Well this weekend has brought some interesting events to Cairo, and I'll talk about what I did get to see, but instead of starting at the end, lets start in the middle. And the middle is this, In Luxor my dad and I hired a taxi for the day to see all the temples. At the end of the day the driver basically forced us to stop at his friends shop and drink a beer with him. It was awesome.
Okay, Okay this is going to work better if I start from the beginning. I went to Luxor on Friday morning. Well, that's kind of a lie I left for Luxor on Friday (late) morning and arrived on Friday afternoon. I took a taxi to the hotel where my dad was staying. It was a nice, really cheap place and, if you ever find yourself in Luxor, I suggest you stay there. The first day we went out to Karnack Temple which is a really really old Egyptian temple. Lots of hieroglyphs but the truly amazing thing is the size. These ancient temples built 3000 years ago are just giant, really, really big.
So after that we headed back to the hotel. Found a restaurant and ate out (again thanks for coming to Egypt and buying me food dad).
Saturday we went to the east bank of Luxor. This brings me to an interesting fact about Luxor. It's a city of over a million people in it and it has almost no bridges across the Nile. The closest one to the center of the town in 12km south. So we took a ferry across the Nile in the morning. I hear about ferries in the north aftican countries sinking every once-in-awhile but I always think, geeze how shitty do those ferries have to be to sink? The answer is about as shitty as the one we rode on.
Also, I have noticed something about the egyptians, and because I'm american I'm going to attribute this to all north africans, they have a weird mentality about waiting. On the ferry we had people jumping off of it before it even got to the dock. THey would just get within jumping distance and people would take off. Its a little like the queuing situation. That is, no one gets in lines, they just jam towards the front and, eventually, it works out. But, the crazy part is these people are totally okay with sitting in a coffee shop or at an airport for 4 hours and doing nothing. They just sit there, I would be bored sick.
Anyways, on the other side of the Nile we ran into the usual onslaught of people offering to sell us shit. What we needed was a taxi but, usually, as you know, its better to walk away from the train stations, airports and ferries and get a taxi further on the road. We tried to do this but there was one particularly insistent
Then we hopped back into the cab, negotiated with the driver to drive us around all day. It ended up being $24 and this guy just drove us all over the place and waited for hours while we explored, so that was money well spent (it also wasn't my money so its really easy for me to say that). We ended up going to the Valley of the Kings, The workers city and some temple that was just covered in hieroglyphs. It was really cool. Then Mahmoud, our driver, insisted that we go to one last temple. We tried to tell him that we were done but he really really wanted us to go. So far that day he hadn't let us down so we said, "okay." When we got there he told us to walk around for a while and to go to the cafeteria when we were done. The cafeteria was really just some old cafe like thing next to the temple. So we walked for a bit and then went to the cafeteria and Mahmoud sitting with his friends drinking a beer. We decided to get some beers as well and Mahmoud came out and joined us. Then we got the ferry back across the river and headed back to hotel after a long day of seeing ruins that were older than I can believe.
Today we went to one last temple before finding a taxi, going to the airport and catching our hour long flight back to Cairo. When we got in we grabbed a taxi and tried to get to my dad's hotel. It's about a 30 minute ride into downtown Cairo so we wern't really paying attention until the driver basically drives us to Tahrir square and asks where to go. At about that point there is some kid with a surgical mask who is trying to get the taxi to turn around because the Shabab (youth) had occupied the square (which is really just a big roundabout). We eventually worked out how to get to the hotel where we found Bob and Shannon. We all headed out to dinner at this place dangerously close to Tahrir. We got there, ordered and ate what was a really nice dinner.
After we had mostly finished and were just talking the waiter came over to our table and said, "The kitchen and the bar are going to be closed, now." We looked at him like, what?, why? and he said "They are demonstrating in the square." That's about when we started to hear the chants. The waiter told us that we could wait in the restaurant for as long as we wanted so we waited for about a half hour and then braved the streets. It was mostly fine. there were a couple of streets that we walked by and just saw a cloud of tear gas and a couple other you could hear what sounded like flash bangs going off but all in all a relatively safe walk to the nearest metro station where I took the train across the river (because I couldn't talk any taxis into driving across). My dad, Bob, and Shannon went back to their hotel. And eventually we all made it home safe. Alhumdulala.
There are some pictures but because I suck at using picasa you have to view them here.
Dad just took off the the airport. He'll be back early tomorrow and I will be sticking around for another 10 days.
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