Camels and Koshary

Africa » Egypt
December 30th 2007

Published: January 2nd 2008

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Two Canadians Eh

Streets of Cairo

THESE were the crazy streets we had to cross!!

Egypt Baby, Yah!!!

It was a little bit wierd being in countries which celebrate Christmas all the way up until Christmas Eve, and then POOF, we get to Egypt and Christmas disappears! Egypt so far has been really cool ... the people are incredibly friendly and we are not afraid to wander around on our own ... so automatically the country gets a huge thumbs up from us!!! People stop us on the streets just to say "Where you from? Welcome!" ... it's awesome to get such a friendly greeting from the locals. Crossing the street here is a crazy adventure - definitelly the hardest of any country we've been to! Cross walks don't really exist, so one has to stop in between cars on 4 and 5 lane roadways! Again it's a complicated game of frogger ... just a little bit intimidating! Also, Egypt is a predominantly Muslim country and we've found it really interesting to see raunchy lingerie in many stores ... it is hard to imagine a woman who covers everything except her eyes wearing a string bikini thing with giant flowers covering her nether regions! There are varying degrees of how the women cover

Royal Mummy Room

It was so wierd to think that we were looking at human bodies from thousands of years ago!

up here - some cover everything, others just wear the head scarf, and still others cover nothing at all. It's nice to see the diversity. Also, we're having a bit of a hard time with the local men here ... the fact that woman clearly are subordinate to men is hard to accept. When Kristena asks for things, or orders something, local men push past and it's made pretty clear where she stands on the totem pole. She also gets blatantly checked out by dirty old men, even when we're walking together and it's a bit creepy. Even when it's obvious we're together we still get the cat calls ... Trevor has been offered many camels for his lady! Yeck!

For our first few days here we visited the Egyptian Museum and found our favorite place to eat! Egypt is really cheap ... so we've been eating complete meals for about $2 US. The museum was interesting, but a little bit difficult to appreciate because they have thousands of ancient artifacts and only about 10% have written explanations of what they are. The Royal Mummy Room and King Tut's room were the highlights ... to know that we were

Oasis Sunset

looking at human bodies from thousands of years ago was incredible! Christmas day was hard for us ... we were really missing home and spent most of the day waiting until we could call Canada. We didn't end up going out for a nice supper or anything (spent too much time on the phone!), so instead we picked up our favorite meal (koshary - it's a pasta/fried noodles/chick peas/tomato sauce and onion dish - delicious) for $2! Merry Christmas, ho ho ho.

On the 27th we headed to the desert in western Egypt for a little "oasis" trip! We had a bit of trouble with the company we booked with - once again we've managed to find ourselves a bit ripped off - but the experience was still really cool. We took jeeps around, zooming up and down sand dunes, and ended up sleeping under the stars in the middle of the desert. The desert was much colder than either of us expected - it was a rough night huddled together!!! After that, we headed back to Cairo to meet up with our tour ... thankfully we haven't got any crazy people this time so we are enjoying ourselves

Trevor was REALLY excited to finally be here!

a bit more than on the safari! First day was all about the pyramids - we were both reeeallly surprised to see that they're right next to the city! While we were walking around, Trevor gained a little fan club of girls yelling "Maradonna, Maradonna!" (Maradonna was soccer player for Argentina, and Trevor was wearing the Argentina jersey) ... it was pretty funny!

Enjoy the photos! And Happy New Year!
Trevor and Kristena

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