Brendan Doms

Me in front of the Sphinx and the Pyramids of Giza.

If my checklist for Thursday had looked like this:

• eat authentic Egyptian felafal
• pet a camel
• learn how to make papyrus
• see a mummy
• climb 200 feet down a shaft I barely fit in
• touch one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world

Then I would have been able to check off everything with no problem.

I traveled with 3 American brothers from Utah to 3 different pyramid sites: Dashur, Sakkara, and of course, Giza. I learned a lot about Egyptian history, and was harassed for being a tourist on many occasions. I also got to experience the desert first hand. It is nothing but sand and rock and the sun beating down on you. Competition for shade was fierce at the busiest tourist spots.

The shaft inside the Red Pyramid of Dashur was perhaps the most memorable event for me. The climb down took a good 10 minutes, and I felt that if I were even slightly claustrophobic I wouldn’t have been able to do it. Climbing inside all of the tombs and seeing multiple sarcophogi really gave me a profound respect for how the ancient Egyptians had stoneworking down thousands of years before their neighbors.

The pyramids themselves are incredibly massive, and held the record for the world’s largest structures for many centuries. Touching one feels like putting your hand on a piece of history. It was an impressive and tiring day.

The spire attached to the mosque closest to my hostel, which has the loudspeakers for delivering the call to prayer at 4 AM. It’s more of a hymn than a chant, something the media never really got through to me.

The view from the balcony of my hostel room in Cairo. The open area is Talaat Harb square.

The air tastes like dust: millians of motes are suspended in the air, blurring distant light. And there’s a tinge of gasoline on the wind blowing in through the open window.

The sides of the highway are subdued in sand-tones featuring hand-drawn scenes of the art and culture of a civilization long past. In stark contrast, the road itself is filled with neon. There must be no enforced laws concerning underlighting, a phenomenon I haven’t seen much of since playing Need for Speed: Underground.

There are uniformed police at regular intervals, and the driving is as bad as the rumors: stoplights, stopsigns, and even lanes are mere suggestions. When entering an intersection it is customary for drivers to flash their lights on and off to alert perpendicular traffic of their intention to cross at insane speeds, headless of the proper right of way.

The hostel is dimly lit at 2 AM. I’m glad I didn’t have to find it by myself.

I have arrived in Cairo.

Ok, the next time I have the chance to update will be in a foreign country. I now have 4 separate plane rides right ahead of me totaling something like 20 hours. Yikes.

A special thank you to Brian, Matt, Nate, Sean, and Zach for the Kindle. It is going to make this trip a whole lot better.

As for the 4 people I’m meeting up with in Europe: Andrea, Carli, Joe, and Sean - I can’t wait to see you!

When I get back I’ll post more about how to prepare for a trip like this, and all the lessons I learned, but for now: a quick note on one specific thing that took me hours to figure out and really bothers me.

The main Italian website for buying in-country trains is http://www.ferroviedellostato.it. What they don’t tell you is that despite the decent English interface, when you get to the part where you actually try to pay for a ticket, all of your cards will be declined. This isn’t because anything is actually wrong with your cards or the information you entered. It just appears that they don’t accept US credit cards. The most upsetting part is just that if their error message said, “Sorry, we don’t accept US credit cards” instead of “The payment is denied” it would have saved me hours.

The preferred solution, it turns out, is for North American customers to use http://italiarail.com. However, every single time I’ve tried to book a train on this site in the past two weeks it gives me the same error: “We are experiencing technical difficulties processing your request. Please try again later.”

I’ll just have to buy the ticket when I get there. Lame.

This is the whole thing as far as I know right now. Quick legend: London is red because it is my gateway into and out of Europe. Blue markers are where I am by myself. Yellow markers are where a friend is travelling with me. Blue lines indicate plane flights, red are trains, and green are ferries.

A quick note that Target is totally awesome for travel-supply shopping. They have a ton of $1 travel/sample sized toiletries. I could have done all of my shopping for under $20 if it weren’t for the fact that I needed new sunglasses.

Strangely, it seems like some items are very unfairly priced for the different genders. Women’s sunglasses went as low as $4.99 at Target, whereas the lowest men’s was $12.99. And flip-flops? The women’s section had a pair for $2.99 while for men’s only got down to $14.99. Do men not usually do bargain-bin shopping?

The “before” shot. Taken last night by my mom. We’ll see if there are any visible changes when I return.