The Big City in the Desert

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Arriving into Egypt was a pain in the butt. To make it through immigration it took me over an hour, very ruff dealings for five in the morning. When I finally made it to my bag it was the only one left on the carousal. Good news was that my airport transfer was there.

I arrived very early on Friday morning, which is a holy day for Muslims so the city was very calm. I was overwhelmed by how unbelievable large the city was. All the buildings are this tan color, all have at least 20 satellite dishes on the roof, and a lot of them are not fully finished buildings. I just can never express the size of Cairo in words. 25 million people live and it feels like it.

I arrived at my hotel, which was under renovation but I loved it, minus the very smelly room I was given. I later found out that all the rooms smell bad. I was excited to get my day going, I went to go downstairs to find out some information and as I went to close my door the door handle just came off. I ended up staying in my room, taking a nap while a man spent almost 2 hours trying to fix this door handle and then finally gave up and replaced it.

At this point I was truly ready to get my day going. My first stop was the Egyptian Museum. The size of this museum was so overwhelming and what was more overwhelming was how many tourist were there. I decided to take my time and go through the place on my own. In 3 hours I still had only covered ¾ of the first floor. There was so much to see. The most interesting thing to me was 80% of the artifacts in the museum were not protected any one could just touch them if they wanted. The biggest disappointment doing the museum on your own were most things were not really labeled with information. It was set up to try to make you have a guided tour.

When I finally made it to the upstairs I visited a room that had mummies. I was very excited to see this display of mummies, but when I finally got into the room it was uncomfortable for me. I felt as if I was violating these people last wishes of having ever lasting life buried in a tomb somewhere,

When I came out of the room I was determined to tackle the upstairs, which had the King Tut treasure; all of these artifacts were protected by glass. This guided stopped me and offered to take me around and honestly by that point I was so tired that I agreed, even though his price was expensive. He was a dirty pervert and even writing about him makes me feel gross. He never did anything but I just could tell he sucked. He did share with me a lot of information and it was nice to have someone with me who knew what they were talking about. After the tour he took me to this perfumery across the street and then to this papyrus shop and then he asked me to go with him in the evening, and that was when I went into the middle of the street and jumped into the first taxi that stopped.

Big mistake. The taxi driver ended up dropping me not at my hotel, because he had no idea where it was. I then started to walk until I found another driver that took the hotel business card and indicated that he knew where the hotel was, big mistake number 2. I ended up driving around with this guy for 20 minutes with him stopping every other block to ask someone new if they knew where the hotel was. We did finally find it and I honestly think that he was just as relieved as I was. I thanked him, got out of the cab, went straight to my room, got right in my bed, and told myself I was not leaving the room again until one of my other tour people showed up.

That was my first day in Cairo!

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Comments

[Sarah]

I hope you realize...
Dearest Leah, As I've read your blogs, I've enjoyed hearing about your adventures and things your doing and seeing, however, in this latest blog, it sounds like you took off in Cairo by yourself....and that just doesn't seem like a good idea to me. So, I just hope you realize that you could disappear in a city that size and no one would know, and/or be able to find you. You're not very big you know, I wouldn't want some big Eqyptian to carry you away. Please don't get stolen, I'd really like to see you again someday.