The Odyssey (well, Kenny's Odyssey), pt. 2 - Things are still going to plan.

EGYPT! It would be an abomination to truthfulness if I told you that Egypt is different. In fact, it is so way out mind-blowingly different that I will never look at the world the same way having been there. It's an extreme environment where every person you meet wants to shiste (the word of the country) your money away from you at every turn. It's always, "gimme that money and see what I make for you!" or "come to my shop! I make you tea and special deal!" Everyone will offer you a business card (which, ofcourse, is inside the shop but is never produced). If you make the mistake of engaging in ANY conversation with ANYONE on the street, you find yourself having tea with some random Egyptian INSIDE his shop (who hussled you in there by faking to give directions) and at some point during the exchange you find that he has the impression that you want to buy thousands of Egyptian pounds' (divide by 6?..or is it 5?..8?) worth of smelly oils. True story.

There are traffic laws and paint on the roads for crosswalks and lanes, but you would never guess that. Cars drive where they fit and crosswalks are wherever you get the courage to jump out in traffic and PRAY TO GOD that the derelicts speeding toward you will dodge around. And if fifteen seconds pass without hearing someone's horn, you have just witnessed history.

Every building is filthy and the streets are filled with rubble (actual pieces of building that look like they got bombed off of there), garbage and MILLIONS of feral cats.

That sign has a totally different effect on me now that I see it again. See, the entire time we were there, every so often somebody would ask where we were from. After we replied, they would respond: "Welcome to Egypt." But the tone of it was never right. It sounded foreboding and intimidating, every time. Kinda like you hear in the movies when some evil villain welcomes the captured protagonist into his lair.

We found a sky bridge right at the airport. Oh, and it was business as usual with the eccentric travel itineraries. This flight arrived in Cairo at about 1AM.

We stayed our first night at a hotel which we booked through some scamming agency who operated their racket right out of the airport. Even though I'm pretty sure we were shisted, it was still quite cheap. Although, it was quite shady as well...

It was localized on the 6th floor of some building downtown.

The entry was dripping with class.

I gotta say it again: HOLY CRAP is Egypt a strange place. We spent our first day just walking around in Cairo. The things we encountered:

An entire neighborhood where EVERY shop sold breakers for electrical distribution panels...

A market selling miscellaneous car parts. Run of the mill stuff--you know, fuzzy dice, stereo equipment, novelty horns, police sirens. Oh, and an entire engine and a CAMEL. Maybe it's a package deal.

Do you see that?! Who wakes up, thinks to themselves, "I'll just walk down to the market and pick up AN ENTIRE ENGINE AND A CAMEL?" Egyptians. That's who. Funny thing is, they were staring at me like I was the one off his rocker for taking so many pictures of this scene.

Another themed neighborhood. The theme for this one was alarmingly extensive displays of child-mannequins. There were many many of these stores in the neighborhood. The demand for child-mannequins in Cairo...it's...it's beyond me.

Here's a view of one side of the city.

That tower might be famous. It was on the tourist map... And notice that haze in the air? It sticks to you. I think it's mostly sand and glue.

Here's a view of the other side of the city.

We walked into this area of museums. It was so strange to see everything written in Arabic all the time. Until now, everywhere I've been at least has letters I recognize. It really helped to develop the feeling of being an absolute foreigner. It's a familiar feeling...I've had some amount it since I got to Europe, but I've never felt it so intensely as in Egypt.

A pretty garden, and...is that a nice place in the shade to sit down?

Oh yeah, take a load off. For some perspective: This picture represents everything that we brought along for the trip. Keep that in mind as the trip develops.

Next, we decided to go see some pyramids. While walking down the main drag in Giza (on our way to the pyramids) we encountered a mini-dump with a herd of goats. Now, I can't stress this enough: this is a main thoroughfare. Cars are like six lanes across (in four lanes of space...this is Egypt...) and going at least 40mph. And there are GOATS!

Dirt roads in urban places. And look at the center of the picture at the end of the road between the buildings. PYRAMID!

I think I mentioned before that buildings are generally in disrepair. It's pretty rare to see one with all of its windows.

Mc Donald’s! Every place delivers. That includes Chinese, pizza hut, Mc Donalds...There was no clear pattern.

We finally made it to the Pyramids, only it was too late to get in to see them. Unfortunately, pyramids in Egypt close up real early. So we peeked at them through the gate.

After peeking at the pyramids, we went to a Pizza Hut that was right across the street for a snack. If you look really hard, you can almost see the outline of one of them through the window in this picture.

Here's the pad of our CS host, Nick. He's a teacher on contract from the UK. Unfortunately, I never got a picture of him with us, so this'll have to do. Another interesting aside, he got this apartment pre-decorated...apparently the style is pretty typical Egyptian.

We realized that we came to Egypt and had no idea really what we wanted to do there besides see the pyramids and get on a camel. So, we spent the morning planning things out and, thanks to some epically good advice from Nick, we decided to take a night bus to Dahab.

Since our bus didn't leave until evening, we decided to make another attempt at seeing the pyramids for real. Included: more experience with the Cairo metro system!

It can be a quite colorful place in the middle of the day...

While taxi cabbing to the pyramids, we saw this guy. We were driving down the Egyptian equivalent of a major freeway (limited access, everyone goes as fast as their old Russian beaters will take them). I guess it's no problem to ride a bike down the freeway in Cairo with what looks to be rolled up sheet metal on your bike.

