I arrived at the Cairo airport at night. Crap! Cairo was just as freezing as Lebanon, at least at night. I had been hoping to be greeted by warm, beach-like weather that would magically evaporate my sickness away, but no such luck, even in a desert country! Staring out the cab window, I was shocked by the size and sprawl of the city. The highway we drove through was very wide, and we passed lots of tall buildings and huge billboards and huge everything else. For a moment, I felt like I was driving through Houston, Texas because everything was so huge and sprawled out, but then we passed by several huge glittery mosques and it brought me back to reality. This was Cairo, and it was huge! Or at least it seemed so as I sped through it in a cab from the airport to Hotel Havana. The taxi driver had come from the hotel to pick me up. He spoke fairly fluent English and had the radio tuned to a station playing American music- '80s classics to be more specific. Bon Jovi to be more specific. “I love Bon Jovi,” said Ahmed, the driver. “Me too!” I said. “It's my life,” he rejoindered. I nodded, smiling, thinking he meant something like Bon Jovi was the soundtrack to his life, the music that defined the prime of his life. A minute later, I got smart and realized he was talking about the song “It's My Life (it's now or never!)”.
Once at the hotel, I walked through the corridor along one of the upper floors, wondering what my travel companions would be like. I turned a corner and ran into two strangers- both with blond hair and glasses, a guy and a girl. Suddenly, I felt like Alice of Lewis Carroll's classic tale, after she ate the mushrooms. Had I grown, or had the halls and everything in it shrunk? It turns out, these short strangers were David's friends, two of the people I'd be traveling with for the next 8 days. Introductions were made, and then they showed me into our hotel room where I met David. I put down my suitcase at the foot of my bed and exclaimed over the comparative luxury of this hotel room. I threw myself on the bed and lay with my arms behind my head, and sighed with pleasure. It was nice to not be completely alone in such a big, foreign city like Cairo, and my travel companions seemed like a bunch of good-natured people. It was weird: as I lay there on the bed with my gaze toward the ceiling, I felt like Eric was sitting there on the bed next to mine. They were different, but shared just enough of the same traits to make it certain that they were brothers, especially in the way they spoke. What must it be like for people to meet me and Sarah separately? It must be mind-warping...Anyway, after sharing some stories, we hit the sack early because we wanted to start out super-early tomorrow, my first day in Cairo.
***The next day***
What can I say? I saw the Sphinx! I touched real Egyptian hieroglyphs! I climbed the Great Pyramid! And it was great! Actually, the climb up the inside of the pyramid was arduous, and I was hit with a wave of nausea at the top from dehydration. So at the moment, while we slowly made our way up the narrow, claustrophobia-inducing, railroad track-like path, hunching over for minutes at one point and sweating in the humid, stifling space, it didn't feel that great and I was wishing I was in far better shape. But, on the way back down, I was able to enjoy the iconic moment a lot more and when I got out into the light and the fresh, open air, I felt a rush from the climb, and all I could think was “Woah...I just climbed the Great Pyramid!” Finally, something to check off that damned List.
"Get outta my ass!"
"Get outta my picture!"
David, one of my traveling buddies
It's the Borrowers!
These are not from a museum!
Two triangles
We had dinner that evening on an anchored restaurant-ship on the Nile. The view on the way down to the ship was pretty, the two lions sitting on their haunches at the end of the bridge, the subtle tones of the sunset, and the reflections on the slow-moving waters of the famed river. We crossed the walkway along the river and saw some strange sights that may go forever unexplained. To our left were dozens of park benches, and each one had a young couple perched on it and acting all couply- which in a Muslim nation like Egypt means nothing more than sitting close and holding hands. One couple though was stretching the boundaries and feeding each other potato chips. Only, when the guy held the chip up to the girl's lips, she completely ignored it and trained her huge mascara-lined eyes on the four of us instead, giving us the most seductive, cat-like look, her pointed eyebrows raised from under her headscarf as if to say “come hither”, her tongue sticking out ever so slightly and lolling about, anticipating the chip that dangled patiently between her boyfriend's/husband's fingers, but her cat eyes still glued seductively on us.
WTF?
And then a few steps later, another girl in a long skirt and headscarf gave us the same seductive “come hither” stare- though her guy wasn't trying to feed her potato chips- and I did a double take because under the scarf her face, I swear, looked like the face of a man. Again, we'll never understand the real reasons for this flash mob-like charade, but there was something off about this entire walk to the restaurant-ship on the Nile. As I shared with the group later, during the dinner, I thought the entire scene with all the couples on the benches, the seducers, and the cross-dresser was a charade set up to freak out us foreigners, to inject a bit of surrealism into our tourism experience in Egypt. Just a theory! The dinner was amazing, especially the seasoned fried potatoes- the best I've ever had. And we got a basket of that Egyptian bread that looks like a giant version of those air bubbles you get sometimes on pizzas. It's like flatbread, but blown up like a balloon so that the inside is hollow.
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