Cairo, Egypt

It is my last day in Cairo and I am excited about my next steps. Tomorrow I will be meeting up with one of my best buddies and through the rest of this trip I will be traveling with friends, some of whom I have known for more then a decade. I still have space in my itinerary and am accepting applications to travel with me for a couple of nights in Milan and two weeks across Spain. Come on, everyone is doing it… it’ll make you feel good.

I am grateful to my hosts in Cairo for giving me a space to just sit and be for a while. I should have read a book and looked at a calendar to realize that the month of mercy, forgiveness and emancipation from hell wasn’t the best time to come, but I am glad I did. Yesterday I crossed off one of the last things on my to do list which was to visit some of the other pyramids around Cairo. The first stop was Saqqara, the oldest stone monument in the world. Sit on this for a minute… I am 28 years old, the U.S of A is 230 years old and this step pyramid is 4656 years old. How did the folks who commissioned and built this thing like their eggs? Did their kids play kick the earthenware pot? Did their adolescents act like complete idiots when they first fell in love? I don’t know and I can’t even imagine what the folks inhabiting the world will behave 4656 years into the future. Hell I have a hard time envisioning what’s going to happen 6 years from now.

It was an impressive complex, magnificently restored and continuously being dug up. On another part of the site was a place where you could still see the carven images on the walls. Most of the ones I paid attention to involved food. Those Egyptian royalty sure looked like they ate good. Six years from now, I bet we are going to able to fit a terabyte of information onto something that will fit on our key chains. Ignoring exactly what ideas we are going to store on all that digital space, how long will that information last? One can’t argue against the permanence stone as media.

My driver and I then traveled about 15 km to Dahshur. This might be my favorite of all the pyramid areas since it is secluded, the red pyramid has the most impressive inner chambers one can climb into and there was the least hassle from touts. I say this might be since I only got to spend 15 minutes there before getting asked to leave by the tourist police. Ramadan hours puts a cramp in my style again.

We then drove past palm trees loaded down with dates and through dusty streets full of small kids in uniforms just out of school, donkey carts and women minding vegetable displays to Abu Sir. Now, Abu Sir is a site closed to tourists, but if you talk to Abdul up front and fork over LE 20 and perhaps another LE 20 and then maybe a mechanical pencil and a Sharpie marker one might be able to get a hurried tour in broken English and snap a few shots. Lots of great hieroglyphics and some dilapidated piles of bricks in rough pyramid form. This is the site visible from my hosts’ balcony. I do wish I got off my keister and spent more time out of the Nile river valley in the desert while I was in Egypt. The desert reminds me of what the ocean looked like in Thailand where it was just water and the huge skies replacing the wet stuff with brownish yellow sand. If only desert wasn’t so so hot…