No, really, there are Pyramids, right over there!

Pre-Party.

So just to explain some of the photos in the album, the first several are not of Cairo- sitting in a restaurant in Irbid and the blue Mosque is the King Hussein Mosque in Amman. We have to take a 1.5 hour bus to Amman to get to the airport so we usually leave early and go to some things in Amman before grabbing flights. The ones of my bloody foot, is well, my bloody foot. Two days before we left for Cairo I ran into some jagged metal in the middle of the street and took a chunk out of my foot- awesome! Good thing I had those tetanus shots...

Dark Sacred Night

Well we finally land in Cairo at about 9pm and my favorite news was hearing that the outside temperature was still 90 degrees. Feels soooo good... We jumped into a taxi- an Arabic word for "death trap" and managed to arrive in our area without either dying or vomiting all over the back-seat. Then came the interesting part, finding the hostel. You see, we are all Arabic students, in theory, but the local Egyptian dialect is so far off of the formal Arabic that we are learning it might as well be a different language. Whole summer of learning Arabic + Cairo Streets = Useless. After convincing some people the hostel existed, others that we didn't want to buy designer jeans or drink coffee, and others that we didn't want to stay in their hotel instead- we found the little door with the little sign in the back alley that took us to the best thing ever: air conditioning. Now, I'm not a prissy girl- I can take the heat in the kitchen, but when it is the middle of the day in a desert city filled with incubating smog- air conditioning will save your life. We had a nice room with 5 beds and a bathroom and the place had free breakfast for all of $10 US a night. Not bad for a good night's sleep.

Bright Blessed Day One

The first sday we were off the the Museum of Antiquities which basically holds all the cool stuff that has been taken out of pyramids and tombs. On the way we ran into a man who looked at Hanna and insisted she looked exactly like his daughter, who was getting married the next day. We all laughed because Hanna, being from Bangladesh, was a brown girl, an ya know, all brown people look the same... He was so excited about his daughters wedding that he invited us over to his perfume shop where he showed us pictures of Princess Diana buying perfume from him and served us tea. We told him about our language studies and explained to him again that Hanna wasn't Egyptian even though she is brown and knows some Arabic. We had a nice little chat and he taught us some phrases in Egyptian, and then when it was time to go his old uncle went with us to walk across the street to the museum. Remember, the streets are crazy and people just fly through them whether on foot, bike, bus, or car. This little man held up both his hands to stop traffic so the white kids could cross the street, oh buddy.

Big touristy spots, like in Beirut or in Petra, are the only places that we get to be around other groups of Westerners/Europeans and the groups we encountered in Cairo were the biggest yet. Just being around groups of Westerners we were all experiencing some reverse culture-shock even though we've only been away for about 8 weeks, but I guess Euro-trash will do that to anyone!

We made our way through the Museum of Antiquities, in which many exhibits were under construction so the collection was a bit cramped. An understatement considering it was a huge building stacked floor to ceiling with amazing treasures from statues to tiny beads, sarcophagi, conoptic jars, boat figures, tomb furniture, tablets of hieroglyphics and Ancient Greek, and everything in between. We got to see the contents of the boy-king Tut, and I always find it a crazy experience seeing something up close that you've read about in books your whole life. My other favorite room was filled with statues of the time period of Queen Nefertiti because the statues were the most stylistically different than any of the other faces in the museum. The Queen Nefertiti art looked like real faces of real women from Africa and the Middle East, even if they were a stylized form of beauty, they didn't look like all of the other cookie-cutter images of women. At any rate, the artifacts and the art was beautiful. I got to see some of the most beautiful turquoise and blue figures of scarabs and the Eye of Horus and Lotus.

After the museum, at around noon, we decided to head off to Giza in order to head off Team Crazy so I could go to Luxor with them. As we are riding around in the taxi, in between Johnathan's gasps and car horns we look off to the side and low and behold- Pyramids!! Rising right up out of the city! Looming tall and picturesque. You pay an entrance fee (thank goodness we have Arabic student ID cards!) to get into the "pyramid park" and walk around them in the desert. You can pay to ride camels or horses around be we all decided against it because the animals didn't seem to be that well taken care of and the pyramids were a huge tourist trap. We saw so many trashy tourists there too- waaaay to many ass-cheeks and uncovered parts! Bless her heart, she doesn't realize that scarf needs to cover her ass instead of her head! Other than that it was kind of magical to walk around the pyramids and get up and personal with such an iconic image. We also got to walk down to the Spinx and hang out with him for a bit.

Over heated and a bit worn out from walking around in the desert we went back to the hostel for a nap in the luscious cold. After that we went off on an adventure to find the Kan al-Kahlili souk, a large outdoor shopping center for touristy stuff. Well, we get over to the area whereabouts it should be, but instead of finding the touristy souk we found the native one. By native, I mean the place where crazy, over crowded Cairenes buy clothing. We ended up walking for what seemed like miles down a narrow path about two or so people wide with two stories of clothing hanging above us and piles of clothing on tables to the side of us. Of course, when a path is two-people wide you shove 4 people in it and huge carts full of goods and then you have other people stand on the sides yelling to try and get you to buy their stuff. In Cairo there are also a slew of non-word verbal communications, for instance if you want someone to move in front of you, you hiss at them and if you want to say no you make a clicking noise and if you want to hit on a girl you make a "bis"ing noise. So we were getting bumped, pushed, run over, hit, yelled at, clicked, hissed, and bissed. I felt like I had touched everyone in Cairo at the same time!

After getting out of the exhausting maze and finding a cafe to sit at and have some limone and mint (my new favorite drink! think lemonade with crushed mint!) we all managed to laugh at our little adventure and appreciate our experience. Well, we had found the souk we were looking for but we were too tired to shopping so we retreated back to the hostel to find out what happened to Team Crazy. We had lost communication with them about three in the afternoon and it was into the evening when we got back to the hostel to find Robin hanging out there and that the other two morons had left Cairo in a bit of frustration to go to Tel Aviv. Luckily we had an extra bed in our room so Robin moved in and we got ready for the next day of craziness.