Finally being the tourist everyone assumes I am

Two weeks in Egypt, and I finally get to some sightseeing. Right now just adjusting to life here is giving me enough stimulation, but there was a long weekend this past week, so I took some time to look around. Not a holiday for Easter mind you, but for the Prophet's birthday. Had Thursday (which is effectively "Friday" here) off, and some of my officemates were even nice enough to clue me in on a holiday tradition of eating little snacks on the Prophet's birthday! Many of them had long blue boxes full of little snacks, and offered me a couple. I geeked out and wrote the occasion down on the back of a coaster and photographed it, just in case I forgot why I bothered taking pictures of a little coconut thing (the orange thing on the left) and a peanut-brittle dealy.


Those of you in the States (that'll be 1 out of the total 3 people who read this) may have noticed that I'm trying to use the date format used by most of the rest of the world, with day/month/year. Actually, now that I look at it, I actually wrote "5" instead of "3", and I have no idea why. Maybe I was thinking of my own birthday in May....but then again, my birthday's not on the 20th. What the hell? Anyway, I ate a snack and then went back to staring out the window for a bit. It's weird (for me) but I guess normal in many neighborhoods to be working in a really nice corporate office building overlooking a pretty poor area. It's a nice reminder of why I'm here, and one of the weird juxtapositions that I get to enjoy in countries like this. Behold the corporate shadow blocking the sun from the poor....or maybe shielding the poor from the sun, in a toasty place like this?


Decided to start off my weekend of touristyness by going on a corny dinner cruise, complete with wretched buffet where I was again duped by beef-mimicking liver, a "life band" that consisted of 2 soulless singers and a keyboard player who seemed to want to die, and an even meatier belly dancer than the one at the wedding.


The chain around her belly kinda sunk in when she moved. Mmm mmm good.

On to pyramids. Giza is actually a suburb of Cairo, so the city/suburbs sprawl right up to the three big (and six small) Pyramids at Giza. Kinda weird to see the pyramids looming huge and awe-inspiring the background of some guy peeing on a wall by the car-choked streets. Or a steel lattice tower and some kids playing football/soccer.


And of course, no postcard-worthy photo is complete without being ruined by my buddy Don, or Dontxu, as someone calls him in Basque ;p.

The mystery of why I'll focus a shot on a plastic candy dispenser instead of one of the coolest antiquities in the world:


SarcophaDon

Below is the reason my rear hurt for 2 days after going to Giza. These were the guides (or rather, one non-English-speaking dude and a feisty little kid), who agreed to bring me back to another hill near the pyramids later on that day, to see all three of the big pyramids together. Rode camels and horses this time instead of just horses, and the little kid decided he wanted to race. Guess who was on the hard-galloping camel holding on for dear life while his loins took a county-jail-like pounding. Riding camels is not nearly as cool as it looks; I can't imagine riding into battle on the damned things, unless it was for the purpose of making death-by-sword seem like nothing compared to the pain of the initial camel-charge.

Back to the grind for now. Plan to try and make a crossing-the-insane-streets video at some point, which I'll hopefully be able to make AND survive long enough to post.