Day Seven (Alexandria, Egypt)

Day Seven (Alexandria, Egypt): Egypt was a little different than I pictured in my mind. It is a very poor country and it showed in how they keep up their streets and buildings. There were mounds of trash along the highway and a lot of their buildings were half built. They would start building and run out of money so they would just stop. Our tour guide said a lot of the people would finish the inside of the house and not have enough money to finish the outside so they would leave it as is. There were whole sections in part of Giza that were cardboard shacks. They do have a population of 80 million but just in Cairo, which isn’t very big, their population is 25 million. Since we left Israel late we ended up porting in Alexandria a little later that what was planned. So we were a bit behind schedule when we left for the three hour drive to Cairo. We first went to the Egyptian museum where King Tuts mask and sarcafigi (tomb) is kept. It was so cool to see the gold mask that you see pictures of in shows and books. They didn’t allow cameras in the museum so we don’t have any of the mask…booo. We then headed over to the Pyramids. Unfortunately it was getting late in the afternoon and we only had 20 minutes of light to take in the sights. They were a sight! There were tours that arrived after dark so we were lucky we got them in some light. There were a lot of angry people when we got back to the ship. 10 French people were confined to their rooms because they were staging a protest at the excursions desk when they got back. We got to see the Sphynix after it was dark and only got to really see the outline. We then went to a nice buffet style dinner at the Mecure hotel. Following that we went to a few shops. I got a cartouch that has my name engraved using the Egyptian alphabet (hieroglyphics). The “cartouch”(car-toosh) is a symbol for eternal life. We also got four different paints on Papyrus paper. They are really nice and we got a great deal on them. We then had a long drive back to the ship and we think the bus driver was a little lost. We were all so nervous because we were about 30 minutes past the time we were supposed to depart but we knew the ship wouldn’t leave without a whole bus of people. Come to find out that we were nowhere near the last people aboard. We went to bed around 01:30 and saw people still arriving to board the ship.