Egypt?!!

I had made a last minute decision at the end of birthright and decided to meet up with two friends from the Taglit trip and travel with them to Egypt. I didn't say anything about this before because I didn't want people telling me it was too dangerous to go.

On Thursday we met in the Tel Aviv centrel bus station and took a 5 hour bus from Tel Aviv all the way down south to Eilat. We grabbed a cab to the border, about a ten minute ride, and then walked across. On the Egyptian side, we booked a ride in a van with a representative of Nature Travels, some kind of travel agency based in Egypt. It's interesting how different the Egyptian border was from the Israeli or American borders. You can tell there is corruption here, things are more laid back, bribes are accepted. There was some money changing hands before we were able to get our visas.

The van ride was long, but not uncomfortable since we had a 12-passenger vehicle to ourselves. We were riding all through the night, so Zibby and Kym (my traveling companions) and I slept as much as we could. We stopped at a few rest stops to learn about Egyptian hospitality. This involves our drivers and body guard (oh, yes. We had a body guard) shaking us awake and forcing us out of the van to sit inside a rest stop where the walls are lined with so many hookahs ("shisha" in Arabic). Then they forced Egyptian tea on us and did their best to converse with us in their poor English.

Egyptian hospitality involves forcing your guest to drink tea at every possible opportunity. So by the time we arrived in Cairo at 7am on Friday, we were kind of high on caffeine. We found a cheap hotel in a sketchy building and they offered us tea before we settled in. We spoke with a tour guide there, and he arranged for a driver to take us around to the Papyrus Museum, where I bought two beautiful pieces of art and drank a glass of tea; and to a camel stable, where we drank some tea, rode camels through the Sahara Desert to see pyramids, went inside a pyramid, rode the camels past the Sphynx, and drank some more tea.

The pyramids were incredible. I will post pictures as soon as I have a chance, but they were so magnificent up close. I kept thinking, I'm in Egypt. I saw pyramids. I was inside of a pyramid!

After nightfall, we drank some tea and mounted these beautiful Arabian horses. We rode them into the desert and set up a camp. Our hosts, bedouins named Ismael and Gabriel, made us a delicious pasta dinner. We spent the night not sleeping, gazing up at the stars, learning Arabic from Gabriel and these two children that were with us, playing games, and galloping the horses through the desert. I really galloped. I don't often think of the desert as a beautiful place, but it is. The sky was deep and starry, everything quiet but the pounding of the horses' hooves into the sand. "Lose your body, leave it with the saddle!" Ismael told me. Nothing but white sand and stars as far as the eye can see, my body back somewhere with the saddle, and I am just a pair of eyes galloping through the desert so late at night, it's morning. The bedouins love the desert, you know. It's not so hard to understand why.

The next day we visited the Egypt Museum, something like a storehouse for all these incredible ancient Egyptian tombs, and slabs of stone covered in hieroglyphics. There is a room filled with mummies and another filled with all the treasures found in King Tut's pyramid. I saw his two outer caskets, his face mask, magnificent jewelry.

Egypt is very much Egypt, and not the United States or Israel. I'll tell you what I mean. I described the museum as a sort of warehouse for these treasures, and it was a lot like that. There weren't many labels on lots of things, no easy explanations; and when there were labels, they were often typed out on flimsy index cards and taped next to the exibit or something. There was no airconditioning, the bathrooms were Egypt bathrooms (dirty, no toilet paper). Egypt is Egypt. I took photos of faces in Egypt and people in Egypt that I will post as soon as I have a chance, and you will see what I mean. In Egypt, you can walk into a bathroom, have a woman in a headscarf shove a wad of toiletpaper into your unsuspecting hand, and then demand money. We went to the market, and a three-year-old tiny little girl tried selling us tissues by unrelentingly following us and pressing the tissues into our hips, the highest place she could reach. Men carry trays of pita bread on their heads and mount motorcycles and bicycles with them. You can buy a glass of mango juice that is so fresh, it feels like somebody just stuck a straw in the actual mango. Hookahs cost less than ten American dollars, and everybody smokes, everywhere. Sometimes Israel feels a little like the U.S., but Egypt didn't, not once.

Our last day was spent on the beach in Sinai, after a 12-hour filthy, crowded bus ride. It was so well worth it, there aren't even words. We slept on the beach, about twenty feet from the Red Sea. We went snorkling and saw all kinds of amazing fish and coral. Remember that children's book called "The Rainbow Fish"? I saw rainbow fish, and eel, and clown fish (like Nemo), and huge schools of tiny shimmering blue fish. I saw coral that looked like brain, and red and green and blue coral, and coral that punctured a hole in my left foot.

And now I'm back in Israel, in Chadera, staying with family friends. Later today I am moving into Kibbutz Yagur, where I'll be staying and learning and working for the next 3 and a half months.

Salaam!