Well….after eight days in the wonderland of Dahab I am back on the road.  As always, it was sad to leave the friends I made there and there is no way to make saying goodbye easy.  A common trend in my travels has been feeling like I have known people for much longer than I have. When meeting people while traveling you already have a common interest from the start, traveling, so there seems to be a connection and acceptance from both sides.

 Going back real quick.  The picture I uploaded of the kids drinking beer (and a half glass of liquor) out of a snorkel, turned into a funnel, is an initiation to the dive master certification.  Both of these guys had been in Dahab for four months and had just recently finished their Dive Master Cert. after 100 dives.  The snorkel test consists of your instructor pouring an unknown amount of alcohol into the funnel and the student finishing it all. In this case, each student was required to drink 3 beers and a half glass of mixed liquor ( i think vodka and rum). They have a finger in their mask so that they may breath through their nose.  As everyone was watching the gut wrenching superbowl game, I was on a ten hour bus ride to Cairo.  A ride that very well could have taken 6, but there were multiple stops along the way, in the middle of nowhere, for 30 minutes a piece, solely for the purpose of people smoking cigarettes and going to the bathroom.  We finally arrived, at about 7am ,and I got a hotel room, about 6 US$, to put my stuff in and start my day….on somewhere around 3 or 4 hours of very disturbed sleep. To paint a quick picture of Cairo for you; Cairo is a dirty city with plenty of traffic.  Two lane roads usually accommodates  3 lanes of cars and 2 lanes of motorcycles.  Going anywhere touristy leads to being bombarded with scammers, such as people trying to sell you tickets to something or people that want to give you a tour or show you where the entrance is and then ask you for money.  ”La shukran” (no thank you)  is the polite response for these hagglers, but looking them straight in the eye and saying “LA……la” (NO…no) will sometimes result in a different response…however, neither are consistently effective.  People crossing the street look like suicide attempts and I have seen a mini bus nudge a woman who was holding her child’s hand to cross the street.  Not to mention, a taxi I have been in has come within inches of T-boning or being t-boned while trying to cross an intersection on multiple occasions. However, I have not gotten into an accident yet, so Manila, Philippines still holds the record for my taxi getting into 4 wrecks on the way home from a bar. 

That being said, there is a lot to do here and I have one day left, and maybe one more on my way back.  So, after putting my bag in the room, I set out to find a place to get my camera fixed.  After looking for a while for the street with all the camera stores I stopped to ask a few people to point me in the right direction.  On of the people I asked was extremely helpful. “What is it that you are looking for exactly?” He asked me.  I explained to him that I needed a camera repair shop and he said “come on, lets see what we can find”.  Mahmoud ElEtrby was dressed in a suit and tie with a briefcase.  He was about my age and he worked for GlaxoSmithKline as a medical representative and he was on the job working his territory before attending afternoon classes at the university.  Mahmoud asked a few stores (translating for me) if they could repair an Olympus camera before we finally found one.  He worked out all the details for me about when I can pick up my camera and how much it will cost, and then he walked me to a road on which I could easily take a taxi, with a straight shot to the Egyptian Museum.  When we got to the street, he gave me his card and said “if there is anything you need while in Cairo give me a call, even if you just have some questions about what to see.”

The Egyptian Museum was amazing, although I couldn’t stop thinking that the little cards on every item there were full of crap.  They would say things like “This stone sculpture could have, probably, been possibly used to do something that maybe….blah blah” …you get the idea. After the museum I stopped at a shawarma place on the side of the street for a cheap (about $1.50) meal.  While I was eating, I started talking to a kid, 19, from Nigeria who came to Egypt in search for a soccer career.  He is up at 5 every morning, does physical training followed by a match. He wants to come to America and convinced me to come watch his highlight reel.  He said if I can get him a deal in America I could be his manager….I told him he has a better shot at a college scholarship, but I would look into both.  

Later that night, when I got back to my hotel, I called Paul Booth, someone who I had been talking with, by email, about possibly staying at his place.  Paul is the husband of a friend of a friend of my sisters, but we haven’t figured out exactly how we are connected because the Rachel I thought my sister was referring to went to a different school than the one that actually connects us.  Paul served in the Peace Corps in Africa for four year and is now teaching at an American school in Cairo.  He has been extremely accommodating and I could not have asked for a better contact in Cairo.  So, I made my way to Paul’s place where he set me up with a place to sleep, a couple of different guidebooks, plenty of information about Cairo, good conversation, and he even let me borrow his digital camera while mine was in the shop.

Yesterday, I woke up and made my way to the place near the museum where I met my friend from Nigeria, Agboola, because he wanted to go to Giza with me.  Giza is the typical tourist hot spot for seeing pyramids, although there are plenty of others around Egypt.And it is the home of the famous Sphinx, which is much more impressive in a photograph than in person.  My guide book refers to the quote of an English playwright, who said that “the Sphinx is like meeting a TV personality in the flesh- always smaller than had been imagined”.  I tried to take some up close photos so no one reading this has to be disappointed. We made our way to the town of Giza (about 30 minutes by taxi) for about 20 cents a piece and we bargained a taxi down to $2 to take us to the pyramids. At the gate, I worked our way into a tour group that was entering through a side gate by a guard holding a handful of tickets.  The tickets would have costed about $25 a piece.  Throughout the day we exchanged knowledge, mostly him explaining the Islamic religion to me and me teaching him basic economic concepts, starting with globalization, spawned by his curiosity in why I was so amused by a picture I took (below). 

I’m going to skip ahead a few hours (imagine that) to my way home, last night after I picked up my camera at the store.  Paul had given me a map of Maadi (the area he lives in) and an address, so I just had the cab driver drop me off at the restaurant at which I met Paul the night before, before walking to his place.  After second guessing myself about my sense of direction, and my place on the map, I stopped to ask a guard at some bank if he knew where we were on the map.  About 5 minutes later there were about 6 bank employees looking at my map, none of whom spoke English.  Eventually the bank manager came outside to help; he spoke English.  After asking where I was from, he quickly invited me in to join him for a cup of tea.  We spoke for about twenty minutes, I asked him some questions about his banks strategy and the level of competition in the market and he asked me questions about my travels and what I did at the bank at which I worked before my travels.  (Freddie, if you are reading this, I’m doing some international competition research for when the time comes   He had lived in New York, for a few months, doing training at the Bank of New York.  I can’t remember his name, but I do remember that it meant honesty in Arabic.  When we finished our tea he asked if I would like one of his employees to assist me to Paul’s apartment.  When I turned down his offer for a personal guide around the block, he took out a piece of paper and translated the address I had showed him, into Arabic, in case I were still unable to find my way I could ask someone on the street. 

With all that being said, I will end this post in saying that I have still yet to try camel meat but I refused to leave the country without adding camel to my list of exotic cuisine.  It will be right up there with some of the top ones, such as kangaroo and zebra (which the sale of is now outlawed in restaurants in Kenya- Source- Paul).,/p>Today I am going to get lost in Old/Islamic Cairo and make my way to the Sufi dancing presentation tonight.