Egypt & Egyptians

Egypt Air was fairly disappointing and made Thai Airways look good. On our first flight we departed an hour late, and on the second we departed half an hour late. The first airplane was super crappy and the service was not great, either. The best moment of the flight was probably when a guy fell asleep and started snoring in the next row before takeoff.

We discovered quickly that Egyptians are big fans of President Obama. He visited Cairo University to give a speech this year, and it was a huge deal; the first speech by US president in an Islamic capital. He also visited some mosques and schools near the Citadel, which our guide mentioned several times.

There were people everywhere selling things on the street. There were the usual postcards and touristy trinkets, of course, but there were also women on bikes with freshly baked pita bread, and men with boxes of tissues at stoplights, just like the people selling the fragrant flowers in Taipei.

Hotels in Cairo have extremely tight security; there were metal detectors at every entrance, bomb detectors and/or bomb sniffing dogs, and a hotel guest manifest listing guest arrivals and departures.

Health care and education in Egypt are free, all the way up to university, so a surprisingly large percentage of the population goes to college. (I forget the number.)

I didn't realize it rained so little in Egypt; we asked our Upper Egypt guide what the annual rainfall total was, and he said it rained "every couple of years". I'm not sure if maybe he meant a couple times a year, but anyway it seems it rains very little. Consequently, the Nile is the source of nearly all freshwater; outside of the valley Egypt is just a giant desert. It's actually very striking, the line between the dry sandy desert and the lush green valley, with abundant palm trees and other vegetation. I confess I always thought Egypt was just desert because the Pyramids are built on the sandy part. It turns out the pharaohs built their tombs in the high, dry areas on purpose, as it was great for preservation.

Tipping is rampant in Egypt, and the nuances are not that easy to understand. You are definitely supposed to tip in bathrooms and for porters and waiters. If you take a photo with someone they'll want a tip too. However, there are also lots of cases when people will ask for tips to which they aren't entitled; for instance, street kids will sing songs at you and ask for money. Our tour guide in Cairo was constantly tipping security guards and parking attendants, and got really good service. Egyptians also are fond of handshake greetings; I wonder if it's cause-and-effect, as the tipping is all done very smoothly via handshake.

I'd known before, but hadn't fully comprehended the extreme oldness of everything in Egypt. The mosques which were built over a thousand years ago, and the churches which were built in the Roman area, are all considered "new", compared to the relics of the pharaohs. We were at an alabaster factory and they were selling scarabs and other artifacts that were hundreds of years old, but they were considered "family possessions" rather than antiques. It's also mind-boggling that we can still see paint on carvings that are thousands of years old.

It turns out that Egyptians have lots of yummy food. Of course there's baba ghanoush and tahini and the yogurt dishes, but we also enjoyed a beef stew called tagine, the omnipresent rice mixed with pasta, and D liked their roasted eggplants. For breakfast, they have a mashed bean dish that is bland and starchy and meant to be eaten with assorted side dishes and condiments. D likened it to congee, and ate it nearly every morning. The dates, on the other hand, I think are an acquired taste.

Lots of things in Egypt seems to have been built (accidentally or on purpose) on top of other things. For instance, there was a mosque built on top of Luxor Temple, the Hanging Church is built on top of part of a Roman fortress, and Ramses VI's tomb was built on top of King Tut's (which is why it was fortuitously never found by grave robbers).

I think that there's almost too much to see, and it's all too close together, in Egypt. When we went to the Egyptian Museum, I felt that all of the items were clustered closely together, without much explanation. I remarked to D that it seemed that as large as the museum was, it needed to be at least twice as large to properly display everything. Later on we discovered there are several new museums in the works, including a new Grand Egyptian Museum at the Pyramids, and many of the artifacts will be doled out to those new museums. Similarly, when we were at Luxor, we were very impressed with the Ramsesseum (temple of Ramses II) but there were only three or four other visitors there, while the Valley of Kings and the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut were covered in people and tour buses. People go for the big name attractions, I guess.

Egypt is a poor country (I think?), but things are not cheap. We had a hard time finding hotel rooms at good value, and restaurant meals cost about $12-15 per person, which isn't a lot by American standards but is way more than the $2-3 per person that we were paying in Southeast Asia. I'm speculating that locals don't eat at restaurants, or don't eat at the same kinds of restaurants.

The Aswan Dam seems to have made a huge difference for Egypt. Before the dam, the Nile would flood the valley about 3 months of the year. Now, there are no floods, and farmers can use the water from the reservoir for irrigation.