Some say that Egypt is gross and no fun and hot and nasty, others say it is amazing and they loved every minute of being there, and still others have come to the conclusion that traveling in Egypt is a really cool experience, but have checked it off the list of places to visit. If it's not obvious, I am in the third category. Going to Egypt was a blast, we just got back yesterday and were quite tired and sweaty and tanned and filled with great stories.
I'll give you the rough sketch of the trip and fill in with good stories, though most will have to wait until I see you because there are so many good ones.
We left at 5 am on Friday from the Moshav and headed for the Israeli-Egyptian border down on the Sinai Peninsula, it's called Taba and is a few hours too far away, stupid Gaza means we can't just drive a couple hours and be done with it... oh well. There were a bunch of us that went so we had two mini buses of IBEXers, but ours was better because it wasn't packed full, which meant leg room, oh yeah. Then we went through all the checkpoint things at the border, which is a pain and expensive. To backtrack sort of, all of us that went together are actually smaller groups, mostly 4 people per group. My roommate Daniel and I and our friends Courtney and Danae were a team for the week, but we hung out with other groups most of the time. Ok, so border crossing... oh yes, story: Courtney was one of the first ones to go through and let's just say she is not a pro at concealing the fact that we are students using tourist visa. So having been labeled a student tourist and having the Israeli personnel hate us, we moved on... thanks a lot Courtney for putting IBEX in jeopardy :) We learned that Courtney only talks after we do at any checkpoint and says as little as possible, she's still figuring that out though...
Then we joined with our friends Walker, Jason, Lily and Heather and took a mini bus across the Sinai peninsula, which contains lots of dirt, rocks, hotness and Egyptian checkpoints and sketchy stretches of road. Six or so hours later we got to the train station in Cairo, bought our tickets for the next evening (To Luxor) and proceeded to walk around forever in downtown dirty Cairo looking for the hotels they had picked out. Side note, our group did very little planning, like we had a general idea of where we were going and that was all. So God really took care of us and let us hang out with groups who had a much more fine-tuned plan, it was wonderful. So we finally found the Egyptian equivalent of that sketchy roadside hotel that you only ever dread staying in, which is like a three star in downtown Cairo... but hey it was a bed and it was 9 bucks.
After dinner we collapsed into bed, slept til 5 am and then grabbed a taxi to the pyramids. We left early so that we could be sure to get tickets into the Great Pyramid, they apparently go fast. So our taxi driver took us to the back entrance and the camel ride business of his third cousin twice removed on his half sister's side. We learned that everyone you meet in Egypt is related to no less than half of the country and they are all in cahoots in business. We walked away from that little set-up and walked about a mile to the front entrance, which was good, because it killed time and the pyramids don't open til 8 anyway, thus began two themes of our trip: not sleeping very much and walking a whole lot.
Once on the right side of the pyramids, we killed more time in a really really fancy hotel, where we pretended to be interested in a room so we could use bathrooms that were less scary and sit in air conditioned comfort. Then we went up to the pyramids, thanked the Lord for our student ID cards for the first of many times where paid half what the average tourist pays. It was wonderful. Then we walked all around the Great pyramid and took pictures and made another video clip (side story: following Courtney's student-tourist fiasco, we made a video, so we decided to document our excursion whenever possible, so now we have a whole lot of random video clips that help us remember all the funny little things that happened). We got to go into the great pyramid (which cost just as much as getting into the pyramids to begin with). It was really cool, except that it actually was really really hot and stuffy and you came out weighing a couple pounds less and really thirsty. Well worth the cost, it was fun. Not a lot of decoration (none actually) but a really long tunnel and a cool chamber with cool acoustics. So we left the pyramids, walking by the Sphinx on the way, which is smaller than we imagine, but still very cool. The pyramids are pretty amazing, they are as big as you imagine, really old, and a good reminder that even though the stones last the people who made them are long gone and mean nothing. An interesting contrast to what we see in Israel that points us to the God who is forever.
Then we got a taxi to the Cairo Museum and continued our perusal of ancient stuff. But first we were really hungry, so we went to Pizza Hut. Oh it has never tasted so good. Non-kosher and cheap (Daniel and I split a pizza and some cheesebread and it was 4 bucks each (like 20 some Eqyptian pounds) We tend to imagine the Cairo museum as something like the Smithsonian only with just Egypt stuff. Well it is not. It was weird, it's sort of like a big warehouse with the occasional label on things. It is more or less laid out with stuff from the same time period together, but there is so much stuff that it is just there, not much explanation. It was cool for sure, but disorganized by our standards of museums. But then again, everything in Egypt is disorganized, but it is cool. After that we had nothing else we wanted to see and time to kill before our night train, so we went to the Nile and took a ride on a felucca (sail boat) for an hour, it was so nice to just hang out on a boat on the Nile river and take a break from walking and breathing the street air. It has been decided that Cairo air quality fails without even checking, It's like chain smoking, plus the amount of times you almost get by a car is no less than 10 times greater than the times you don't get hit by one. It's a miracle we are alive in all reality...
So after the boat ride we walked to the Hard Rock Cafe so Courtney could get a shirt and so we could say we went. We just took pictures and waited, no ordering of expensive food for us poor folk. Then we wasted more time at McDonalds for dinner (with free wi-fi, how nice) and went to the train station. There we met every group from IBEX that had even considered going up to Luxor, it was a weird reunion, but cool to see everyone. There were already some great stories and we had only been in country for like 40 hours. So we got on the train, told some stories and then tried to sleep. I think I slept the least of our group, Daniel can sleep anywhere without too much trouble, he lays down and he's out, not so for me... oh well. Anyway, the train ride was a couple hours longer than we thought, but it was ok, we were in Luxor now, the next stage of our adventure was about to begin.
But I will leave it at that for now because I need to take a nap, read a lot and work on a few papers. Funny thing about leaving, coming back means you still have lots of stuff to do, just a week less to do it. And it is basically dead week. IBEX is over in 2 weeks, sheesh...
Anyway, I will pick up the adventure in the next day or two, enjoy...
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