I still think it's quite the novelty to see these 4000 year-old archeological marvels in the distance, just chillin'. Check out the bottom right--an example of the rubble piles that were so common.

Still cracks me up: just some guy, cameling right across a main thoroughfare.

Pyramids! Unfortunately, we were still locked out.

There's that Pizza Hut that we went to the night before. And a tricked-out camel. Nice clips, yo.

After our pyramid failure, some guy helped us bargain for some delicious and cheap snackwiches. See that little kid in the background?

He and his buddy knew just enough English to convince me to take their picture.

We made it to the bus station! Time to study Swedish and wait for that thing to get movin'.

Next stop, Dahab! Actually, there were like thirty stops before there. Toward the end of our nine hour journey, guys kept getting on the bus (dressed in plain clothes, but with guns) to check our passports.

Taken from the bus, I think this is one of the better pictures to illustrate the chaos of Cairo traffic.

So we get there, and...what's this? A beautiful beach resort! See that dog? He was our best friend after we gave him a piece of paper that some treats were wrapped in. We named him Ped.

Not to mention a glorious sunrise over the Red Sea, Saudi in the distance.

Look at this place!

Time to lounge around for a bit and soak up some rays. Can you believe this place?!

Checkin' out the menu for something to sip on, I noticed stuffed pigeon on the menu. I wonder what "Frick" is...

A kitty came to visit. What a great place to be a cat...

Hey kitty!

Heh.

Lunch time! Delicious and unreasonably cheap. But that's not even the best part.

BAM! Check out that venue! Dahab, baby!

It's actually a bit rough around the edges. I think there was a terrorist attack there some time ago and they're having a bit of a time bouncing back.

Tyler wanted to go for a dusk snorkel once we learned that the Red Sea is like the premier place for scuba-ing and the like. I thought it high time to post up on a lounge chair and watch the light fade over that sea...my toe was still pretty gruesome and painful from the Finnish trip.

I set up to write some postcards and enjoy a cappuccino on the beach.

Not a bad compromise, in my opinion.

After, we went to a place for some shisha and Bedouin tea.

Dinner time! Probably our best anti-shiste of Egypt. We talked the guys down to 90 Egyptian pounds ($15) for a fantastic, three course seafood dinner.

The main course. Check out that onion-candle, right on the plate.

I forgot to take a picture of dessert...it took a long time to arrive, and by the time it did we were worried about missing our bus to Mt. Sinai to see the sunrise. Actually, "bus" is something of a loose term in Egypt.

There were like fifteen of us in that little tiny thing. We thought we might get some sleep before our 1AM climb, but there really wasn't much room.

The way the scheduling worked out, we had to be up and down Mt. Sinai pretty quickly. We had a bus back to Cairo to catch that left St. Catherine (small town near the mountain) at 6AM. One of the trip planners that we talked to in Dahab was certain that we wouldn't make it up and down in time for anything good, but instead we were the first ones to the top of the mountain and the first ones down and we caught our bus. Not bad, if I may say so myself.

We got to the top with enough time to lay down for a bit on top of the chapel up there. That was literally the highest you could get on Mt. Sinai. We rang that bell to let everyone know we won.

On my way down, I encountered this camel parking lot.

The best picture that I managed to take of the sunrise. Tyler got some much better ones...

Quite stunning.

We were actually a bit early for the bus and had to wait.

It was a good thing that bus left so early. We made it back to Cairo in time to get on a camel and see the pyramids for real. That's the camel I got on.

Yep. On a camel. Done.

Touch a pyramid: Done.

A pyramid roll-call. They're quite big and rubble-y once you get close enough.

Job well done.

That night we went to a party with Nick. That's where we first heard about a volcano in Iceland. We were like, uh-oh. I didn't quite believe it at first, or even understand what it could mean for our schedule. It really didn't sound that bad at first, though. It was just a somewhat vague report of some flights in Europe getting canceled.

Saw this place on our way out of Maadi (the suburb of Cairo where we were staying with Nick). The name of it reminded me of Albuquerque.

There's our plane! Almost done with Egypt.

Another intercontinental plane ride with meals! I didn't get to enjoy it fully, though, since we were quite sleep deprived. The last time that we actually slept in a bed was the first night with Nick.

Rome! We had a six hour layover and took that as a challenge to see as much as possible in that amount of time. First stop: Coliseum. It's literally right there to greet you as you come up from the metro.

It's one of the things that I was really glad to see in person. Romans, man. They're pretty nuts.

At this point, we were still not fully aware of the scale of that volcano's influence. We had heard so many conflicting things so we stopped in to this place to see if our flight was still on. From what we could tell, it looked like it would still fly.

Not knowing if we would ever get the chance again, we decided to enjoy pizza in Italy again.

We got a little behind schedule and our layover was almost used up, so we had to take a taxi to the airport (we still thought we would fly and were terrified of missing the plane). I love Italy. A lot of the taxis are racing themed Italian cars (this one was a Fiat Panda...not exactly a race car, but that didn't stop them putting flamboyant red upholstery in there).

Once we found out that our flight was indeed canceled, we began to realize the scale of screwed that we were getting. This was one of the lines of disrupted fly-ers waiting to reschedule. Looks pretty bad at first glance. And even worse, once you realize that the line curves to the right up there in the distance then around that shop. If you look to the far right of the frame, you can see about where the front of the line actually is. Yikes.

Things looked bad. Looks can be deceiving, though. We would learn later that things were actually catastrophic. More on that in the next post...