Cairo, Day 1

Egypt was so amazing, it really sparked my interest in Egyptology. I had always been intrigued by the culture of Ancient Egypt, but after having seen and learned so much in the past 5 days—I am yearning to learn and read more about all things Egyptian!

We got off the boat at around 9:30ish, it took them a while to stamp everyone’s passports, and we passed through security in the port passenger terminal (which was VERY nice and new) and proceeded to the 4 bright yellow and blue buses that transported us to CAIRO. It was a 3-hour trip through mostly desert. I woke up that morning with a really intense stomach ache so I wasn’t feeling too hot on the way there, and was also a little car sick—but the bus ride was very interesting. Our guide was named Abir, and she is 43 originally from Alexandria but her family moved to Cairo and she lives on the outskirts with her husband and 5 year old son in this residential compound, where most affluent people live—most of the compounds have schools, country clubs, some stores, and are kind of desert oases. On the way into Cairo we passed all these small trucks carrying a various kinds of produce. In Egypt we discovered people honk all the time, and there is actually a sort of honking language. You use the horn to signal changing lanes, nudging cars on the road that are going too slow, telling people they are drifting into your line (seriously, line markers are taken to be a VERY loose guide on where people should drive), and so on. Our bus driver Muhammad was ALWAYS laying on the horn. We saw lots of thatched mud brick huts that were in the shade of looming tall billboards, it was sad to see modernity and destitution so close together. For the most part the ride into the city was completely desert terrain with a few hamlets of green land and very few trees. Once we reached the outskirts of Cairo we started passing the residential areas and compounds, but I noticed that most of the houses looked the same, with a Mediterranean style to them. We also passed some very new modern looking shopping malls, and one of them was totally devoted to the home, interesting. Abir also pointed out a new very modern business center that they have nicknamed a “smart center,” where the prime minister of Egypt has actually moved his office to, out of Cairo, so we passed his office building. Once we got into Cairo the traffic got 10 times worse. The local bus transportation were these small white vans that had 4 rows with probably 3 people in a row and were SO tiny and cramped, it was funny to see them zipping through the traffic. We had lunch at the Meridien Pyramids Hotel, and as we walked into the hotel were serenaded by a traditional Egyptian band playing Christmas carols…Lunch was pretty good, we had some Egyptian dishes:

After lunch we drive about 20 minutes to Memphis, which is 18 miles southeast of Cairo. It was the 1st capital of unified Egypt, and was founded in 3100 BC by King Narmer. We went to a museum, and saw a bunch of old monuments, and sphinx. My favorite was a huge limestone statue of Ramesses II, its on its side with a building built around it and 2 stories of balconies that you can walk around to get views of it from all side. The statue was probably 75 ft tall, and very detailed. You can see a very detailed dagger that’s at his waist, and his facial features are very distinct. After that we went outside to a garden that had more statues, mostly of Ramesses II, and we also got a glimpse of our 1st sphinx, made of alabaster. After getting haggled by some Egyptians to buy their carvings, papyrus, and scarabs, we retreated back to the air conditioning of the bus and headed to Saqqara.

It was a short drive to the entrance of Saqqara, which is basically the Sahara desert. Saqqara is best known for being the site of the earliest stone pyramid constructed in Egypt, the Step Pyramid of Djoser. Our first stop was going inside the tomb (or Mastaba, as the Ancient Egyptians called them) of Mereruka was the vizier to Teti, who was pharaoh during the VI Dynasty. We weren’t allowed to bring cameras into the tomb, and it was SCORCHING hot inside too, but it was cool to see all the scenes carved into the wall. They depict vivid scenes of fishing, hunting, metalworking (featuring dwarfs..that was interesting), and children playing. Some of murals still had the original colors on them, it was amazing to see. We into 5 rooms total and in each our guide would explain to us what was going on in the artwork on the walls. The last room we saw was where Mereuka and his wife and son were buried, but grave robbers robbed the treasures and their bodies in antiquity.

Next we went to visit the Step Pyramid of Djoser which was built in te 3rd Dynasty for the pharaoh Djoser by his architect Imhotep, it is 197 ft tall. We walked through a gate and then through long passage flanked by columns and then once we passed that we turned right and there was a vast space, that was once the Heb-Sed court and the pyramid was beyond that. After we took pictures of the pyramid, we walked up to a look out and could see the pyramids of Giza across the Sahara, and we could also see excavations of other mastabas that were in the process of being unearthed.

On our bus ride back to Cairo to check into our hotel, Abir told us about the agricultural villages that are on the outskirts of Cairo, and told us that some Egyptian movie stars buy plots of land that are sandwiched by the farmers, because the land is cheap and they build really nice large homes, she pointed some of them out to us, I thought it was pretty weird—but I guess Cairo is so polluted that most people would rather live outside of the city. The Cairo Marriot is the largest hotel in Cairo and was built around a palace built by Khedive Isma’il to give the French Empress Euguenie a place to stay during her visit for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The hotel was ENORMOUS, and so so nice. It had 12 restaurants, and lots of shops, a place called “Funtasia” that was a play park for kids that had merry-go-rounds, jump castles, slip-n-slides, arcade games, popcorn, snacks, etc, it was pretty wild. There was also a huge open space with a garden and a patio area, a large pool, and an open-air movie theater on top of the hotel. Lauren and I switched with our room mates so we could room together and we had a large corner room that over looked the Nile and was on the 7th floor. We relaxed for a while and explored the hotel before we had dinner in a dining room that was actually the ballroom of the old palace, it was ornately decorated and at the front of the room was this huge wide staircase that I’m sure was used when the palace was still inhabited. After dinner we were all really tired and exhausted from our long day so we went upstairs and went to bed, anticipating our 4:00 AM wake up call the next morning to go watch the sun rise over the pyramids!