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Published: December 30th 2006
Well quite a bit has happened since the last entry... we got on a train to alexandria at around 12pm and it took about 3 hours. Alexandria and Cairo were much different than I was expecting. I expected cairo to be a more world class city with skyscrapers and just more modern over all and I expected Alexandria to be a bit nicer as well since apparently a lot of european tourists visit alexandria but both places were a bit run down. The hotel in Alexandria was really nice, no doubt the nicest hotel in th city and we got a really good dinner at a restaurant called Tikka Grill which is right on the corniche (boardwalk)... After that we headed towards Fort Qait-Bay and met a group of 3 Egyptian men who just kinda came up to us and started making conversation. We didnt really know what they were talking about but we still managed to spend about an hour with them, they wanted to exchange pounds with us for some american money and they went and bought a bag of peanuts to share with us. Things got a little interesting when they started saying " I am terrorist, he is terrorist, he have gun, i have gun." Dave turns to us and says "well things just took a turn for the worst." apparetly they were just joking. Then they asked what religion we were, we said catholic then they responded "good, catholics and muslims love each other" and when we said we were from america, the first thing they wanted to talk about was Pres. Bush. Actually a couple times as soon as we say "America" they go... "Oh BUSH!"
On our way back from the fort we walked through one of the craziest markets I have ever been to. We were walking along the corniche and we saw a group of live sheep standing around and some dead ones hanging, and a whole bunch of xmas likghts hanging across the streets for pretty much as far down the street as we could see. So we figued we might as well walk through it, the dead hanging sheep was the least of the things we would see. There were gutted pigs, sheep and cows every where. Groups of people standing around cheering while they were skinning a sheep, animal heads everywhere and puddles of blood. It was actually pretty horrifying but as you can imagine we took plenty of pictures and videos so I can share this all with you guys.. haha. At one point the smell was pretty overbearing and I almost just threw up...
Unlikely as it may seem, after this we headed to dinner at some chinese restaurant in our hotel and then went to some hookah bar. Unfortunately it had more of an industrial feel and not lik the places i expected or would go to in NYC with dim lighting and plush seating and whatnot..
Yesterday we were able to see a few tourist sites, we went to the Biblioteca of Alexandria which was closed and then to the National Alexandria Museum which has some pretty awesome exhibits. There was a mummy in the basement which i tooka video of. After that we went to the only Roman ruins found in Egypt, the Roman Amphitheater. While they were breaking gound to put up an apt building they just stumbled across it.
After that we went looking everywhere for lunch and finally stumbled across a place called Karma, we went inside ad it was a really strange set up, there were tons of tourists which confused us and a buffet style setup but no one was serving us so we just started taking food and ordered some beers buit they onlky charged us for the beers... turns out that we were part of the tourist group and i guess lunch was included for them so we just actled like we were part of it and got some free lunch... now we're just hoping that Karma doesnt come get us and we all get sick.
Besides that it was mostly a traveling say and we took the 3pm train out of Alexandria to Cairo, had a couple hour wait then took a sleeper train here to Luxor where we arranged a tour guide to take us around for the day. It hard to see since its still really early, about 630 but it looks like the nicest city we've been to. The train stationw was brand new and a lof of the buildings look pretty new and redone...
Other than this everything has been going really well and ive felt really safe the entire time so hopefully most of you arent worrying about me too much...
love and miss you all..
talk to you soon...
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jason
non-member comment
hey matt
Hey man, glad to hear everything is going great so far. Don't forget the picture of the monkey wearing the hat at the bazaar! Stay safe and look forward to hearing from you soon.