Chaotic Cairo, you can hear "pstpsttt..." everywhere around you, Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga they are sayin... then they offer camels and chickens, anxiety attacking a few times for the first two days, the amount of garbage on the streets is huge and when we looked from the terrace in the morning where we were stayin (center of Downtown), we thought the city had been bombed just before we arrived. Cultural shock x 3. Hihi ;D
Then they explained to us that all the buildings are unfinished because if they are left like that, they are not obliged to pay taxes to the state, so they just build and leave it looking as horrible as possible from the outside and voila! Egyptians are very smart and capable people, as you can see, and I like it. Something like us, Serbians, but we still have to learn. :D
The rooms in the apartments are generally huge and spacious, but all the paint they lefteverywhere, plus ingenious conceptual solutions such as light switches at a height of two meters or sockets on the floor (that we saw in the Karnak Temple in Luxor) xD
On the other hand, we got the impression that globally they are a warm people, only a huge crisis hit th country, so now it works the way it does. Their wives also approached us with a smile to welcome us and say that we are beautiful. I was a little afraid of the children, hihi, i know, silly me, but they have that tactlessness, they follow you, they shout "money money", and when you don't give them money, they throw some kind of curse in an like cute evil voice, you can recognize it exactly. xD
And yess, some teenager grabbed my ass in the bazaar... I got to hit him on the arm and swear something in English, although it didn't shake me as much as later tripping that the taxi driver decided to kidnap us when we saw on the maps that he was going in the totally opposite direction from the desired one. It turned out that the man was just choosing a route to avoid the evening crowd. That was the first and only time it occurred to us (fiancé's sister and me) to "jump" to the city alone, without him.
For 3 days in Cairo, we visited the museum in El Tahrir, the pyramids in Giza, the Hanging Church and other churches in the Coptic part of the city plus the museum, Saladin's citadel, we also pedestrianized Zamalek and Al Manial islands on the Nile... and the Khan el Khalili bazaar for a couple of hours before the bus to Luxor, which was about 50 minutes late so we left Cairo at 1:56pm instead of 1:06. But that's so normal for Egypt. <3
Follow me for part 2.