We woke up late to our first day in Cairo with breakfast of tea, eggs, jam and bread. We wanted to go to Alexandria so we headed to the train station. The hotel manager had told us that train leaves every hour but when we got to the station, the ticket office told us the next train was in a few hours. The funny thing about Egypt is that you can ask 10 people for directions or information and you will receive 10 completly different answers. Also, when someone says no, the no is flexible. This also holds true for the police there. No can easily be turned into a Yes with some Egyptian Pounds.
We then decided to go to the bus station. The tourist office told us it was a 2 minute walk...we ended up taking a 10 minute cab ride. Did I also mention that there was a heat wave in Cairo....the temperatures went over 40 degrees, and this was not including humidity.
We paid for tickets at the bus station and then realised that the sights we wanted to see would have been closed by the time we got there b/c Alexandria was 3 hours away. In Egypt, there is no such thing as a refund but we did manage to haggle our way into getting half of our money back. We then decided to go to the Egyptian Museum instead.
The Egyptian Museam is huge. If you were to visit each artifact for 4 seconds, it would take you 3 weeks to see everything. The displays are also very poorly labelled. If labels were luckly enough to be present, they were in either english, arabic or french. So, we decided to hire a tour guide. Big mistake. This guy charged us 80E.P. for a 1-hour super tour in which we ran around the whole museum like chickens with our heads cut off. He was also not very knowledgable at all. After the 1 hour, we ditched the guide and wandered around ourselves. Some highlights included animal mummies, jewelery, tombs and mummificaiton.
After the museum, we were hungry so we headed to the local market Khanal-Khalili (please forgive my spelling). There we tasted a bean dish, Foul, which was excellent. One thing I really enjoyed about Egypt was their food. It was tasty and cheap.
After dinner, we saw some beautiful mosques and walked around the market where there were swindlers everywhere. People kept thinking that Irene and I were Japanese. We were glad to have Dave with us. Women don't get much say in Egypt and Irene and I were often ignored.
When we got thirsty, we decided to sit in a coffe shop to have Sheshia and tea. What a rip off. They had a tourist menu and a local menu. The tea was 10E.P., about 2CAD which is more expensive than Canada....and guess what, they brought us LIPTON tea!!!! Urgh.
On our way back to the hotel, we saw a street vendor get his goods taken away by the Tourist Police. In Egypt, there are Tourist Police on nearly every street corner. Tourist are supposed to go to them to report anything that has happened. Anyways, the street vendor had a fit in the middle of the road and then tried to run away from the police. This was a funny site as he had a a lot of adipose tissue (i.e. he was fat).
Lessons Learn from Today
- only ask directions from women
- no one actually knows where anything is
- there are no such thing as a map of Cairo with street signs
- we are walking dollar signs
- plan, plan, plan.
No comments:
Post a Comment