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well... we didn't have an auspicious start to our adventures in egypt... having finally succumbed to my first bout of food poisoning I spent a very miserable few hours in the middle of the night flying over libya vomiting into an aeroplane toilet bowl while dave extolled the many virtues of Egyptair cuisine!
thankfully when we arrived in cairo we had our hostel picking us up so we went straight to bed and i continued to enjoy the constant companionship of a clean toilet!
so cairo wasn't the best start but it was only the first day...
Our second day in Cairo i was determined to see the pyramids so armed with lots of water and dry bread we set out (intrepid adventurers that we were - we took a taxi from the hostel!) However we soon learnt that the best way to actually see anything more than a papyrus shop we should do cairo on our own!!
so first stop... papyrus shop... very unimpressed... still sick and now someone was keeping me from the toilet for another hour when i could have been using that time to see the only remaining ancient wonder of the world!!
so as you can imagine catherine is very grumpy...and anyone who knows me knows that that is not a fun place to be! I also had the distinct impression that we were only there to be scammed and i hate that more than anything else! (for those of you who have never been to egypt - papyrus was the paper that they used in ancient times to write on - now they paint beautiful pictures on it and sell it to every silly tourist who takes a taxi and not the bus!)
Dave was being unfailingly charming and polite to the stupid man trying to tell us that this was really papyrus not banana leaf which is apparently what everyone else in egypt would try and sell us!! in fact it was quite beautiful however the poor man did not understand that i would have been quite happy to buy the banana leaf at a 100th of the price since all of you who would admire it when i got home would not know the difference!! despite this we were both very admiring of the work which was very stunning but we kept saying that we were definately not
going to buy anything!!
anyway...30 mins later I am now very bored of looking at hieroglyphics on papyrus and dave and i were trying to extracate ourselves from the very enthusiastic seller while our driver looked on hopefully wanting his comission!! Finally dave was being way too nice to the guy and i said no just one too many times and all of the nice comments about us being like tutankamun and his wife and how in love we both were all disappeared and the true egyptian male came out in him... he turned to dave and said "Ignore your wife... you are the bank, you decide!" well you can imagine how fast we left the store!! I am not a feminist but boy that put my back up so quickly you could see the dust as we ran!
so finally we get to the pyramids... however our driver had not got his commission for the day yet so rather than dropping us at the ticket booth we get taken around the back to his "friend" who will give us such a brilliant deal on camel rides around the pyramids and student cards and entry all for less
Stepped Pyramid
This was one of the original pyramids at Saqqara (not Giza). than the price it would cost us to go into the pyramids by ourselves!! I had had enough of scamming for one day and so we both said no very politely and walked off - our driver kindly pointed us in the direction of the ticket booth and we walked off with more camel sellers trailing us and trying to sell us every kind of discount imaginable... what we didn't know at that point was that our driver was sending us deliberately in the wrong direction to ensure that we had the "opportunity" to have at least 10 people try and sell us camel rides and then get incredibly offended when we did not "trust" them! so by now i am just plain angry... first with the stupid driver, then the stupid touts, and most of all with the stupid sun which was not making my day any easier!!!
Despite the adversarial conditions we finally found the ticket booth, bought our tickets and turned the corner to see the pyramids and sphinx in all their glory!
The Pyramids of Giza are the remaining wonder of the ancient world (we had seen the other one - temple of diana in ephasus and the best thing that you could say about it was that it was a pretty duck pond with a sign saying that the temple used to be here)
I don't think that it is possible to be disappointed by seeing the pyramids... they are spectacular ... the fact that you have seen them and heard about them so often makes it impossible for there to be a lack of awe when you see them in real life!
what i was surprised about was their proximity to the city... literally 100m away is a KFC and the sprawling streets of cairo... The Nile in egypt is the lifeblood of the country - along the edges is highly developed but as soon as the water irrigation channels stop there is nothing but desert. The pyramids are on the edge of where the fertile land stops at the edge of cairo so one side of the pyramids is developed city and the other side is 1000s kms of desert.
The pyramids themselves are surrounded by the tents of archeologists and other pyramids that have become rubble over time. What i was most surprised about was that they were not smooth - I knew in theory that the limestone casing that had covered them at one point and made the surface smooth had been removed over time to make other temples... decorate fancy houses in paris and london etc but i didn't really understand how much of a difference that would make up close. The Great pyramid is therefore not nearly as impressive as the smaller Khufre pyramid which still has the limestone casing on the top but the sphinx was really cool!
I guess that although they probably weren't as impressive as i had imagined them to be, they still made a strong impression simply because they were such an important monument! Definately very glad that we got the opportunity to see them!
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Patrick Holman
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Too funny!
You are definitely funny! Poor kid. I bet that was really rough going through all that sh*t. Your husband is a saint. Just remember, he put up with everything you put up with AND he put up with you! Egypt never did become a great country again. huh?