TGIF

My how the time flies! After a very relaxing evening at the beautiful Nile Palace Hotel in Luxor, we were up early (again) and off to the airport Friday morning to return to Cairo. We were in the air less than an hour and then headed straight to our new hotel. It is a bit of a let-down after how great the last one was. It's sort of bizzare - there is a one story buiding with the lobby, bar and restaurants, then all the "rooms" are this pre-fab looking buildings out back, motel style. Each room is a little barrel-vaulted enclosure with a sliding glass door to the outside. Strange. But, it's clean enough and there's air conditioning so we don't mind!

Waleed left us at the hotel for a much-deserved afternoon off. There's another guy from the travel company who took care of checking us in who was, let's say, slightly less competent than Waleed. After a week of being well taken care of, it was a little frustrating. We finally got all checked in and were told we could catch a shuttle to downtown Cairo to explore...in 10 minutes! We threw our bags down and out we ran, guide book in hand, to brave the city.

In our first few minutes of walking around we realized that every guy and his brother on the street was going to act as if he wanted to help you (with directions, finding a taxi, etc.) but really just wanted to have you check out his shop or hop in his friend's taxi. This is very Egyptian apparently. We ignored all the dudes and with our guide book map navigated our way to a little diner/restaurant that was highly recommended. Two of our new friends from the tour tagged along.

We found the place and had the cheapest but best meal ever. See this type of diner serves just one thing - an Egyptian dish called kushari. All you have to do is specify the size you want, which was helpful since the waiter/owner didn't speak much English and we obviously don't speak much Arabic. Kushari is made of rice, spaghetti-like noodles, lentils, little macaroni pasta and onions and is topped with spaghetti sauce. It sounds sort of weird, but it is delicious, especially if you like the carbs like I do! The grand total for 4 of us to eat 'til we were stuffed plus have a soft drink was 28 Egyptian pounds - a whopping $5!! Even McDonald's can't beat that for a value!

We had more time to kill in the city before the hotel shuttle bus came back and we didn't really want to be badgered on the streets all afternoon so we decided to stop into the Egyptian Antiquities Museum. We'll be visiting again tomorrow with our guide, but admission wasn't too steep and we may not have a lot of time tomorrow. What a museum - in so many ways. It is, what I'd call, VERY Egyptian. There is very little signage and apparently no maps available. It's not airconditioned except for a jewelry exhibit, Tutankamun's room and the Royal Mummy room. The artifacts are sort of just strewn about the various rooms in out-dated looking casses, usually without descriptions, titles or adequate lighting. That being said, the pieces are incredible. (We also heard they are building a new museum, so we'll cut them some slack - no sense fixing up the old museum if a new one is coming along!)

We wandered around for a bit an admired things as varied as mummified crocodiles, ancient jewelry and even petrified bread loaves found in a tomb. Our main objective was to see the mummy room which is extra (more than the museum entry!), but since we're probably not going to make it back here again, we thought we could check them out. (We knew we weren't going with the group tomorrow.) Gross! There are about a dozen mummies in various states of mummy-hood. Some had hair, fingernails and eye lashes visible. So bizarre, yet you couldn't tear your eyes away.

That about wrapped up Friday. Tomorrow it's back on the bus for some fun in Cairo and our last day of the tour. Yikes....