Egypt

We stayed in a resort town called Sharm el Sheikh. The resort was pretty nice, but the food was awful. It was a lot of mixed meats and vegetables. I was sick most of the trip and am still not feeling very well. I marked the spots in red where we were, and then the green line is where we drove.





These are pictures from our resort. Our room was similar to a condo. It had a separate bedroom and a full kitchen. The kitchen didn't have any utensils, but that's okay because the buffet was included and open most of the time. The resort had 6 pools and was on the beach.

This is a view of Cairo from across the Nile.

Views of Cairo. I really don't understand the buildings. There are miles and miles of concrete skeletons with reebar sticking out the top. Like construction was never finished. The majority of the people live in these buildings. Most of the windows have don't have glass panes. As we were leaving, we saw a small boy playing on the roof of one of these buildings. There wasn't a rail or anything. He was playing so close to the edge, I thought he was going to fall off.

King Tutankhamoun's Pyramid - the biggest one.

This boat was buried next to the pyramid. It was used to carry all of the contents of the King's pyramid down the Nile. The Giza area was only used for burial/funeral purposes.


Three groups of Muslim girls came up and asked to take pictures with us. They liked our blonde hair and the fact that we wore western clothes.

Yea that's right - I saw the Sphinx!!

I took this picture for all the Carlson people! I ate at TGI Fridays on the Nile in Cairo. We all had the same thing because we were on the tour - but it was normal American stuff. Potato soup, grilled chicken, rice and a salad. We also had Oreo ice cream though!! I hadn't seen an Oreo in so long!!

I hope that you can see this video!! I took it as we were leaving Cairo. Our Czech tour guide would not shut up on the bus, so that's her talking in the background. I swear we were like 30 minutes outside the city and she was still talking!!

Random stuff I noticed about Egypt:

There are no stop lights. There are medians everywhere and all the drivers simply make U turns. Pretty much everywhere you go, you drive past wherever it is you are trying to drive, and then you must stop and make a U turn up ahead.

They don't use any coins at all. Everything is done with the Egyptian pound. The conversion rate when I was there was like 5 pounds to the dollar.

Buildings are also strange in Sharm el Sheikh. There are randomly abandoned resorts/buildings everywhere. On any street, you may have 5 working resorts and 5 abandoned resorts. I don't understand this.

Men were very overbearing. Everywhere we went, they tried to talk to us. They would address us by trying to guess which country we were from. The most common guess was Russia, which I thought was funny. Our travel agent had warned us not to go off the resort at night, but we wanted to walk to a nearby convenient store. As we were walking, some random guy came out of no where and started talking to me. I told him I didn't understand and walked faster to be near my friends. At that point, he sped up and was walking next to my friend Julia. He started to talk to her, and then put is hand on her butt. As he did this, she got up in his face and yelled "HEY!!" He jumped about a foot in the air and took off. They're not used to women sticking up for themselves.

One other note about Cairo - we were told not to even touch the Nile. They dump trash and other materials into the river. As we were eating at TGI Fridays, there was junk floating by the whole time.

For those of you who don't know. . I also ended up going to Israel during spring break. We went to Jerusalem for a day. I took a lot of pictures and have a lot of information to share, however, it's late and I am tired! I will post more tomorrow (hopefully). We had some Internet problems earlier today that delayed this blog. . but anyway. . until tomorrow!