Egypt:, Day One and Two

This is the start of the Egypt Blogs...im going to put them in a couple days at a time so its easier to read.....not quite done, but that is a goal to reach before I leave for Barcelona on Tuesday. Enjoy. I apologize in advance for all of the typos that may be found in here....i dont really have time at this point to re-read everything...sorry mom.

Day 1: Well I guess the best place to start is day one: the airport. As you all probably read in my last blog I thought we were leaving on Friday….turns out we left Thursday….I found this out Tuesday night haha….After I told my mom this she said it’s a good thing you travel with people or else you would end up nowhere haha. Anyway, it all turned out ok…it just meant I needed to actually pack before Thursday…which successfully happened. We flew out of Bilbao Thursday to Barcelona….had a lovely 19 hour layover in the Barcelona airport….I use lovely VERY loosely. We only had one bench that was comfortable enough to sleep on…so we switched on and off. While we were staying the night in the airport there was this middle aged homeless man that was trying to sleep near us. I think he suffered from some mental illnesses from the way he was acting…so in the morning when he was still asleep on the other side of this small café area, Joy and I bought him breakfast and wrote a little note that said have a good day and Jesus loves you. He didn’t end up eating the breakfast but he read the note and then left. Then Friday morning we flew from Barcelona to Prague and then from Prague to Cairo. We arrived in Cairo at about 230am Saturday morning.

We stepped off the plane, got our luggage and went to go find a taxi. This was quite the experience considering the language barrier totally took place here. After a little confusion we finally had this guy lead through the airport to a place where he said taxis where….we were all a little skeptical, but we knew we had to eventually trust someone to lead us in the right direction so we went with it. Once we got to the place where this taxi was we loaded up our luggage as the taxi driver tried to figure out where our hostel was from the information we had. He didn’t really understand the address so after asking a few people around the airport, he finally got in and we began to drive. During this drive, I leaned over to Joy and I said This will probably make number one on the list of most uncomfortable times in my life…we wanted to think positively about this situation…but at that time all I could think about was that we were in a Country we had never been in…in a car that was driving quite fast….with someone we don’t know…and also someone we can’t communicate with…at 3:30 in the morning. But now that I look back…we were completely fine, I think it was just a little initial culture shock or something to that degree. After driving around lost for about 45 minutes and asking about every police man we saw for directions to our hostel, our taxi driver finally got us there. We checked in and then went to bed.


Day 2: First day in Cairo: We got up, got ready for the day, and then decided to just wonder around Cairo and what not. Our hostel was downtown….so we were in a good place to be able to just walk around and explore. Since we had gotten up after breakfast time and had had a dinner the previous night that consisted of airplane food, we decided to look for something to eat first. We knew that we really had to be careful about where to eat because we didn’t know how things would affect our stomachs…and we also did not have a clue where any good food places where….sooo we were lame Americans and ate at McDonalds for our first meal in Egypt. Yes we know, it is pathetic and funny at the same time…but we were so hungry that we really didn’t care. We then walked to the Nile and decided to walk along that. It was soo pretty…we took picture and just stood on a bridge for a while and talked…the weather was perfect, probably around 65-70 degrees. After that we decided to walk on the other side of the river so we crossed the bridge and began walking again. We then saw a sign for a Hard Rock Café that was right on the water so we wanted to see if we could go out on the porch for awhile….turns out we couldn’t get there through the Hard Rock Café, but we went down to the restaurant anyway. We decided we would just go in for drinks and sit and chat for awhile. What we thought would be a half an hour or so turned into a couple of hours….mostly thanks to our AWESOME waiter Sayied. He was absolutely hilarious and after we were there for awhile he started to give a riddles and these little small table games that we had to figure out. It kept us entertained for quite so time. Then the other waiters were seeing that we were laughing and having a good time so they would come over and see what we were doing and such….I think we met most of the staff that night.

Before we left we asked OUR WAITER about this food that we had been told to try called Koshery…we wanted to know where would be a good place to get it. He said there was a place called Tom and Basals not far away and that they had really good koshery. He gave us directions ….well “directions”….we took pictures with him, and then we left. Finding this place wasn’t the easiest thing to do, but after asking a few more people we finally made it. We ordered to go and then headed back to the hostel so we could plan our Jordan trip with the help of the people at the Hostel. The Koshery was amazing. It is this mixed dish that contains rice, paste, lentils, Garbanzo beans, caramelized onions, and a marinara sauce. They also gave you two different kinds of spicy sauce to put on it too. Not only was this food realllly good, but it was realllly cheap. With converting from Egyptian pounds to dollars, it cost us less than a dollar….and it was a very filling meal. Let’s just say, this was definitely not the last time we ate this. We then talked to Hisann (one of the main workers at the hostel) about going to Jordan for the next couple of days. He told us that we could take a 6 hour bus ride to Nueva, a small town close to border that has a port that we would go to too take a fairy to the Jordan boarder. We got it all planned out and set our alarms very early to get up and catch the 7oclock bus.