacts everywhere which is really cool...but most of it is right there for all visitors to touch, examine....and there's so much in there that its all crowded in between the walls. It was fun to be there though one because 1) there's so much stuff and so much history with each artifact that its hard to really grasp it all and 2) there are tons of other tourists from all over the world which wasn't bothersome since we're not usually around a bunch of tourists in Morocco.
After that we went back to hotel briefly and the got dinner at a great little restaurant called Felfela not far from our hotel, then went back for a good night's sleep which was greatly needed at that point!
On Thursday, we awoke refreshed and met up with our private driver for the day, Moses (this was the same guy who picked us up from the airport early early Wednesday morning, who basically is like a freelance driver for various Cairo hotels and tourists). He was GREAT. Really nice, funny, pretty good English, and he seemed to have fun with us for the day too! We left and went out on the edge of Cairo to Sakara - the step pyramid and dodged the large Asian tourist groups that covered the place...got done really quickly and so Moses took us by a carpet "school." Basically, kids start there at a young age and learn how to make carpets and then get a certificate to work anywhere else...they had some beautiful stuff but it was a little sketchy. It was hard because in the west we hear so much about child labor exploitation and sweat shops that even if this place was legit it was really hard to be sure, especially since these kids don't get any other schooling...where do you draw the line I wonder? I don't know, we didn't buy anything but it was cool to see some of the differences between Egyptian and Moroccan carpets. Heck, after a few more Arab countries I should be a carpet connoisseur. Ha ha...just kidding. I still have trouble judging prices, but I'm getting there.
From there we grabbed some lunch and then went to the camel stables (again guys partnered with our hotel/driver...clearly a daily operation). We made our little camel caravan and received a 16 year old guide named Mohammed who made sure our camels continued at the pace and direction they were supposed to and chatted with us ("Where are you from? "Indiana...near Chicago" "Chicago!...mafia!). The camel ride was a laugh fest for me as I was at the back of Anna and Aileen and so I got my own personal show as Aileen was nervous and jumpy on the camel and Anna was just eating up the whole experience. So we rode the camels for awhile and soaked up the warmth (sadly it was hazy and not sunny that day, but still nice and desert-like), took funny touristy pictures with the pyramids (see photo albums for the whole Cairo trip on the link to the right), and saw the Sphinx from the distance. We had been told by multiple people that it wasn't worth it to go inside the big pyramid, but it was Anna's dream to come to the pyramids and go inside...so we did.
Yeah, let me tell ya about that...first imagine paying money to descend about 25 feet at a steep angle down into a structure which has thousands of tons of stone above you. Then imagine what it would feel like 10 feet into the descent to lose clean air and instead breathe in the B.O.-filled stale air that really has no where to go as you continue about 50 feet straight and then ascend and find yourselves in....wait for it, wait for it...and empty stone room with an empty tomb. Yeah, good times. Aileen and I get into the room and look at each other with the "I can't believe we just did this, much less paid for it and lets turn around and get out of here" look and then we see Anna turn around with this huge grin on her face. She thought it was the coolest thing ever. To each her own I suppose.
So that was an adventure. We got out, back on the camels, and back to the stables and went for a water-check-out-the-perfume-shop-nearby break and then were back on horses this time to see the sunset over the desert as we looked out over the pyramids and the huge sprawling metropolis that is Cairo. Pretty cool.
After that, Moses took us for a boat ride on the Nile, where we had a nice dinner and watched some Moroccan dancers...gotta get in your Egyptian belly dancer before leaving Cairo...then we dashed back to the hotel to grab our bags, thank the hotel managers, and back into Moses' car to the airport.
Obviously, we shoved a lot into Thursday, but it turned out to be such a good day! We had so much fun chatting with Moses about stereotypes about the US, listening to the Arab music in his car, and seeing him weave in and out of the crazy Egyptian traffic. We got to see the pyramids and sphinx and realize that the history books are misleading in two ways - first, the pyramids and sphinx are basically right by the edge of cairo...the city stops at the edge of the desert and then there they are. And secondly, the sphinx is teeny compared to the pyramids! We also got a little taste of Egyptian culture and life; here's some random bits and pieces...
- shops are open all night long in the summer because its so hot, so year-around there are always tons of people on the streets from like 8pm-midnight and often beyond, and its very common for all the shops to be open all hours too.
- Egyptian Colloquial Arabic sounds a lot more like Modern Standard Arabic which means even though I couldn't understand everything they were saying, I could distinguish a lot more words than I ever can in Moroccan Arabic. Which was cool. They just say some words differently. Oh and English is the second language...who knew?
- Everyone we met was very friendly...
- You tip everyone even if they only do a very small service. Kind of to the point of ridiculousness. Especially coming from Morocco where you barely even leave tips for waiters.
- Egyptians are very proud of their history and heritage and clearly very used to showing it off for tourists.
- Cairo is HUGE. Huge huge huge. And very very polluted. For every picture you see of the pyramids and the sphinx add a layer of smog to the bright blue sky depicted and it will be a lot more correct.
So that was Cairo...very very cool. A great 2 days...and then it was onto Paris.
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