Grand Pyramids Cairo

... night to Amman. I could be on that plane tomorrow if I wanted, paid c.c. I’m back in business. Lebanon visa is available at the airport, Lebanon apparently resuming its earlier free-wheeling ways. So this deal is almost done, the only question a matter of when, not if. The Cairo International Film Festival just started yesterday and runs ten days, so I may stay for that. I just discovered Jazeera Airways out of Kuwait, also, so that may spice ...

... day.<br><br>We intended on walking to the Cairo Tower downtown, but because of our new location, have to travel by taxi both ways. Cairo Tower opened in 1960 and was completely redone and reopened in March 2009. It is Cairo's tallest building and the views from it are quite picturesque on a clear day. However, the winds are gusting and the sand is blowing in the distance, obscuring the view of the pyramids but we do manage to see ...

... girl behind me that kept hyperventilating. It was funny. The place smelled like bleach and urine. I'm not sure which one came first.<br><br>The interior of the tombs were so well preserved as to be almost criminally enjoyable. Just as art, not as "artifact."<br><br>There. Blogger's Block be gone.

... gold and jewel encrusted chair, gold bed, jeweled belt, gold door knobs, gold games, gold sandals, suspect King Tut could have easily been mistaken for modern day Elizabeth Taylor drag queen. <br>Later that night we travel to our hotel near Mount Sinai which we proceed to climb at 2.30am so that we can reach the summit for sunrise. This is where Moses was given the ten commandments and saw the burning bush. Got to hand it to Moses ...

... bringing up the Nile. It has since become the worlds largest Goodwill, and you can read about it in my previous entry. After a couple of hours there, that included a successful venture to find some nice, cheap, woven Egyptian cotton goods, my mom and brother were pretty tired and overwhelmed by the constant loud, noisy crowds. After trying to navigate with them around a massive street fight that was brewing, I was too. We went to a good little ...

... right next to the pyramids. We could see the pyramids from the highway. I was totally speechless when I first saw them. They are so massive, yet really hard to believe they are real. It blows your mind to think about how old they are and how they could have created such things back then. We had to wait in line for about 20 minutes to get our tickets because they weren't open yet. The idea of lines don't really exist here in Cairo. People were sticking there hands under ...

... where we had a purpose (biking and excercise), though I guess in some ways it wasn't all that different. But perhaps it was, the main difference being that in China we were outsiders rarely seen in those parts...in the Nubian village we were tourists from our swanky hotels across the river taken on a tear jerker walk. There was no attempt to interact or to actually learn about the people living in the place. Their poverty was simply on display for our ...

... Watching the media, I thought perhaps they might be interested in an American perspective on the speech. So I stood trying to make myself look as interesting and intelligent as possible, but to no avail. Then a young woman approached me. She worked for the American University in Cairo's newspaper; it wasn't the New York Times, but at least she cared about what I had to say. Finally, I myself made my exit, pushed through the small Gaza protest that had formed outside (only seven ...