Pyramids of Giza, Memphis, and Sakkara

Trip Start Dec 12, 2006
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Trip End Mar 15, 2007


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Flag of Egypt  ,
Friday, February 16, 2007

I spent most of yesterday on a day tour of the sights around Cairo.

I tried to get a student discount card, but since I had no proof of being a student, they gave me a teacher card, which gets me a discount on the museums as well.

Our cab driver, Farag, took us to the Pyramids where we arranged a camel ride to the pyramids. It cost 130 Egyptian pounds for the camel ride and "admission" into the pyramid area. The camel ride was painful, but it was an experience. Normally, you are supposed to pay 50 pounds to get into the area, but there is an opening in the fence for the camel ride tours, so you are actually paying the local people and not the government.

The Pyramids are very impressive.They are about 4500 years old so even though they are slowly falling apart, it is aging well. The Sphinx which is near the Pyramids of Giza is less impressive. It looks small, but it is interesting that the entire thing is made of a single stone.

The bad thing about the camel ride is that you can't get close to the Sphinx since you haven't really paid for admission. However, I was able to touch the Pyramids...

We went to Sakkara next, which is where a lot of the older and first pyramids were made. Admission was 30 pounds for students/teachers. They look very old and are much smaller than the Pyramids of Giza. Also, most of the area has not been excavated so they might actually find stuff there in the future.

We spent an hour or so at Sakkara and after that went to the Memphis museum, which wasn't too impressive. They had a lot of old statues and other artifacts. The only interesting object was the alabaster Sphinx. Anyhow, the tour ended around 4 p.m.and we went back into the city, where there was tons of traffic and our taxi driver went crazy and started driving down one-way streets in the attempt to avoid sitting in traffic. I must admit he is a bit crazy, but he knows how to drive and knows the streets well. He also started obssessing over an Australian girl in our group and kept on repeating "Life is Delicious" and singing parts of a Lindsay Lohan song about "waiting for the postman to bring a letter"

Very strange, but otherwise a great day.

In the evening, eight of us went to the bazaar where we walked around to see all the vendors and products the people sold. We didn't spend a lot of time and just headed back to the guesthouse.
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