Cairo

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Untitled This morning we were woken up at 7am and had to be in the lobby ready to go at 8am. Breakfast was available in one of the hotel's restaurants. First stop was the pyramids. We went to the Great Pyramid first. Some people went inside, but I didn't. We were conned into paying someone to ride their camel even though we were picked up and put on the camels - I was not interested and did not want to get on the camel. Oh well. We got about an hour to walk around the pyramid before we got back on the bus and headed to the second pyramid. I did go inside this one. It was warm and it felt like there was no oxygen. For the most part, the ceiling was very low and you had to bend over to walk through. The line was so long and moving so slowly that even though I rushed out of the pyramid, I almost missed the bus - it didn't help that it took me 5 minutes to find our bus in the mass of similar looking buses. Next, we went to take a group picture with all three pyramids in the background. Leah, Julia, and I took a picture "walking like Egyptians" - we couldn't resist. Then, we went to the Sphinx. After the Sphinx, we had lunch at Felfela - the menu was set and most of us weren't used to Egyptian food yet, so we ate a lot of pita bread. After lunch we went to the Egyptian Museum. There is so much there to see and we had so little time!!!! You could spend days there looking at stuff and apparently there is so much more stuff in storage that they don't have room to display. We spent the most time in the section devoted to King Tutankhamun. Kate, Leah, Julia, and I went to the cafe for some caffeine and looked around the gift shops. After the museum, we had some time to kill before going to the train station, so we went to a perfumery (where most people bought TONS of stuff - I only bought one small bottle of Lily of the Valley oil) and then to Funky Bros - a clothing-type store (most of us didn't buy anything there). Then we headed to the train station. Our sleeper train to Aswan was due around 8pm, but in Egypt nothing is on time. We finally got on the train and were NOT impressed!!! It was old and kinda dirty. The bathrooms were gross and when you flushed the toilet, it just dumped out onto the tracks. We ate dinner on the train. Several of us got two bottles of wine to share, but after tasting the wine we decided to try to return a bottle (luckily we'd only opened one). The guy didn't want to take it back, but he eventually did. Later, we went to the "Club Car" where there was music and dancing. It wasn't all that exciting and we were tired, so Kate and I went to bed, or tried (every time I was almost asleep it felt like we'd hit a donkey or something).

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