.. and everything else!

So we are getting ready to leave Cairo tommorow morning for Luxor and we have survived it so far!

It's a very very intense place. We have moments where we lose patience with it all completley and then moments that restore your faith in it.
On our first full day (yesterday) we went to the Egyptian Museum where Leo met with his contact Sara. She was very helpful to his dissertation and we are meeting her and Andrew tonight for dinner in a restaurant called La Bodega.
She got us into the museum and the Mummy rooms for free - they were quite creepy. A lot of them had full sets of teeth and heads of hair which I'm not sure why but I wasn't expecting. They also had a room of mummifed animals - crocidiles, giant fish, baby baboons! and of course the Tutankamhun 'death mask'. Surreal seeing everything and the museum itself was quite an experience. Thousands of artefacts displayed in thousand year old cabinets in a non air conditioned museum.. very different to what you would expect but they are currently awaiting a new museum. Leo learnt that most people we have spoken to so far are not intereseted in having many artefacts returned as they think they are good advertisements for Egypt when placed in other countries and that they have plenty of things in their museum as it is.. you can see where they are coming from!

Today then we went to the Pyramids at Giza. Another site that was hard to comprehend considering they have been there for 4,500 years and also quite an Egyptian experience with the many touts everywhere! You are warned its bad but you really can't imagine till you're hit with them. The tourist 'police' even look for 'baksheesh'(tips). If people offer to take a photo (with your camera) of both of you - you pay. They follow you around throwing tea towels over your head to protect you from the sun and you have to pay even when you give it back. I literally had to pry a note out of someones hand who kept trying to reach into our bags. It got a bit offputing - it can ruin the whole energy of the place when you can hardly take a photo or concentrate on what you are looking at because if you don't keep moving someone will try and lift you onto a camel!!

We climbed inside the great pyramid then which Leo had warned was quite stuffy and you had to crawl a bit ... he was not exagerrating! I felt so claustrophobic.. we got stuck behind an American tour group and had to pull ourselves up a steep slope (in the dark with a ceiling about 3 feet high) with railings attached with people behind and infront. The woman infront of us kept stopping for breaks which was very irritating. When you finally get up there you can go into the King's chamber which has a stone tomb as well. I have never felt so strange before. The acoustic was undescribable it was so echoey you could barely understand anybody and even when people were silent there was this hum all around you. The energy was just very strong. It was the most central part of the great pyramid which is one of the oldest things in the world - a very surreal feeling.

We got one of the Cairean 'black and white' taxis there and back and managed to get one of the nicest taxi men we have had yet. He charged us half the price of everyone else and didn't pester us at all - very civil and courteous and when we tipped him he seemed genuinley surprised! He restored our faith a bit from some of the other hair raising incidents. Our taxi man this afternoon for example had near death experiences, a yelled fight through his window on a motorway and almost knocked down about ten people.

The heat so far has been much better than we expected. It was breezy at the pyramids! The mornings and evenings are fine its really just the afternoon heat but we are coping much better than we thought and feel just fine so far! We have ate really well in recommended pubs and restaurants so our next challenge is getting this internal flight to Luxor - the time of which they keep changing which does not put me at ease!

We wished to have seen more of Islamic Cairo such as the Citadel and Khan al Khalili but we are def going to do all of that when we return on about 15th July.

Hope everyone is well and you are not all asleep after reading that but it is a good way for me to record everything!

xx