Booking Cairo

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After lots of online research on places to stay in Cairo, I rediscovered a site that we have used before called “Hostelworld.com”. Not only does it list hostels rated by the users, but it also has a healthy collection of budget hotels. Based on our experiences in New Zealand, I trust the review and percent ratings for the places I have been so far. Our needs in a hotel are not huge: travelling for a year we are not going to be staying in the Hilton or some five star place. At the other end of the spectrum though, we aren't interested in a place that is unsafe or vermin riddled. In South East Asia, we have been fairly lucky and usually end up paying less than $60/ night including breakfast. It appears as if Egypt will be similar and we have booked a place at the Juliana hotel in downtown Cairo which got excellent reviews on the site.

Meanwhile in Chiang Mai, our hotel area is very Thai and not very touristy, despite the proximity to the train station. This is good from an experience point of view, but hard sometimes when you need services or restaurants. After breakfast Evy and I walked around the neighbourhood, looking for a place that does laundry. Of course, all the signs are in Thai only. One place that had clothing hanging out in front turned out to be a sort of clothing store. At another place where cloths were drying in the doorway we did a desperate pantomime get across the idea we were looking for laundry services, but it seemed as if this was just the laundry from an upstairs tenant. In the end we decided to get the laundry done at the hotel, seldom the cheapest option.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped at what looked like a small stationary store. It turned out to be a huge office/art supply place, but unlike in North America, they stock just a few of each item and all in a very packed space. The other thing that I find different is no matter what it is, be it elastics or paper, they always seem to be set up so that you can buy one or two of the item and not necessarily a huge pack. After going though the jetsam and flotsam of our belongings before leaving on this trip, I am especially cognizant of how much we buy that we don't need to and how our stores are set up to encourage this wastefulness.

We made a trip into town around lunch time and took a large stack of books to sell with us. Evy knows all the bookstores now, and was able to get rid of all of our extra books. At the same time, we picked up two guide book on Egypt: “Lonely Planet” and “Lets Go”, both of which have proved fairly good in the past as independent travel series.

After an afternoon of school work, we took the hotel shuttle to the night market again for Indian food (pity we are not going there as the kids like the food so much), and Evy bought souvenirs for for Italy relatives. We also made an attempt to call our property manager about missing rent cheques. After not being able to get through on the phone, we sent an email suggesting that we just end our association with them, as they have been less than ideal. We shall see.

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