Egypt - Day 2: Part 1: Giza

Our driver Maghdi picked us up promptly at 8AM. He actually got to the hotel earlier but waited for us to eat breakfast. Breakfast wasn't bad: coffee, cereal, eggs, sausages, yogurt, bread, croissants, juices...


Maghdi says "I'm going to take you four places - Giza, Saqqara, Dashur and Memphis".
We told him we want to ride camels. He said "No problem!" and drive us to the area of staples near the pyramids (about 1 hour). There were a lot of staples there but Maghdi had his contacts. We also told him that we want to go into the great pyramid. He replied "Why? you bend and walk down a long passage and there's nothing there! - we'll go to the one on Dashur, it's part of the ticket, no pay extra".


After some slight haggling, we were on camels with a guide name Hassan and a camel boy name Ali. Hassan is more like a tour guide. Ali leads the camels on foot.
Note: What we should have done with haggling is to do it BEFORE we got on the camels. Also, we should have told them that we'll pay 1/3 of the price he offered, not 1/2.


Riding camel is an experience! They tell you to lean back while it gets on it's legs or sits. That didn't really sink in until my camel first got up and I felt like I was going to fall off. The front legs extends first, then the back legs. So when only two legs are extended, you are sitting on a slant, way off balance. On top of that, camels are pretty tall.


Hassan asked us to give him LE 50 each for admission tickets. While we waited for the tickets, Gim's camel kept trying to wipe its head on my leg. It was pretty gross. It took many attempts before he actually got me... but he got me.


After riding in the desert for a bit, we came to the pyramids. Surprisingly, there weren't that many people in this part of the site. It was fenced off and can only be accessible via camels or horses. A lot of the time, it felt like we were the only ones there. There are also views that you can't get from the other side (where the tour buses would drop people off). I highly recommend doing the camel tour (but of course, haggle and pay less). We told Hassan we want to go into the pyramid. He pretty much gave us the same reply as Maghdi and told us to go to Dashur. There must be a reason why the locals say this...


"You happy? I'm happy." and "High Ho Silver!" are the memorable quotes from Mr. Hassan. He took us to good spots for photos and made us pose. The spots were nice but the poses were mostly corny (above).


The guide books did say that you can't climb the pyramids. There was also a reason why Hassan kept giving all the tourist police around "hand shakes". We both got to climb the Pyramid of Khefre (the 2nd biggest one, with dome on top). These things are MASSIVE! I'm still in awe of how these were built so long ago and are still standing.


To see the Sphinx, we had to cross over to the tourist area. It's not as close to the pyramids as I thought. Hassan's story / description of it was way off. I learned from the audio lectures that this was NOT the "face of man, body of lion, head of woman" that Hassan described it as.
I'm glad I didn't get to see the Pizza Hut and McDonald's near the sphinx I heard so much about. Sad note: dropped my nice Ray Bans in front of the Sphinx (the pair of sunglasses I picked up in Amsterdam 5 years ago).


Mr. Hassan and I in front of the staples after the pyramids. He loves America, especially the money and super especially the tip he shook us down for.


Us in the desert to the pyramids

Check out my picture set on Cairo, Egypt

Egypt - Food: Part 3: Not So Touristy Food

Egypt - Food: Part 3: Not So Touristy Food



Fatta, liver and tagines

more on my food blog...

Food In Egypt - Part 2: Standard Fare et al

More at my food blog: Food In Egypt - Part 2: Standard Fare et al

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.

Egypt - Day 0: Minor Bump

It was way past boarding time and we weren't on the plane yet. The only explanation we got was "there's a security check". After an hour past the departure time, they announced that we're getting vouchers for food and refreshment.



Gim did some numbers and broke the vouchers down to at a delay of at least 2 more hours. We also noticed that the plane that was parked at the gate disappeared - they must do the "security check" away from the gates.
Around 2.5 hours, one $10 voucher that only works at the wok & roll, one long line and a box of disgusting fake Chinese food later, they opened a line to the shuttle. After that line, we got on one of the last shuttles - we decided to wait in the terminal instead of maybe the plane. The shuttle dropped us off in the middle of the airfield, next to our plane. Luggages were sprawled across the tarmac. We were told, 5 at a time, to look for our luggage, "finger it and wave". How hard could looking for 2 black duffle bags be in the dimly lit airfield? We got lucky and saw ours right away.


It wasn't just our flight that was on the tacmac with luggages sprawled out. There was Emirates air. Egyptian Air, Emirates Air... see a trend?

It'll be too easy to end the story here.
When we got on the plane, a middle age Egyptian couple try to scam Gim's seat (At check in, I asked for an aisle seat, Gim the one next to it.)
The wife was occupying 34F (Gim's seat). We triple checked the ticket and told her that she was in the wrong seat (this is the AC bus incident all over again.) She points to her husband who was sitting behind her and he kept insisting that there was a mistake and it was the correct seat. He insist that the airline double booked and they were both printed the same seat number (I mean.. seriously?! at this day and age, I highly doubt computers make mistakes like that.) We asked to see their ticket, they kept pointing in circles. We grabbed steward and the couple finally produced a ticket that was a seat over (both middle, non aisle seats). She got up and moved over. Seating problem over. Nope! They gave an extra effort to make up 3 different stories at 15 minute intervals to get us to give up our seats for non aisle seats that would seat us apart.
They ended up finding seats elsewhere and an elderly couple ended up next to us.

Tech: Wayne's hard drive crashed + Importance of Backup

Wayne has one of these here Lenovo ThinkPads. Which one? I'm not sure. It has a 15 inch screen and doesn't double as a heating pad like my MacBook Pro.
As much as I like to point at his blue screen and laugh while shaking my head once every 2 weeks, THIS IS NOT FUNNY. Like most paranoid tech (or used to be tech) people, I'm sure he constantly saves while typing. OS crashes are recoverable - if he's consistently hitting CTRL + S all the time (who doesn't right?), the most you'll lose is that couple of seconds / minutes of data. A Hard drive crash is another story. Data is a lot harder to recover.
That totally blows. Wayne is the shiny head of this outfit - lots of important data.
Time to upgrade to a Mac or XP (he was using Vista - and IMHO the hardware couldn't handle it).
This episode reminds me of the importance of back up. I should really be backing my data up more often. I do have that extra layer of protection because most of my important stuff sits in a repository somewhere else as well as several iterations across our servers (production, staging, devs, etc.). Even so, there are some files that are localized to this radiator of a laptop of mine.
Maybe it's time I upgrade to OS X Leopard + Time Machine?

TickerHound Gets Reviewed on Mashable!

Financial Q&A Service TickerHound Launches

http://mashable.com/2008/05/01/tickerhound/

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