Hello from Cairo!! Yesterday was a fun although exhausting day.....Saul and I only got 3 hours of sleep due to our new found friends from our hostel whom we went out with the night before to celebrate Saul's birthday. Very very quickly we found out that negotiating here is required conduct and can get extremely tiresome after a long day, but lucky for me, I happen to be with someone that is from Africa and knows this formality well! :) So hired a driver for the day who started by taking us to a paper store, where they showed us how they make paper out of the papyrus plant. It was very interesting!! Then he took us to a perfume factory (well oil actually), where they explained how they extract oil from plants/flowers. I tried many scents that I'd never heard of before and most were pleasurable. After this, we negotiated a ridiculously good price for a 3 hour tour of the pyramids and the sphinx by camel and horse. Saul started off with the camel, however after 10 minutes couldn't handle it....lol! Unfortunately the little boy who guided the camel spoke better English than our actual guide so we didn't really learn much of the history behind the pyramids, but it was enough for me just to see them.... They really are something to see in Cairo as it is fascinating to me how they were built. At night, we visited a couple of mosques and a bazaar or market with our newfound friends that we met while on a dinner cruise along the Nile river. As women, we were not allowed to go into the main part of the mosque and only a smaller portion which was 1 tenth of the size of the men's size, but we still peeked through and saw the magnificance of the men's side.
Today was a rather light day as we were both exhausted from the previous two days so we took it easy and visited the Egyptian museum which holds many artifacts from King Tut's tomb as well as many many other Egyptian Kings, Queens, and other royalty. This was great too, although many of the pieces were unmarked and thus we had no idea what we were looking at. We visited a cafe afterwards for this excellent apple drink that they have when all of a sudden the police raided the sidewalk grabbing all the tables and chairs with a whirlwind quickness. Shocked, I got up from my chair quickly and ducked into a door opening but still got hit by some chairs that a shop owner and policeman were fighting over. Didn't hurt at all so don't worry mama, I was just utterly shocked at what was happening and how quickly it all came and went. When it was over I looked at Saul and he said "Welcome to Africa.....you couldn't possibly visit Africa without seeing something like that"....lol! Back at the hostel, our host explained to us that you must have a permit to put tables and chairs on the street and that a diplomat was in town today and the police probably came around trying to clean up and make the streets look "pretty". Apparently it is a very normal, very common occurrance, that I had the fortune of witnessing......
Anyway, that has been our adventures thus far.....we are are heading out to Kenya on a 3am flight tonight and will arrive in Nairobi around noon. Hope all is well with all of you!!!
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