Egypt Post 1

One problem that I have is that I tend not to do anything if I can't do it perfectly. That's how my room is generally a mess because I spent the day I set aside to clean it doing something totally insignificant. I don't care how clean the room appears; if your sweater dresses are not organized by hex code, it is all a lie.

It is also the reason that most of the trips I've taken remain un-blogged.

A big part of the problem is that I would really like to make a map of the whole trip, as well as each leg of the trip. But I need a map that:
- shows the places I visited
- shows the paths between places
- doesn't give so much information as to be unreadable (basically, I want all the major cities and famous places, and any non-main places I visited, and nothing else).

What I really want is a webpage that can generate that based on my itinerary. But, since I don't have that, take out an atlas and follow along:

20/12 - fly from Moscow to Hurghada
21/12 - leave really early in the morning, tourist van to Luxor, board boat
22/12 - boat to Edfu, Kom Ombo
23/12 - boat to Aswan, side trip to Abu Simbel
24/12 - Aswan, catch night train to Cairo
25/12 - Cairo
26/12 - was supposed to be Alexandria, but I got sick
27/12 - 03/01 - Hurghada

So, in the interest of getting over my stupid perfectionism, I'm going to do this in chronological order and just write and post pictures until I have to stop for the day.

December 20 - Hurghada

I'll come back to this later, because at this point Hurghada was just a place to stay before going to Luxor. But, in short, Hurghada is on the Red Sea and 80% of its tourists are Russian. It's sort of a less-rich man's Sharm el-Sheikh.

Hurghada has an international airport that doesn't really handle its tourists well at all. First, you buy a visa. This is no big deal. But then you wait in not-line for about an hour to get your passport stamped. I think I'm claustrophobic about people because waiting in not-line does bad things to my heart rate.* In the future, I need to make sure to:
1. warn people I'm travelling with about this.
2. stand in the line that's next to the wall, no matter how much longer it is.
3. bring more suitcases so as to make a little fortress around myself.

Anyway, once that was done, we were shuttled to the resort and told that we'd be leaving for Luxor at 5:30 am the next day. I didn't really have time to get an impression of the resort, except that the buffet was really good and there seemed to be mosquitoes.

December 21 - Luxor
Luxor day was a very, very tiring day. First off, we were picked up at 6 am. It turns out that they adjust times for Russian tourists, which is probably a good idea. It takes about four hours to drive from Hurghada to Luxor. Most of this is through the desert. We stopped briefly at a cafeteria where it seemed like all the tour buses stopped. Lots of people were standing around wearing old-fashioned clothes and tending goats and camels and charging tourists for pictures:

At some point I decided I was totally cool with being a stereotypical tourist.

Andrey bought a hat from a vendor. He negotiated the price down from 400 Egyptian pounds (about $80) to 50 ($10). I really hate negotiating, so I was impressed. The vendor congratulated me on my new president.

It's immediately obvious when you are approaching the Nile because everything turns green and habitable. I'd like to say that the desert has its own beauty, and I'm sure that I will say that in a later entry, but I really wasn't feeling that on Luxor day.

As for the city of Luxor, I can't say much because we just drove through there on our way to different tourist attractions. What I could see looked very agricultural, with no offices or shops, but it's entirely possible that we just never drove through the commercial district. I saw a lot of apartment buildings being built up while people had already moved into the lower floors. I am guessing it's due to a housing shortage, stopped construction projects, or both. I wish I had asked the tour guide about it. I didn't because I thought it was a rude question, and it probably is. It took me a couple days to realize that answering tourists' rude questions is the tour guide's job.

All the women I saw walking around were mostly dressed in black, totally covered up except for their faces. This blog tells me that this is either a Khimar or a Chador. I was surprised and a little bit worried. I wasn't prepared for it to be quite that conservative.

[Marin takes a couple hours getting lost reading someone else's blog].

So, as I was saying, I didn't get much of an impression of the city because I didn't spend any time there. The tourist attractions were more than enough for one day. But they will have to wait for the next blog entry, because I have work tomorrow.

* It depends on how tall the people around are. If they're around my height, I'm fine. If they're taller (or I'm sitting down), it really bothers me. In this case, a flight from Switzerland got in at the same time as ours.

To the left!

New president! Hooray!

Apparently people all over the world are celebrating, which I find...distressing. As in, I like Obama and I think he'll do a good job, but I feel like a lot of the enthusiasm from other countries isn't because they think he'll do a good job, but because they think he can't possibly be worse than the last president. I agree with that, but it makes me sad about how the last eight years have been spent.

Well, I think that's true of Europe, anyway. People I met in Egypt didn't talk about politics but were excited that America was going to have a Black president, or they didn't mention it at all (I suspect that there are some serious racial issues going on in Egypt, and I won't pretend to understand them, but it was pretty easy to predict who was going to talk about Obama and who wasn't).

Russians mostly know not to talk about politics with me because a) from a professional standpoint, I can't, and b) they have no room to talk, and, to be fair, I'm not sure they discuss politics with each other. I think they are mostly happy that George W. Bush is gone but also worried about the economy.

But occasionally you come across nutjobby Russians who think that Nostradamus predicted that the last president of the US would be Black and that therefore the US will collapse soon. Do you have these people in America too? The best way to deal with this is to just accept the prophecy and point out that there could be Black presidents after Obama. This really bothers them because a) they were all prepared for you to argue with them about the validity of Nostradamus' prophecies, b) they are most likely racist, whether they know it or not, and c) they really can't argue with that. I have been having fun with this.