I have put up all of the pictures from the trip through africa and Egypt. Sorry it took so long.
From Nairobi to Dubai (6 hours) From Dubai to Cairo (4 hours)= long night.
My plan for Cairo was to blend in which is why I grew a beard for a month.
I was surprised when I walked down the street and every 10 feet someone asked me if I needed a hotel room or wanted to know where a good souvenir shop was. How did they know? How could they see past my clever disguise? Was it the blue jeans and sneakers? The baseball hat or sweatshirt? The blue eyes or white skin under the beard and everywhere else on my body? The backpack I had on or was it just the fact that I can only speak two words of Arabic and I don't even pronounce those two right? Anyways, I blended in like a bull in a chicken coop or a cheap modern day building next to the pyramids (you'll hear more of this later).
When I arrived in Cairo I got in a cab and headed towards my hotel room that costed $8. After checking in and getting my bearings I headed to the Egyptian museum. People say you could spend days in there, maybe you could but I was out of there in less than 2 hours. Don't get me wrong, it is amazing; all of it. After you see a couple tombs, you've seen them all. Things weren't labeled very well either. That and I really am just not good with museusm, if you don't remember reference back to one of the first blogs in Washington DC in august.
I met a guy who owns a shop who I got talking to, his name is Mohammed if you can believe it. It is the most common name in the world. If you are in a Arab country and you want to make a guess, well it's a good guess to make. (Lots of people with the name steve in Africa, in Middle East not so many). Anyways, I spent a bit of time with this guy talking about egypt and the history. He bought me dinner, a free dinner is always good even if it cost less than a buck.
The following day I headed out on a day trip with a couple of friends I had made in the hotel. Gustavo from Argentina (no one in Egypt could pronounce his name so they called him Mustafa) and Kiran and Vibha who were a couple from India who I will meet up with again while I'm in India. Anyway we headed out on our day trip to the Pyramids, Sphinx, and the surrounding areas. I had imagined for the pyramids that I would walk a mile or so into the desert before coming across these wonders. I was wrong, they are right in the middle of the city, it between houses and restaurants, well with a big fence around it.
The monument was built by the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu of the Fourth Dynasty around the year 2560 BC to serve as a tomb when he dies. The structure consists of approximately 2 million blocks of stone, each weighing more than two tons. It has been suggested that there are enough blocks in the three pyramids to build a 3 m (10 ft) high, 0.3 m (1 ft) thick wall around France.
So this place is impressive!!! I didn't realize that the whole thing is basically brick, I always thought of it as open inside. And people had these things built so they could be buried inside of them; just one person, it's a bit greedy. The only opening is this small room where the tomb is held and you can only get to it by walking through a very narrow tunnel with low ceilings. We took a camel ride around the pyramids to see all the angles and also to see the sphinx. It just amazes me that these were built so long ago and with nothing except a human work force. They guess that it took between 20-100 years to complete with anywhere up to 25,000 people working on it at one time. What I don't understand it that right next to the pyramid they put up a building maybe in the last 20 years. This building may have taken a month to put up. They don't even make it the same color or material as the pyramid so that it will blend in. It is hideous and embarrassing to see this crap of a building next to one of the biggest wonders of the world. Just outside the fences of the pyramids you can sit in a restaurant to watch the sun set over the pyramids. It is not a fancy restaurant like you would imagine, in fact it is a KFC/Pizza Hut. So for the price of fries we sat on the 3rd floor and watched the sunset.
When we made it back to the city center we stopped at a local restaurant for some local food (koosheri) and stuffed ourselves for under a couple of dollars.
The following day and my last day in Cairo I went to see Old Cairo and the different Mosques that were built years back (one was 450 years old and the other about 100). They were both absolutely beautiful and very calming to be inside. I then headed to the citadel which is where the king Mohammed Ali used to live after he had it built back in the 1800's. I went with a driver Farouk who drove us the day before to the pyramids. He was a good man who I learned a lot from about the local culture. He would always sing "come with me, I'll tell you we do" and announce that "life is delicious". He told me that he didn't believe me that I'm American because all Americans are very arrogant.
If you want to visit a clean city don't go to Cairo, the smog is amazingly bad. The two days I was out driving I saw two accidents, both involved only one car luckily. Both times the driver was going to fast and spun out of control and hit the median. The traffic lane lines mean nothing in Cairo, I think the drivers think that it is just decoration. On a highway there may be four lanes with 6 cars driving along in them. If you earn your drivers licence in Cairo you can drive anywhere in the world, however you might piss a lot of people off in other parts of the world.
My last night I went on a boat cruise up the Nile river (the longest river in the world) with Kiran and Vibha whose company I enjoyed very much. That night I said my fairwells and got a few hours of sleep before heading to the airport where my plane would be delayed 4 times and I would spend the next 12 hours of my life.
Anyway, I am a faker and I don't care, and I proved it today by being photographed on a camel in front of the Pyramids, and if that wasn't impertinence I do not know its name.
Richard H. Davis
No comments:
Post a Comment