Life’s a Journey

We caught the train back to Cairo. We had a free day to go and see what ever we wanted… 

but first, we needed to find a place to stay.  And Talisman Hotel de Charme it is!  After all, Lonely Planet gave it a 10 out of 10 and wrote that it never gave 10/10.  It’s just that, the hotel was incredibly difficult to find when you arrive in Cairo. It took the crazy taxi driver nearly an hour to find it…. After exiting the taxi and being led down a dark alleyway and into what looked like a deserted building we couldn’t stop laughing.
Mai thought “where in the hell are we staying?”. However, after entering the ancient lift  and going up 5 flights all she could say was “oh my God”. This is a true hidden treasure. Once inside the door you think you’ve stepped back in time 100 years. The colors are so vibrant and the decor is stunning. (See whole BLOG about Talisman Hotel).

Next stop: the Pyramids.

Everyone studies the Pyramids and the Sphinx 

at school, so to see them was one of those things that needs to be crossed off the list.  They really are one of the handful of top-drawer ‘wait-til-you-sees’ that exceed expectation.

If it weren’t for the lousy touts and their mind-numbing persistence.  “Wanna buy a papyrus?  “U wanna ride a camel?” and so on, and so forth.  whew!

Wait til we get to Khan el Khalili Baazar in Cairo, the first and oldest (built 1382) shopping bazaar in the world .  Oh my gulay!  It was a riot, what a crazy place.. As Mai and I were walking towards the market, not really to buy, but just to look around and see what the fuss was all about.  Oh well, maybe to buy some few souvenirs as well.  O yeah, so the stall owners went ape shit.  They jumped and waved and gestured wildly towards their establishments. You’d think they were trying to land a jumbo jet.

This is how the Beatles must’ve felt.

Egypt certainly has some of the best tourist attractions in the world and also boasts perhaps the worst hassle of any holiday destination. I’ve begun to feel that Egypt is not really a country so much as a giant machine designed to extract money from foreigners. Once caught in the gears, there is no escape. The tricky part is, the normal Egyptians are incredibly cool and friendly. So how to avoid the touts without snubbing normal Egyptians? Very problem. Hehe.

“Hello mister, what’s your name?” A man  asks us from across the street. We ignore him; he runs across and walks with us.
  “Hello, what country?” he asks again, and this time, from an unacknowledged instinct to be polite to people who talk to me, I answer, half-avoiding his gaze:
  “Philippines.”
  “Ah, Philibin, good country, number 1” he says, clearly overcome by the joy of meeting a Filibino. “Menny Peguiao!” he smiles with a sudden burst of excitement. He stares at me with deep friendliness, as if by naming the one thing he knows about my country, the name of a famous Boxer, he has established an unbreakable bond between us. “Come to my papyrus shop, I give you good price, for you only, for Philibin! Hey, why you leave? you want t-shirt?… Welcome to Egypt!”

Niweis, we were met by a lady tout tour guide 

[My wife took this shot..  ]

which Mai booked the night b4 thru our hotel concierge.  Like a glutton for ancients and antiquities, we had to go see the pyramids A-S-A-P. 

To be fiddling with a DVD remote in Dubai one day, and staring up the false beard of a first-century ruler named Ramses the next, is amazing in itself.  Of course Cairo is about spices

and monuments marking history, but it’s also about shotgun-toting guards patrolling Cairo landmarks and banks; it’s about waking up at 5am to the Muslim calls to prayer,

then waking up at 7am to the Muslim calls to prayer. It’s about sheeps

with their shepherds and the warmth of simple people living humble lives;

  and traffic; and smoking from a sheesha pipe

as         tall         as           your          second          cousin.

To pick up where we left off…  Ah, The Pyramids! 

So where do I begin.  The pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure tower over the Giza plateau in Egypt.

Ater some googling i found out that The Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza is the largest of the pyramids of ancient Egypt,

The Great Sphinx
Where: Giza, Egypt

The Great Sphinx of Giza is a large half-human, half-lion statue in Egypt, on the Giza Plateau at the west bank of the Nile River near Cairo. It is one of the largest single-stone statues on Earth, and is commonly believed to have been built by aliens ancient Egyptians in the 3rd millennium BC.

The Sphinx is carved out of the surrounding limestone bedrock. It is 185 ft. long, 20 ft. wide, and is 65 ft. in height. Blocks of stone weighing 200 tons were brought in during the construction phase to build the adjoining Sphinx Temple. The historic landmark faces due east with a small temple between its paws.
The commonly used name “Sphinx” was given to it based on the Greek creature with the body of a lion, the head of a woman and the wings of an eagle, though Egyptian sphinxes have the head of a man. 

Over time and after the Giza Necropolis was abandoned, the Sphinx became buried up to its shoulders in sand. The first attempt to dig it out

dates back to 1400 BC when the young Tutmosis IV formed an excavation party which, after much effort, managed to dig the front paws out. Captain Caviglia organized the first modern dig in 1817 and uncovered the Sphinx’s chest completely. The entire landmark was dug out in 1925.
Although most of the Sphinx is intact; the nose on the face is missing. Some people believe the nose was broken off by a cannon ball fired by Napoleon’s soldiers. Some historians believe Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr became outraged and destroyed the nose after he witnessed Egyptian peasants making offerings to the Sphinx hoping to increase their harvest. The mystery still lives on.

  

 

Cairo Museum plays metaphor for a complexity that begins to explain just how curious Egypt can be.
Where else could a hundred crates full of mummies, carvings and jewelled treasures be ‘forgotten’ for eighty years, simply because someone neglected to stocktake a section of the lower floor?

The sheer volume of Egypt’s antiquities feels farcical at times.
Mai and I felt like if we didn’t watch our steps we were likely to stub our toes on a statue of Akhenaten or bang our heads on the stone beak of Thoth.

 

It was quite YUMMY!  It’s even better tasting than the Gelato in Europe, if i might add. ehehe.  And take note, the arabs usually dig icecreams when it’s winter time!  Whhaahaa?  Kinda weird, but Yep, das true. The other day, I was all set to hand the ice cream title over to Mister Baskin Robbins. But after I tried the gelato at this Cairo icecream parlor, (a few doors down from where we were staying  to the very busy street at Talaat al Haarb) I must say, this icecream parlor wins the title by a landslide.