Week Nine: Skipping over Europe, landing in Africa

It was a shorter week at my internship than usual, because on Wednesday afternoon I flew from London to Cairo! (Meaning I didn’t work on Thursday). I did some more work for Martin about the Gulf Region, and for Andrew regarding the Beijing Olympics. All in all, a very relaxed week in the office. On Tuesday, I actually couldn’t even make it into the office… latent stomach flu from Paris, it turned out. We ate so many things in Paris, I can’t even begin to guess what it could have been. Basically, I spent Tuesday either trying to lay deadly still in bed or making a run for it to the sink… not a fun day. My roommate Jessica was nice enough to buy me some ginger tea bags so I could make tea and I drank about a gallon of it that night. Then I brought in more tea bags to my internship the next day and spent my day sipping ginger tea while doing my tasks… luckily for me, the sickness was gone by the time I landed in Egypt.

Cairo was quite an experience, to say the least! The closest experience I’ve had to Cairo is when I visited Saigon (err… “Ho Chi Minh City”), but even then there are some big differences. The driving there was outrageous… no one bothered to even look in their side view mirrors, roads with two lanes seemed like there were three because cars formed an extra one in between and just straddled the white dotted line. Half the time there weren’t even any lines, just a big space and it was just a big driving free-for-all. Pedestrians… oh wow. I have never seen so many pedestrians come within an inch of their lives so many times before. In Vietnam, yes, it’s quite dangerous too, but most of those vehicles are motorcycles, bicycles, or mopeds, not full on cars like in Cairo that could easily squish them like a bug. The streets are full and crowded most of the day, except for an interval around 4-6 am in the morning. They call New York City the city that never sleeps, but I’ve discovered that there are plenty of cities that never sleep… Cairo being one of them, hands down.

My friend, Yehia, took me to see the Pyramids of Giza the morning after I arrived. He does not like doing tourist stuff, and I guess it’s understandable because he’s lived in Cairo all his life and it’s all normal for him, also because he’s travelled all over the world and somehow developed the idea that most hyped up places are nothing too amazing to him. However, he humored me. For our tour of the pyramids, I rode on a camel and he rode on a horse. My camel was named Moses and every time he sat down, he made me lurch forward and I was clinging on for dear life the whole time. It was a good leg muscle workout though. Worse was when he went into a gallop, and I was bouncing high off his hump and hitting my butt on the way down. All negligible facts, considering I RODE A CAMEL!

Pyramids of Giza

Me and my camel Moses

The Sphinx

View of Cairo from the pyramids

I met a bunch of Yehia’s friends, some of whom are Americans living in Egypt because they are the sons and daughters of American diplomats working in the embassy. We all took a day trip out to the sea (where we, against my wishes, spent our time in a nice looking swimming pool instead… not so logical) and went for a nice dinner. There were so many of us that we actually had to take two cars, Yehia drove one and then he took one of his drivers to drive the other one. On the last night I was there, we also made plans with his friends to take a night time felukka (like a small sail boat) ride down the Nile River, and that was really nice and breezy, not to mention pretty.

Sailing down the Nile River in a felukka

I visited the Khan Al-Khalili, the largest bazaar market in Cairo, where it was crowded and narrow. Vendors shouted a lot of things at me, and I suppose I should be happy I couldn’t understand them because they were calling me Yehia’s wife at certain points, then I would be Daniel’s wife at other points (Daniel is one of Yehia’s friends in Egypt who was with us at the time). I did understand when someone yelled at me in English, “Oh, lucky men!” and I finally realized what they were trying to say to me. It was an interesting experience at the Khan, and it’s not as if I have never been haggled before, so it wasn’t disturbing at all, just entertaining.

Khan Al-Khalili

We also went to Coptic Cairo, which is one of the oldest, if not the oldest part of the city. It is basically the remains of when the Romans were in Cairo and consists of some very old cathedrals (instead of mosques, like the rest of the city). Right outside Coptic Cairo, however, was the oldest mosque in Cairo, which we passed. It took us forever to find the right route to Coptic Cairo and we must have asked directions from at least seven different people on the street. This was one of the many times that we got lost in Cairo… even though Yehia has lived there all his life, his sense of direction is not any better because of it, but rather, it’s the same as it is when he is in San Diego – nonexistent.

Remnants of the Roman influence... the wall

Outside of the hanging cathedral, in Coptic Cairo

The oldest mosque in Cairo

I was fed really well in Cairo, he made sure of it, as always. Between the fabulous food that his cook whipped up for us and the awesome restaurants we went to, I was never left hungry – which may also be a bad thing. I tried a lot of different Egyptian dishes and loved them all. Granted, I’m not hard to please when it comes to food, but I still stick by my story that Egyptian food is delicious. Yehia always says that many Egyptians are overweight/round/fat, and I can see why. Good thing my trip was short… I would probably soon join the ranks of those exact same Egyptians in terms of weight!

What I didn’t like about Egyptian lifestyle is their tendency to be late. Though we did manage to do some really fun activities, before actually getting to do them was the part I will now call waiting-in-the-car-in-front-of-people’s-houses-for-them-to-come-down-almost-an-hour-later-when-they-said-they-were-coming-in-five-minutes. Believe it or not, this happened more than once. Yehia said that his friends usually know better than this and that I came on a bad weekend but later he admitted that Egyptians tend to be very tardy. To which I would like to add on… sometimes they are also flaky and don’t even show up. There was one incident when we waited forever for a girl to come down from her apartment building… only to have her say (after more than half an hour spent on the phone with him, as we’re sitting in front of her building) that she was not coming at all. Verdict: completely unacceptable. We could have done without all the unnecessary waiting this weekend, but if I overlook that, then my trip was quite an amazing one.

The Citadel