After a long day (or two) of travel from Philadelphia to London to Cairo on New Year’s Eve, I was pleased to finally touch down in this very smoggy city just a couple of minutes into 2005. They say breathing the air in Cairo is as bad as smoking four packs of cigarettes a day.<\/p>\n
The flight over southern Europe was pretty cool to do on the big party night, with Athens, Greece lit up in spectacular fashion. I was greatly relived find that the reservations I thought I had made were actually still being held for me at 1AM in a nice clean hostel right on a busy square in the center of Cairo. I felt the strong presence of the Middle East from the moment I landed — probably due to the arabic writings and the fine desert silt that seemingly permeated its way into everything I came in contact with. The drivers are the craziest I’ve ever come across with no regard for traffic lights or even cops trying to direct traffic.<\/p>\n
I spent my first afternoon at the Egyptian Museum (just a few blocks away from my hostel), where I got to scrutinize all of King Tut’s relics. I also saw lots of famous mummies and endless other artifacts. The museum isn’t really very well presented. There is hardly any information on what you’re looking at available. Just the odd type written note taped inside a glass case.<\/p>\n
One of the coolest rooms contained a series of miniature models found in various tombs depicting everyday life thousands of years ago. There were scenes of things like butcher shops that really didn’t look much different from what you’d find in the Third world today. It’s one thing to do an archeological dig and come up with theories about how life was, but it’s another to find actual models available. It was pretty amazing.<\/p>\n
I’ve read lots of warnings about touts (hustlers) surrounding the tourist areas here, lying through their teeth about anything — in hopes of getting you into their trinket shops. They always start out very nice and walk along side of you on the street, striking up a casual conversation. It all sounds innocent enough, and you want to be nice to those who are nice to you — but the intermittant conversation always seems to start accelerating until you’re being given the hard sell on something. One guy outside the museum actually had me going for about a minute, pointing me to the wrong end of the museum (as the entrance) and telling me it was closed for prayers for an hour. He told me he worked in the museum on the second floor and sounded somewhat genuine. Of course, the second he tried to direct me across the street to a trinket store I knew he was working for someone. He was not pleased when I finally caught on to him and turned tail back to the main entrance of the museum!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After a long day (or two) of travel from Philadelphia to London to Cairo on New Year’s Eve, I was pleased to finally touch down in this very smoggy city just a couple of minutes into 2005. They say breathing the air in Cairo is as bad as smoking four packs of cigarettes a day.… Continue reading Hustle City<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cairo","category-egypt","without-featured-image"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3sHuW-L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/day.lat\/lon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}