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Algeria 0 - Egypt 4

Thursday was the Egypt vs Algeria soccer game.  This was quite a big game for Egypt and I spent the evening walking around downtown.  Cairo is a rather bustling city with lots of traffic, people and noise.  It was quite amazing how the city pretty much came to a halt during the match.  Everywhere you looked, every alley, open space, restaurant or store had a TV and a crowd huddled around to watch the match.

   

Well Egypt won and the celebration spilled into the streets and continued well into the night.  I was luck to be right smack in the middle of it all.  Had I not known what was going on I would have thought that this was a riot or protest but it was the country united in sheer crazy happiness for their home team.

Cairo Continues...

The Great Pyramids

The Sphinx

The first layer of the pyramid

Spent my first day visiting the pyramids which turns our are more than just a big pile of 4000+ year old building blocks.  I was able to go inside of the one with the still intact top.  There is no photography allowed inside the pyramids so here’s a photo of me inside the pyramid.  Thank you iPhone!!!

The entrance into the pyramid is only about 4 ft tall and has hand railings on both sides to so you are able to hold yourself steady as you descend approx. 100 ft down then another 50 ft up all the while staring at the ass of the person in front of you.  Once inside, in the exact center, is a room that opens up about 30 ft high where the body and treasures were laid.  The memory I will take away from this experience will be the smell.     Since there is little ventilation within the tomb, the tomb smells like the inside of a shoe...a really really bad smelling shoe.  Oh did I say that the temperature is quite high as well?  So the inside of a hot, moist, sweaty smelly sneaker.  Um yeah.  I guess there’s a price to pay to earn the bragging rights of being inside the Great Pyramid that’s visited by over 5000 people daily.  All in all, it’s pretty spectacular to be amongst something that was put in place and is still standing from so long ago.  

Here’s a few photos from Cairo.  Actually a beautiful city and relatively clean, Cairo didn’t fail to impress me.  Here’s a view of the skyline from Al-Azhar Park, their equivalent of Central Park.

Al-Azhar Park

On my second day, I went to the Egyptian Museum.  Sadly, the museum looks like it is quite short of funding as everything is cramped into 2 small floors.  Again, no photography is allowed but the main attraction is the King Tut exhibit which is amazing.  To think of the age of these items and to know that so many of these treasures were found and looted along the years (again +4000 years ago) to have one complete tomb untouched for such an eternity is quite amazing.  I wondered what it must have been like to be the one who wandered upon this great find not even knowing at the time what it was.  These Egyptians were smart dudes.  I once buried a jar of coins within the pine trees near my home in Wisconsin as a boy.  I doubt anyone will ever find or care about this in the year 2384 A.D.

Just a few random pics of what I saw walking through the local markets of Cairo.

Egyptian phone repair labor union rep.

Buffalo Head anyone?  I'll take the hooves.

Cairo Arrival

Well, I have arrived to Cairo.  I'm always amazed at how easy it can be to get into some countries and others are more inquisitive about how long your stay is, where you are staying and why are you here.  This is not the case for Egypt.  What is always the case with entering into a new country is the waiting.  The passport line was moving along ok and it comes up to my turn and the man sends me away because I didn't pay the other booth for the $15 Visa.  I would think signage would be of some use here but got the visa and moved back to the back of the line to wait again.  Pretty uneventful.  Get to airport, get on plane, sleep a little, get off plane, stamp passport.  Move along.  Next in line please.  There were lots of people holding signs waiting for their guests with their names nicely printed and readable from afar to drive them off to their destinations except mine.  Once out of the baggage area, I find mine.  I wonder if he knew that my favorite sharpie color is light blue.

This is, after all, budget travel I suppose.  At lease he was there.  

On the walk to his car he hands me his cell phone and motions it to my ear.  I'm told that there are other people being picked up so "5 minutes ok? ok?"  (which became 25 minutes)  So the driver doesn't speak English, well, a car is a car and at least he was holding my name right side up!

Met a couple from Brazil in the taxi that are doing Cairo in 3 days who are also staying in my hostel. I'm not big on tours but we did manage to get a cheaper rate for the tour of the Pyramids and the Sphinx tomorrow since there were 3 of us so starting off with the big daddy of the sights right off the bat.  Not much else to say at the moment.  It's 8pm here and for me it's still 1pm with little sleep.  Going to fight the urge to sleep now and see if I can make up the 7 hour difference.  Wish me luck.