Destination:
Egypt –
Cairo – What are you staring at
me for? You're the dude in the dress!
We arrive in
Cairo in the morning, taxi to the hotel, bad hotel, stay anyway, too tired. We relax for a bit and walk around looking
for another hotel for tomorrow. Found
one, then to an afternoon at the Egyptian Museum. The museum has an amazing collection but the
displays are old and cluttered and there’s no interpretation at all (sorry, but
once a museum person...…) besides little cards done on a typewriter. No lighting or highlighting, looks a lot like
a deposit, we walk around anyway, lots of the most amazing things to see, even
if you have no idea of what most of them are.
There’s a lot
of staring going on here, however no feeling up my arse business since Luxor
(no, I’m not disappointed, though). You may
think, staring is ok, I can handle it, but still, sometimes it’s just TOO MUCH!
Guys even use their cell phone to take
photos, now I know how Madonna and Angelina feel. And I walk around “fully
covered”, long pants, shoulders, scarf around the neck to cover any possibility
of cleavage sighting, the works!
Having
said that, the hassling and harassing here in Cairo is actually much less than
we we’ve been told and were prepared for. We actually are starting to like the
place, kind of grows on you after a while even if we not really into the big
city scene at the moment.
We go to the
Indian Embassy (wrong one actually.) Funny story involving us walking for about 2 hours, crossing over a bridge across the Nile and asking about 20 people for directions until we get to the Indian Embassy only to be told that we really need the Indian Consulate which is located ON THE SAME STREET AS OUR HOTEL BACK IN DOWNTOWN CAIRO!!!!!!!!!!!! We had to laugh as did the lady in the Consulate when we told her.
Anyway, we apply for our highly prized 6 month visas and now we have 2 weeks in Cairo to sightsee (Islamic Cairo, Coptic Cairo, Khan Al Khalili Bazaar etc) and wait for the visa. Anyway, after a few days we feel pretty good,
take the local ferry to visit Giza Zoo, take the local metro, “review” all the
restaurants and know well our local liquor store. We kind of start to own the place a bit, even
sitting around on the kerb for a chat as the locals do. Off to see Pyramids soon...
