Tim and I got up early and headed off to organise our onward travel. We decided on the tourist sleeper train but securing our tickets was not without complications. First problem you have to pay in US dollars and according to the Lonely Planet these have to be paid in cash unless you use a travel agent etc. The hostel offered to do this but at a significant cost so I decided to organise it myself. Then when I got to an exchange bureau that would give out dollars they wouldn't take travellers cheques. This meant I would have to convert money into Egyptian pounds then back into dollars losing on the rate each way. Then we went to try to find an ATM and this took us three goes - the first one didn't accept visa, the second didn't have enough cash. Finally we got to the ticket office to find that they would take visa (at an extra 2%) - but the price had gone up by $10 each and the cash I had with my wasn't enough for the tickets. Luckily though they said there were plenty of tickets available and I had time to get them later.
So we went back to the hostel with just 15 mins to spare before checkout , packed our bags, got the extra few dollars from my small emergency stash, collected Julian and then headed back to the train station. Tickets purchased we sat down so Julian could have his "breakfast" and suddenly it was 13:00 and half the day was gone.
In the afternoon we visited the much recommended Egyptian museum. It has a very large collection of impressive artifacts though there is very little information about them without a guide or extra book. We spent a while looking through it but the boys didn't find much that interested them and we left after only a few hours. Others had told us you need days to look through it and indeed if you paid attention to the details and tried to put things in historic context etc this would be true - but there wasn't much excitement in it for a couple of teenagers.
After the museum we went to felfela restaurant aiming to have a nice filling meal - but decided against it when we saw the prices and heard a drilling noise in the wall next to us that was very annoying - so instead we went around the corner to their take away/ kiosk and got the much cheaper snack style foods that we had enjoyed many times already.
We took a taxi to the train station with our bags - though it turned out that the metro would have been quicker and much cheaper. The train was on time. It was very nice and comfortable. It included an evening meal that was similar to an aeroplane meal. Tim and I shared a cabin - Julian was in the next cabin with an Indian man from Bangalore. All went well and we dropped off to sleep one by one after dinner.
