Back to Egypt.....

Luke and I, after taking our felucca ride, also explored Downtown Cairo a little bit. Downtown is the more modern shopping area of the city. Of course, it was an an absolute sea of people, with even more cars jamming the streets. Some young guy waiting at a crosswalk said I looked Egyptian because I was sporting a beard (when in Rome....) and also that his brother had a perfume shop, and he just wanted to take us down there and give me a business card. Right. Obviously he thought I was born yesterday. No thanks fella. On the way back to the hotel we had the taxi driver stop at Anwar Sadat's tomb, a huge pyramid-like structure right across from the viewing platform where he was gunned down. That particular cab driver inquired if Luke and I were and item (with some amount of disgust I might add). I quickly put that one to rest. I mean, really?

The two of us young guns still had a day on our own the next day, and we decided to hire the friendly cab driver Sayed to take us to a few spots. We checked out the Citadel, an old fortress on a hill that has a large mosque and some museums within its walls. We walked around the outside of the military museum, which had some pretty neat stuff. We noticed a sign near the museum entrance written in Korean. Strange.....whats that doing here.....then we saw the English version. The gracious government of North Korea funded the building of the museum. Nice.

Sayed also kindly took us to another large mosque called Sultan Hassan. It was the mosque Obama visited when he made his speech in Cairo. First Obama came, then Adam (people love that joke. I used in in Shanghai with my girlfriend's parents when they mentioned Bill Clinton being there...killed 'em). Afterward, Sayed drove us through a part of the city known as the City of the Dead. It is an expansive old cemetery that, over the years and due to reasons of overpopulation and lack of formal housing, large numbers of people have actually moved into and begun living amongst the tombs. It is now a large, vibrant neighborhood. We saw coffee shops right next to mausoleums. The conditions were slum-like, with a number of feral dogs running about and garbage strewn everywhere and we only drove through briefly, but I think it was one of the most interesting parts of Cairo.

Our last day in Cairo, this time with Dad back in the team, we went to something called the October 1973 Panorama. It is a large panorama dedicated to Egypt's feats in the Yom Kippur War (or October War, depending which side you were on). Now, Egypt lost that one, but, you got to celebrate something, right? Visitors sit on a platform which slowly rotates around the diorama, which is part illustration and part three-dimensional model, depicting this one (and probably only) battle the Egyptian forces won over the Israelis. There was a voice-over and the necessary sound effects, like bombs going-off, as well. Of course, we couldn't understand a word of the voice-over because it was in Arabic. There was an English version, but tickets were two-hundred pounds each, compared to the twenty that we payed for Arabic. I think we got the gist of it anyway. What was even more fun was when we got out of the show. There were all these Egyptian kids, apparently on a class trip to learn more about their brave army. I got the feeling they really weren't city folk because we were rock-stars to these kids. They were really stoked to see foreigners. As we made our way to the exit, we were just swarmed by excited little kids. "Whats your name"? "Where are you from"? was about all they had for English vocabulary. Though one girl motioned at me and Luke, again, wanting to know the extent of our relationship. To the kids' delight, we snapped some photos of them, but their chaperons seemed to be getting pretty pissed, so we made our exit. I'll get some of the photos up here soon. Oh, and who built the Panorama? The government of North Korea.

Of course, with the Kwiats, you can't just end a trip without a little bit of awkwardness. We still had some time left to kill, and on the street outside the Panorama, Dad said there were some murals he wanted to see. He had the name of the street written in Arabic, but unfortunately we didn't think "mural" would compute with any taxi driver. So Dad, in all of his brilliance, drew a picture.

Dad's little sketch of a mural on a wall actually wasn't too bad. Of course it didn't work. He hailed a cab driver and showed him the sketch along with the street name. The driver had no idea went the hell this crazy white dude wanted. Dad of course kept on trying with him. I don't know why but, he did. Well, our position just so happened to be right outside of some kind of government building. The guards were getting a little jumpy with this cab sitting in the front of the entrance for such a long time. So now they wanted to help, to move the process along. One of the guys asked if we spoke German, winning the prize for most random question of the day. The cab driver was getting irked, because he thought we wanted to go to the Pyramids, which would have been a huge fare for him, when we just wanted to go somewhere along that street. The security personnel motioned that we could go inside the building, probably so they could beat us with hoses and phone books.  I said to Dad "let's drop this, like right now". We quickly said thank-you and just walked on up the street to catch a ride back to the hotel.

The next morning Luke and I had an early flight to Frankfurt, Germany, where we would get a connection to Washington Dulles. It was around that time that Europe was getting hit with snow, so we got a little nervous. Luckily we dodged it, not even experiencing a delay.

With that the three-week European/African adventure came to a conclusion.About 30 seconds after I walked through our front door, I was already thinking: "Well, where to next"?