walk like an egyptian

OK as promised! An Egypt update.

It's very intimidating to write a blog entry on such an incredible, and incredibly busy, week. I feel like I was trying to put aside hours upon hours (as would be needed) to give you guys a full glimpse of such an intricate and amazing country, and the incredible trip we took. So, apparently, if I had to pick one word to describe it, it would be incredible.

I decided since there is so much to write and I'm so stressed about it, I'm going to just list my highlights.

So, we flew into Rome (Yikes, I'll probably have to write another blog entry for that one...) connected, and caught a late night flight to Cairo, getting in around 3 am. For the first time in my life I saw a woman with a full burkah. I like to think I'm a well-read person (BBC as my home-page and NYTimes.com always following Facebook) but actually seeing the culture is different than just reading about it.

Anyway, we were met by our tour guide at the airport, who escorted us to our hotel. After a miscommunication about payment and driving down a dark alley- Brooke and I were clutching one another's hands and Spencer and Sam were giving each other looks of confusion- we made our way to a hotel and passed out quickly before a 10 am wake up call.

On first impression Egypt reminded me a lot of what Mexico's inland looked like. We had arrived at about 3 am from our flight and were driving (insanely) through the streets and the amount of people out in the dead of night was almost scary. Groups of people meandered through the roads, with children and stray animals strewing. It was loud, crowded, and WARM. The next morning as we were driving, it was as if nothing had changed. Everyone was honking horns, playing Egyptian music, and dodging cars as they crossed the streets. Peddlers littered the sidewalks as children ran around barefoot. It was crazy.

Our first stop: PYRAMIDS! Can you believe the pyramids actually exist? So to spare you the description, as you can imagine, they're big traingular stone/clay/dirt things in the shape of pyramids. Ta da! We spent a few hours walking about them, taking a million pictures, and awing at their huge size, talking about how they must have used magic. We even went into one (I had to be hunched over in two... you can imagine how Kubin hardly fitted in the narrow tunnels) However, it was crazy to imagine how real people actually did this milleniums ago. It really blew our minds, not to sound totally cliche.

Another site that day was the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Absolutely crazy. I have never seen so many things in one museum before. There's hardly room for walking. We even indulged in seeing the mummy room, so real live mummies. Totally creeping, but on a scientific not amazing. They still had teeth, hair, and nails. But, promise me that if I die don't put me in a glass box like that and let millions of people stare at me. That was kind of weird.

The tour company we went on was a little weird about how they organized things, and Brooke and Scotty ended up taking an overnight train to Aswan in the south whereas Sam, Kubin, and I flew. Well, TIA (this is Africa, a reference from Blood Diamond) and we went with it. We arrived in Aswan and boarded our cruise down the Nile!

Everything is different in Egypt. From the food to the people to the dress to (obviously) the religion. And we were thrown right in. The call to prayer was absolutely amazing, as the Muslim prayer comes over the loudspeaker you see an entire culture come to a pause. Seeing the women with covered hair was also fascinating. Brooke and I were blown away about how every woman covered her hair, but we realized that they would feel the same weirdness in the United States, seeing so much opposed hair.

We boarded our cruise boat in Aswan. It was really cute, like a giant ferry boat but nicer. It had a pool and deck on the top where we spent most of our time. We were by far the youngest people on the trip as most traveling were older couples or families. They were also a majority of Germans, and almost everyone else was at least European. We spent the first day lounging by the pool (I was sunburnt in two seconds) and enjoying the sun that has been deprived of us so long in Luxembourg.

Ok, I don't want these entries to get too long, so I'll talk about our cruise in the next entry!