In an attempt to try and better understand and capture my experiences in Egypt, I’ve decided to write up my experiences at length. This may or may not turn out to be interesting or helpful, but if nothing else it will provide a record of my activities to look back on. What follows is “day 1.” Hopefully days 2 and 3 will follow in the near future, but I do not know when.

The one problem with “weekend trips” is that they invariably involve traveling at some ridiculous hour of the night. Our flight to Cairo left at 11:40 pm, putting us into Egypt at like 3:00 in the morning. To add to the confusion, we unknowingly arrived on the night that daylight savings time ends in Egypt, so nobody knew exactly what time it was. It turns out that Egypt is usually one hour ahead of Hungary, but for a few months they are on the same time since Hungary hasn’t “fallen back” yet. I suppose it was indicative of what was to come that as soon as we passed through customs we were approached by official looking people trying to offer us hostels and taxis. They really try to hook tourists early. At least two of the people in our group were told, independently, that they had “Egyptian looking faces,” for instance. Since I don’t think that blond hair is a traditional Egyptian trait, I think they were going for gullible instead. Luckily our hostel was awesome, and not only did they put up with a bunch of exhausted, adrenaline-fueled Americans, they were there to meet us at the airport at three in the morning. That’s service for eight dollars a night!

The hostel also provided a free shuttle to the Pyramids. We had originally been planning to go on Saturday, but during the trip to the hostel the driver convinced us that Friday would be less crowded. It was 4:00 am, so we just smiled and nodded and agreed to meet five hours later to embark for Giza.

Even trying to recount the trip as it happened, it’s really hard to describe how overwhelming Cairo was. It’s so huge, so chaotic, and so radically different from anything else I have ever seen. I guess I had naively assumed that since Egypt is so touristy, Cairo would be just like any big European city, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The racial and religious makeup made us very visibly outsiders, and the relative poverty of most Egyptians was occasionally striking. Giza is on the outskirts of Cairo, so we a saw a lot of the city on the drive. The high rises and luxury hotels of the downtown gave way to rows of crumbling apartment buildings broken by the occasional mosque. Towards Giza we even shared the road with a few donkey carts that looked like they hadn’t changed much in the last few millennia. I’m trying not to draw any grand conclusions from a three-day trip, but visiting Cairo was a powerful experience and I’m still trying to sort out my reaction to it.

I know it was the most predictable part of the trip, but seeing the Pyramids was still pretty much the coolest thing in the world. The hostel set us up with a tour guide that took us out on camels. We were undoubtedly supposed to haggle more than we did, so I’m sure we were ripped off, but I think everybody was having too much fun to notice. Our first stop was the Sphinx, which was a lot smaller than pictures had led me to believe. They have it set up so that you enter through the temple at the base of the statue and then go up a hill next to the Sphinx. The whole area was swarming with peddlers trying to sell us things. They technically weren’t allowed inside the walled off area near the monument (where we had to pay admission), but that didn’t deter them from conducting transactions under the fence around the complex. Every so often we would also little kids crawl under the fence to sell trinkets, only to be chased off by police officers. Almost all of the goods on offer were touristy junk (plastic pyramids, fake statues, etc.), but I did cave in and buy some ridiculously overpriced water to help fend off the desert heat.

After the Sphinx, we headed up to the Pyramids. They have one pyramid open to tourists at a time, and on Friday it was the Pyramid of Khafre, the second of the three great Pyramids. It’s cool to have been in a pyramid, but there’s really not that much inside. You have to walk bent-double down this tiny tunnel, which eventually opens up into a rather empty chamber. There was an empty stone sarcophagus, but everything else had been looted or carried off to a museum long ago. There was some graffiti (or a message of some sort) dated 1813, which was kind of cool to see. The Pyramids were still unbelievably ancient decades before the civil war. Anyhow, we next rode up a nearby hill for a photo op and then headed back towards town.

The afternoon and evening consisted of eating, napping, and wandering around downtown. A few people in our group had some friends studying abroad in Cario, so we met up with them for a while and just generally hung out.

The most interesting experience of the night came when a few of us were walking around some of the shops near the hostel. We were approached by a couple of Egyptian guys who started talking with us in English. That would not be a particularly notable occurrence, except that they did not appear to be trying to sell us anything or to heckle the women in our group. Instead they talked about the need to improve Egyptian/American relations and invited to go a cafe for a while. The whole thing seemed pretty sketchy to me, especially when the aforementioned cafe ended up being down an alley, but things ended up turning out all right. The cafe was an outdoor affair patronized almost entirely by locals. We sipped mango juice and tea while our “host” told us an elaborate story about how he had lived in Japan for several years and traveled throughout Europe and to the United States. It was probably mostly made up, but I can’t complain too much since we told him that we were Hungarian!

Anyway, it ended up being a fun evening, and the mango juice was pretty delicious. I felt a bit awkward because I never knew whom to trust. We met a lot of very nice people in Egypt, but we could have very easily been taken advantage of. Cairo is the only place I’ve been where it was immediately obvious that I was a foreign tourist, and I was pretty much completely reliant on the goodwill of others. It definitely makes me appreciate Budapest – I may not know the language, but I can pass for Hungarian if I just keep my mouth shut.

To be continued…