April 6th, Spring Break Day 5

The hotel arranged a taxi to take us to the Egyptian Museum today for 40 pounds. We saw the Cairo Tower across the Nile when we arrive at the Museum. It was crowed and we had to wait in lines but not nearly as long or as confusing as the tour books warned us. The building his huge and beautiful, however, they have so much stuff there they don’t know what to do with it, put it, or what all they even have. Very little is marked and there a very few signs or explanations. But it’s not too horrible because you would never have time to read them all anyways. And we would have never gotten my Dad out of there if he had that many signs to read. I did really love the museum though and was amazed to see so many mummies. The most exciting piece had to be King Tut’s burial mask though, just because it’s so famous. Unfortunately you can’t take pictures inside, just the pieces they have on display in the court yard.

When we were finally ready to leave there were taxi drivers waiting at the gate and asking 100 pounds per person back to the hotel. We call these “vultures” and we never even talk to the taxi drivers that wait outside tourist areas. So we walked a block or two and got another guy that wanted only 60 pounds to go back to Maddi. We said no, and flagged another one that also asked for 60 pounds. While we were negotiating with the second driver the first drove back over and said he’d take 50 pounds. Long story short we had both taxi drivers going back and forth on prices until we got to a price we liked. We had fun with that.
After we got back to the hotel we went next door for a bite for dinner at a little Italian place and my parents did something that I never expected!!! They both tried smoking sheesha! I’m still so dumbfounded that I won’t even write about this…just post some pictures as proof.

After dinner we needed to pick up a few items from the pharmacy, which required us to cross a busy Cairo street. Even though one of the rules we gave my parents when they got here was to never hesitate when we cross the street. Mom hesitated and got stranded on the other side of the street. She then couldn’t find a good whole to run across at and wouldn’t come when we told her to go. Eventually a fully covered lady, who probably didn’t speak a word of English and had an infant with her saw mom and took pity on her. She came up and grabbed Mom’s hand at the same time held up the baby for the oncoming cars to see and stepped right out in front of Cairo traffic! It’s pretty sad when a baby has to stop traffic in order for you to cross the street.