Post by Henry
Monday, January 8
After breakfast, we met another tour rider in the lobby, and decided to take an Uber with her to see the pyramids. It is certainly magical to put in a destination on the app in English, and have a driver who speaks only Arabic show up a few minutes later to whisk us there expeditiously. The general entry to the pyramid grounds was chaotic, to say the least. Many fixers appeared to "help us" buy our tickets. Once on the grounds, extreme attempts were made to sell us camel rides. We declined many camel jockeys, and succeeded in using our own two feet for transportation.
Up close, the Sphinx is indeed mysterious and mesmerizing.
The brilliant engineering and scale of construction so many thousands of years ago is truly a wonder.
Call to prayer is five times a day, and the faithful make it work no matter where they happen to be.
Not sure I would be sitting under this rock enjoying a cigarette, but it has likely not budged for a few thousand years already.
For the second part of the day, we traveled to Cairo's old Islamic quarters with very narrow winding streets. There is abject poverty in this neighborhood, but the locals manage. It was a chaotic fusion of people, cars, scooters, tuk-tuks. The aged infrastructure was very fragile, and many buildings appeared to be teetering on the brink of imminent collapse.
Returning to the hotel, we were greeted by two familiar faces, Tim and Jeff, who had just arrived. They were also missing both bikes, and Jeff did not have any of his bags. Strangely, they were cool as cucumbers about their wayward luggage. Their plan was to wait until tomorrow in the hopes that their baggage would arrive via the airlines' delivery service.
For the second part of the day, we traveled to Cairo's old Islamic quarters with very narrow winding streets. There is abject poverty in this neighborhood, but the locals manage. It was a chaotic fusion of people, cars, scooters, tuk-tuks. The aged infrastructure was very fragile, and many buildings appeared to be teetering on the brink of imminent collapse.
Returning to the hotel, we were greeted by two familiar faces, Tim and Jeff, who had just arrived. They were also missing both bikes, and Jeff did not have any of his bags. Strangely, they were cool as cucumbers about their wayward luggage. Their plan was to wait until tomorrow in the hopes that their baggage would arrive via the airlines' delivery service.
No comments:
Post a Comment