Egypt, revisted (day one)

I found myself thinking about Egypt today and remember that I never really wrote about our travels outside Alexandria. By the time we got back I was exhausted; it was quite a trip. Our first day started early in the morning. We caught a train from Alexandria to Cairo which took about 3-4 hours. I enjoyed the train station and our first train was pretty nice compared to some of the other trains.

Our first stop after leaving the station was Giza. This was probably the easiest leg of our journey because we took the subway to within a short distance of the pyramids and sphinx.

The kids thought holding the handles was the fun part

Sneak peak --pun intended :)

These guys wanted us to pay them a lot of money for a ride to the pyramids. I'm glad we didn't fall for it, it was less than 1/4 mile to the entrance. But apparently these guys make a living by getting tourists to ride their mule-drawn carts without giving a price and then charge something ridiculous at the top. I guess it works because they're still doing it.

Standing on the base of the big pyramid. We thought it would be as cold as it had been in Alex so we took our winter coats and ended up carrying them around all day, not fun when you also have kids to carry around all day. BTW, most of Egypt is not stroller accessible so this was not an option.

While at the pyramids, you must take the "I'm bigger than the pyramid" picture

This is a more realistic perspective (and a very cute pic of Karim and his cousin)

I'm glad we got to make a stop in Giza, but really for me it's one of those places that you go to see, say ooh aah and then move out. There wasn't a ton of excitement other than viewing and contemplating. The rest of the time we spent saying 'no thanks' to a million people trying to sell us all kinds of services and apparently 'no' in Arabic means "maybe. ask me a few more times".

We got back on the subway and headed for the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. We weren't allowed to take our cameras in but we did get to see a lot of stuff and I'm glad we made this stop because it made the later stops more interesting. For example, seeing all the things from King Tuts tomb before going into the tomb itself and imagining all the stuff that had been in there.

On our way to dinner we did a quick stop by Al-Azhar school and masjid. We didn't have time to go in but we snapped a few pictures outside, it's an amazing building.

We had a great dinner and then headed back to the train station to catch our next train. Outside the station we spotted this rare spot of grass and a good number of dogs seem to make this their bed at night as it retains more heat than sand or concrete.

And then we spent a really long time in the station waiting for our late train. Not the most fun I've ever had. This picture was taken around midnight and our train was still a couple hours out.

We eventually got on the train and headed for Luxor...