Egypt - Cairo

Cairo is great! It's a sprawling urban jungle with 11 million people. It is chaotic, noisy, polluted (my eyes hurt from the car fumes), vibrant and stays up late; at any given time, there are at least 15 different interesting stuff to look at.

The pink building is the Egyptian museum. They have so many stuff in there that things look sort of piled on top of each other:

The drivers in Cairo are absolutely crazy. Signal lights are more of a suggestion than a rule and they drive at night without headlights to save gas. We'd be sitting in a cab heading into an intersection; our driver would see another car on the cross street also heading towards this intersection. Rather than doing what a sane person would do and slowing down, both cars actually accelerate, madly honking at each other. Just as they are about to crash, the car that got to the intersection a nano second sooner speeds through and the other car screeches to a halt. It's like playing chicken.

How much we pay for a cab ride is reversely proportionate to how tired we are. Sometimes we just don't have it in us to bargain, so we end up paying $4 for a half an hour cab ride instead of $2. We can live with that.

Giza pyramids were amazing - it's a shame we couldn't stand still to take it all in, because we had to keep moving to avoid getting hassled by the touts. The touts in Egypt are the most persistent I have encountered on this trip. But the worst thing about the touts is that it makes us defensive against everyone, thus fending off genuinely friendly or helpful people.

Bill being lured in by a tout:

This street has numerous beautiful mosques and madrassas (schools) from the 11th century. We had actually told the cab driver to take us to the Egyptian museum but got dropped off here instead. Oh well, we had planned on coming here anyway: