Where Are the Pharoahs?

At 2:30 on Wednesday morning I set out for Fiumicino, by 9 I was freezing in Zurich then by 2:45 in the afternoon I had landed in Cairo. The difference was immediately apparent: heat, dust, sand, and plenty of sun, but I was hyperventilating with excitement. I've wanted to go to Egypt since Mrs. Pyne's 5th grade class got me obsessed with the history and coincidentally that was when I wanted to be an archaeologist. So here we were! We had to buy an Egyptian Visa for 80LE and I finally got the stamp in my passport. A driver from the hotel was standing in the lobby holding a hand written sign that said the name of the hotel and my name, which gave me a bad feeling, but we went with him.

On our way to his car a security guard from the airport stopped us and asked if we knew him. We showed him our hotel confirmation and the driver showed him his ID. I'll be honest, this incident gave me an overpowering feeling of terror which only grew worse when we got into his car which was a beat up old Fiat with hand painted numbers in Arabic on the sides and a sheepskin on the dash board. I thought Italians drove horribly, but they have nothing on Egyptians, who don't recognize the significance of lanes or turn signals. They cluster around each other trying to get to the sides they need to be on and use their horn in every possible way to signal a turn, yell at another driver, make other drivers aware that they are about to crash into them, and also they beep their horn to show appreciation of something that may be written on a bumper sticker. In other words, their roads are the definition of chaos.

We finally got to the hotel and the feeling of terror yet again increased because we went into an old building whose elevator had no inside door, and whose walls were crumbling and covered in dust. We checked into our room and decided to walk around a little bit. We took pictures of the Egyptian Museum which was right around the corner from the hotel, but was almost closing, so we couldn't go inside. We walked to the Nile and took pictures of Cairo Tower which was right across the river. This is also when we experienced our first taste of Egyptian men, who are fascinated with Westerners and who crowded us and asked our names, and where we were from. We were too scared to answer, so we ignored them, which as it happens is exactly what your supposed to do. As we tried to cross the street to get away from them a teenager driving a horse and carriage snapped his whip at me. I was not amused. This was the about the time I began to think things like "What the hell were we thinking coming here on our own?!" and "Am I going to have to hide in our sketchy hostel for the next 4 days?" and "Why am I so thirsty?"

We managed to escape the men and walked back to the hostel where we scheduled a dinner cruise on the Nile and took a power nap. The driver picked us up at 9 and drove us to the boat. He brought us inside and we had to wait on the top deck for the tables to be set. Here we saw a whole wedding party coming to the dock with drums and pipes playing. It turned out that we shared the room with the wedding reception and had a delicious buffet and there was singing, a belly dancer, a spinning guy, and two guys who danced around with sticks and tried to get Lindsey and I to dance, but that was not happening. The driver ate his dinner with us which was really awkward but then he went off and left us alone to enjoy to enjoy the crazy festivities. Toward the end we went back up to the top deck and took pictures. The spinning guy was up there and chatted with us before trying to get Lindsey to kiss him which was very amusing from my perspective, not so much from hers. We docked and the driver took us back to the hotel where we fell asleep (I was comforted only slightly by the fact that my pillow had a scene from The Lion King on it and I was resting my head on Mufasa) and wondered how the rest of the weekend was going to pan out.