Egypt: Part 1

Alright, you've all had plenty of time to focus on the fact that there is one man in Egypt who enjoyed spitting in my face. I have to say that particular event was really the only negative experience that I had on the whole trip, so I'm just gonna forget about it! Anyway, now that the adventure has come to an end and we're back in the states, its time for me to share every last detail about the trip, whether you want to hear it or not! To make things easier and the blog posts shorter, the 2 weeks is broken down into 4 parts: Cairo 1, Luxor, Sharm, and Cairo 2. Enjoy!

Cairo 1.

After several delayed flights and hours of sitting on various airport runways, listening to the air traffic controllers (hilarious), we touched down in the city of Cairo, home to 20 million people. If you can believe it, our 1 checked bag came out of the console first (miracles do happen), and we soon met up with Lynn and hopped in the car, headed for Zamalak. My first observations included, "Wow, I stand out here," and "OMG, driving here is the scariest thing ever!" We arrived at Lynn's apartment in Zamalak, an island in Cairo, and immediately headed down the street to Abu Sid for dinner. Egyptian food is yummy, and since they use a lot of rice, I could eat it! Yay! We met some of Lynn and Keith's friends, smoked some excellent sheesha, and I even made a connection with someone doing disease research at the CDC! Exhausted from our travels, we hit the hay and didn't rise until noon the next day!

We spent most of our first day in Cairo relaxing, watching the Die Hard series, catching up, and trying to recover from the jet lag. A 9 hour difference... Despite a very atypical rain the following day, we grabbed our jackets and ventured off to see the pyramids! Now I expected them to be big, but wow! They're huge! I can't even believe that they were basically built by hand. Incredible! Conveniently, while we were there (perhaps just for me) the rain stopped and most of the clouds cleared. Lucky!
After the pyramids, we went to Lynn's office to check out the incredible view that I had heard so much about. It certainly is incredible! I think I'd enjoy being able to look out my office window and seeing the Nile AND the pyramids! Sweetness! You can't see the pyramids in this pic, but they're off to the left, I promise!
To top off the day, we had dinner at a fancy restaurant with 12 so of Lynn's coworkers and friends that night. Before we left, we had to get out game faces on (see below). Dinner was a great time! Everyone had been absolutely everywhere and had tons of interesting stories. Very nice "old people" as they called themselves. Oh, and I ate duck for the first time, so that was neat too! Quack.
On Sunday, we went to Khan el-Khalili.The Khan is a local market that has been open 7 days a week for something like 200 years. You can get all kinds of goodies there like scarves, sculptures, clothes, shoes, jewelry, even bananas, I guess. What a crazy place! There are zillions of little shops and booths and as you pass each one, you are "greeted" by the owners with a plethora of dumb questions. "How can I help you spend your money," was one of my favorites. Anyway, after heckling for a while, and being followed forever by a guy who wanted us to buy a chess board, we ended up with some pretty sweet things to bring back for others, as well as for ourselves, of course.

That pretty much concludes leg 1 of the trip! Stay tuned...