Friday: 6-6-08
Wake up, grab breakfast, and study a little bit more before the test…head over to the test. Test goes very very very well. I think I NAILED it…so I'm pretty excited…we grab some lunch and then head back to the hotel and watch a bunch of movies and just hang out for the rest of the day…later that night we had a little end of fluids party in our hotel room which was fun…stayed up real late and crashed.
Saturday: 6-7-08
Wake up, grab breakfast and decide to go check out the Khan El Khalili. This is a massive bazaar in downtown Cairo…one of the biggest in all of Egypt. We hop in a cab and head over to it…we walk into a little spice shop and this guy follows us in. He starts speaking to us in really good English, and he said that he would take us to the “real” handmade good are in the Bazaar. So we decide to follow him…bad mistake. He takes us through the back alleys of this market area, people were getting worried, but I had kept my bearings so I knew how to get out of there…so more wandering through slums and trash piles, hanging wires, unpaved roads, dilapidated stucco buildings and he brings us to this hole in the wall “factory” and says here is the real hand made goods…it was pretty much 2 guys sitting there and making chess boards…very unimpressive. So Sean and I realize that this is just some stupid tourist trap, and decide to tell the girls we need to leave and not listen to this guy anymore…so we leave, but he says hell bring us back to the main road…on the way he brings us to “the only guy in all of Egypt who does paintings on real animal leather”… apparently he is “very famous throughout Egypt”…and my only thought was “if this guy is famous, he wouldn’t be doing rinky dink paintings of the pyramids and camels on friggin fake leather…the place was so dumb. We walked in, looked at it, and left all within about .3 seconds, yes .3 not 3.
So we get back to the main road and ditch the guy and walk through the bazaar by ourselves…this bazaar was much more hectic than the ones in Aswan and Luxor. The passageways were much more narrow and the people were just as annoying. I have just about had it with people nagging me and touching me to buy stuff. Normally I can just block it out, but you can only do that for so long. 5 weeks of the non stop nagging shortens my fuse. And for those of you who know me, its not that long to begin with…right about the time I realized I wanted to get out of there, this guy comes up to me and starts talking to me…he was being friendly, and I wasn’t. He wanted to know where I was from, who I was, and I didn’t really feel like talking to him. So I just gave him 1 word answers and didn’t make eye contact, and just kept walking…and then he had to go and say this…“why are you afraid of me, are you Jewish? Only the Jews are the afraid around here” and this set me off. I kind of snapped and started yelling at him…but before anything escalated, the rest of the people I was with just told him to get out of our face and we just parted ways…more wandering through the market, and we all decided we had had it, and we hopped in a cab and back to the hotel. And again, we just hung out in our room all day and watched movies, way too hot outside…got some lunch, picked up my laundry, figured I would do a load at the Laundromat before the Europe trip to make it easier…hung out some more, and before I knew it, it was late and I just passed out…one more full day left…can’t believe I'm almost out of here.
Peace
-Al
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