The Never ending city of Cairo

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Well…sleep on an airplane is hard when you have a big person next to you and you can’t really move. Tuesday morning I got up at six oclock sharp and over the next two days did not get much sleep, now I sleep a lot more. I was able to meet up and have a coffee with my friend Sahia once I arrived in Calgary, it was brief but good. Of course, for my nine hour flight from Calgary to Frankfurt I had to have the huge guy sitting next to me and therefore did not get much of any sleep on that flight. Frankfurt is one of the ten largest airports in the world and when it takes your shuttle bus ten minutes to arrive at your plane, you know its true. Cairo is a rather large city….which is a rather large understatement, Cairo is HUGE. Its warm in Cairo, but not hot, which is nice for the time being. I have been to a lot of cities over the course of my travels, however, the traffic in Cairo….is crazy. There are no lanes that anybody follows, the object of the game seems to be to see who can cut off the most people, while also honking their horn the most along the way. I would make a great driver here.  From the outside, looking in one might not agree with this statement, however my hostel is actually pretty nice, once you get inside your room. I had originally planned on going out and exploring the city as soon as I arrived, however I was just too tired, so I passed out once I got into my room. Cairo has a population of between fifteen and twenty million people and they all live very close together. This means, lots of garbage on the streets, as to be expected when one arrives in a developing nation. There are a lot of police and military personnel, however, many of them direct traffic, stand guard outside important buildings and do other activities we are not used to seeing them do in the west. I have not seen one police car yet as far as I can tell, it looks as though many police don’t drive in official police cars, rather they drive in any old car and that may be why I haven’t seen any police vehicles yet. If I don’t see any papyrus for the rest of life I would be ok with that, over the last 4 days the same thing happens each time we set foot outside our hostel, a friendly man approaches you, asks where you’re from and then tells you how nice that is and then attempts to drag you into his brother or his uncle or some sort of papyrus shop. It got old after the first time. If it isn’t papyrus, it will most likely be perfume and these people are very pesky, as we have now turned to pretending not to speak any English and a few other methods to get rid of them. I visited the Great pyramids and the sphinx on my second day here. It was a lot of fun and was able to get a lot of interesting photos. They would not let me climb to the top of the pyramid. I felt ripped off, apparently in the past arrogant Americans had climbed up the pyramid and left American flags sticking out and on one especially special day someone climbed to the top and couldn’t get down. He was stuck at the top for the night and had to be rescued with a helicopter the next day, effectively ruining any summiting excursions for the rest of us. The day after I suddenly didn’t feel so good, must have got a bug of some sort as my stomach has been warring ever since. After Mubarak was overthrown, his whole presidential building was scorched and it certainly sticks out as it is the only building that is black with broken windows and just general decay. Everybody here smokes and you can smoke wherever you want, the worst so far was entering a tiny room where four men were smoking and painting, I had to leave immediately. Cairo is still a fairly conservative city and around ninety percent of women wear some kind of a head covering. Yesterday, while walking down the street, I was looking around and what do I see, a man bent over wearing no pants about fifteen or twenty floors up. I could not be the only one to see this unfortunate sight so I made Aaron and Jonathan look up as well. They were not pleased. Today I went to the Citadel, which is an old fortress that Saladin built to protect against crusaders. This was an amazing fortress that was the seat of power until the mid nineteenth century. I also went to a few museums, the Egyptian museum and the Military musem, I was planning on going to the Coptic museum as well, however one can only go to so many museums before everything starts looking alike. The Egyptian museum was amazing and really had a lot of beautiful antiquities, King Tuts exhibition was especially amazing, being the only tomb never to be robbed. Tomorrow I will hopefully be off to Alexandria.

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Photos

Me with Hassan Mosque
View from outside the courtyard of the Citadel, pretty awesome

Airport goodbye
Esther and Caleb seeing me off at the airport

Pyramids from a distance
View of the pyramids as we came in from the side riding on our horses

Jumping over the Pyramids
Taking some pictures of ourselves hopping over the pyramids

Pyramid ride
Riding through the desert on horses enjoying the marvels of the pyramids

Closeup of Mosque Madrassa of sultan Hassan
Another beautiful mosque, they are everywhere

Sphinx with the Pyramids in the background
The sphinx is ver y big however, somehow not as impressive as I thought it would be

A Lonely Camel
The camel I rejected in favor of a horse

Speaking with some soldiers
Aaron was able to converse in arabic....I was not

Overthrown Parliament Building
The remains of parliament that were burned out as soon as Mubarak was overthrown, many people are very proud of this and have told me they helped burn it down

Egypts most wanted
Actually I have no idea what this says, however it looked funny

Aaron next to Nassar
Aaron standing next to a statue of Nassar he and Jon had been hunting for over the past 4 days

Looking out over the city
Cairo really does never end, it just goes on and on

Typical view in Cairo
Old beautiful buildings litter the city and are falling apart everywhere

Comments

[Leah]

WOOWW
Hey Josh! That is so awesome that you have a chance to travel to Egypt/ Europe! So exciting! Well, I'll definitely read more of your blog! Very interesting stuff. Well, you always did seem like a world-traveler. lol I hope you get to see lots of amazing stuff! Leah

[ursula erl]

travel
Hi Josh, hope all is well .Love ursula and peter