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Published: March 10th 2008
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Well it was time for spring break, and most college students would opt for somewhere in Mexico, or an otherwise happenin’ place, but I was in Italy, so me and thirty three of my friends paid about seven hundred Euro to go to an Italian resort in Sharm El Sheik, Egypt. This is a resort town located on the Red Sea, on the awkward Eastern wedge of Egypt. The resort was all inclusive, three meals a day plus snacks, free soft drinks all day, activities and shows all in Italian, and a beach with a view that I miss from living in California.
We got there on Saturday at around three in the afternoon and jumped immediately into the water. The water was warm and perfect for the temperature, which was about 85-90 the whole week. The meals consisted of all you can eat buffets of varying Italian food and Arabic food, which I was already kind of familiar with from Turkey. The fact that Arabic food is now familiar to me from my travels in the area is strange to me. I guess this is what they mean when they say “gaining experience.”
The first two days
were a general blur of staying up late, getting up late to go directly to the beach and swim and sleep, averting my eyes from the Italian women of all ages tanning and walking around topless. On the third night, we all stayed up later than usual because we were getting on a bus for Cairo at three. The ride is six hours long, and we passed under the Suez Canal, and arrived in Cairo at nine in the morning. First impressions of Cairo were mixed. It’s an old, old, old city. The tram/trolley running through it is two hundred years old and you can tell that it is. The city is CROWDED; it has a population of 18 million in a country that’s around 60 million large. Parts of it also have a huge sense of poverty, especially the projects, which were never even completed.
Our first stop was the Cairo Museum, which has everything you would ever want that has to do with ancient Egypt. A room is dedicated to King Tutankhamen or “King Tut.” I saw his mask, his casket, and most of the things that were buried with him. I also saw King Ramses II,
the guy believed to be pharaoh during the Moses story. You heard me correctly, I saw him. They have a mummy room where I looked King Ramses II in the rotten and dried out eye.
From there we went straight to Giza right over the Nile to see the Great Pyramids. Before going up to touch them however, we took a camel ride around them, which turned out to be my favorite part of the whole stinkin’ trip. Camels are bigger than I expected, and they are a much smoother ride than a horse, but with a less convenient saddle when it comes to keeping your balance. I got my own camel when everyone else had a partner, and I got to run on it, which was the most fun I’ve ever had, as I was riding towards the pyramids when I was doing it. Next we walked around the pyramids, and walked inside the one that still has its casing on near the top. The inside of the pyramid consisted of a narrow and very low tunnel going down hill for about fifty feet, a slightly taller passage going straight for around fifty feet, and then another very
low tunnel going up for around fifty feet, leading to the burial chamber. The whole thing was a hot, smelly, and humid affair, and I wanted to get out immediately after taking a quick illegal picture inside with the group. After that we went to the sphinx, which is in the same area as the pyramids. The funny thing about the sphinx is that if you take a picture of it and the pyramids from one direction, you see all desert and emptiness, and if you turn around, you see downtown Cairo, with a Pizza Hut and a KFC directly across the street from the sphinx.
After visiting a boring papyrus farm and having an Egyptian lunch with coca cola that had Arabic writing on the can instead of coca cola, we went back home, we arrived at the hotel around 1:30 in the morning.
During Cairo I realized that I was sick, and though it didn’t impede my trip in Cairo, it did prevent my trip to Mt. Sinai, which consisted of a three hour hike uphill at night with no lights, cold weather, followed by a three hour wait for the sunrise. I did not feel
like my body could take that kind of activity. One other note: a careless drop of my camera from my desk in Florence caused a crack in the screen, and the damage area has been growing ever since. At this point, the screen is almost completely black, the result being that most of my pictures are now skewed, and not straight.
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