Egypt - Day 1: Cairo

We arranged with our hotel in Cairo, Hotel Longchamps, to pick us up at the airport. I was sure glad to see the driver (his name sounds like Armor All) with the sign when we came out of the gates. He told us that he stood there for 3 hours because no one told him about the delay. I Email them about our delay before the plane took off; maybe they don't check Email often or Armor All wanted to shake us down. Either way, I'm just glad he's there. Armor All works full time at the airport (he showed us his Egypt Air badge) and part time for the hotel as a tour guide / driver. He asked us the the while lines on the road is for in our country, we told him it's for lanes. He replied to that by saying the white lines in his country is for decoration only. I thought he was joking until he made his own lane by squeezing between a bus and another car. Then I noticed that everyone else was doing that. We gave him a full LE 100 (Egyptian Pound; $1 USD to LE 5.5) - LE 60 plus LE 40 tip I guess.

The hotel was located on the island called Zamalek. This is more residential and most of the ex-pats live there. It's less noisy than the hotels in downtown. It's about 5-10 minutes cab ride from downtown, depending on traffic. I highly recommend finding hotels in this area - also highly recommend Hotel Longchamps.

When we got to the hotel, we told them to get us a driver to bring us to the Giza Pyramids (this was recommended by the books and Sarah). It end up being LE 180 for the day - 4 sites. Not too bad of a rate. Our driver will pick us up at 8AM. The hotel offers free breakfast buffet.

The original plan for day 1 was to go to the Egyptian Museum that day. But with the delay (arrived at around 1PM), we bumped to day 3. For the rest of day 1, we decided to get the admin stuff out of the way: currency exchange, cigar shop (Cubans!) and check out the Kahn El-Khalili bazaar.

There were 3 currency exchange places around the hotel. We went to the first one. Got pretty good rates $1 USD to LE 5.4. With a wad of Egyptian cash, we set out to explore.

First things first... must feed!

We came across a bunch of street food stand / holes in walls. We first went to a juice shop (more on this later at the food blog) and got ourselves a cup of sugarcane juice. Then we went to a snack shot and the owner made us "fool" sandwiches and gave me samples of "tamiya" - Egyptian falafel.


After not finding the phantom cigar shop at the Semiramis Intercontinental (b00! no Cubanos while riding camels), we decided to go to Kahn El-Khalili bazaar - one of the biggest and oldest in the world. The taxi dropped us off on the dead side of the street. Found a restaurant called "Gad" and got some grub: stuffed pigeons, mixed grill and salads (more on food blog - of course).


After dinner, we took an underground tunnel to cross the street to the main market area. The tunnel smelled like urine and had a couple of bums in it. We did a quick survey of the market
and decided to come back at the end of the trip to get souvenirs. As we were heading to hail a cab, a guy approached us telling us about the spice store we were in front of. He doesn't work there but wants to give us advice. He said he wasn't going to sell us anything and proceeded to drag us to a perfume store, a clothing store, a jewelery store and a gift shop. He really didn't try to sell us anything, just gave us prices of what we should pay. By the way, his name was Mohammed, nicked named "ola". I think he makes commission if we do buy from these stores. The price he gave was a lot cheaper than what we gathered prior. Mohammed must have been drunk or high because he kept forgetting things and kept mentioning it and even brought us back to the same stores. Well, he ended us buying us sugar cane juices and getting us a cheap cab ride home. Though he did take the cab with us and felt like if we didn't fight him off (in a nice way), he would have came up to our room with us.