Four Days in Cairo

We landed in Cairo at around 2:45am, so needless to say I was rather tired. Our flight was possibly the most turbulence filled flight I have ever enjoied. This was likely do to the fact that our plane made a Cessna look like a jumbo jet. It was basically a flying minibus. Nice and bouncy. At one point I looked out the window and observed the engine sort of flapping round on the wing. After that I decided just not to look back there. We flew from Istanbul, spent the day in Athens and then flew to Egypt. I mention this because I feel I should get some kind of award for eating 3 meals in one day, each on a different continent. But I digress.

Upon emerging from the airport we were sized opon by several thousand taxi drivers, each trying to stuff us into there cars. After extracting myself from them (I did this by yelling at them loudly in Russian), we found a rather official looking personage who I was able to make a deal with.
This man in turn handed us over to an extremely disreputable looking driver, who drove us to "dowen towen" at a speed which I approved of.
We got a room at a decent hotel/hostel thing, which was a good thing as I proceeded to die, and did not move from my bed for 3 days. Must have been the mixture of the food from 3 continents in one day. Probably caused so kind of toxic chemical reaction. I emerged rather timidly from my room on the third day after our arrival. While I was sick I discovered that my camera also had a recorder on it, so I've started making audio logs. This suits me well, as I'm far to lazy to write consistently, and, as anyone who's met me know, I love the sound of my own voice. (I cant help it) Below is a log I did for my first* four days in Cairo: (*out of bed that is)

Cairo: Day 1-2

The first day I went to the Egyptian museum even though I was feeling kind of dizzy. It was fairly interesting, but very disorganised. There were statues tumbled every which way, they also wrote the Pharaoh's names wrong.

Lets see: they wrote the Pharaohs names wrong, spelled their gods names wrong , and got a few mixed up, for good measure. And you ask, how do I know this, how can I know better than the Egyptians. That's a good question. I just do. There's no answer to these things, you just have to except it by faith, that I know more than everyone else, OK? PTL, TYJ for that insight.
Yeah so, the Egyptian museum was cool. I saw king Tuts stuff. His mask, sarcophagus (sarcophagi I should say, plural.) four chariots, jewelry etc.. All the jazz he had in his tomb. That was fairly interesting. Downstairs they had a bunch of statues, some that were huge, but unfortunately they don't allow cameras in there. After that we ate at this place called "GAD", that Masumi seems to have a great fondness for.

The place serves pretty good food, a bit spicy, but it doesn't seem to agree with me for some reason. At night my stomach always begins to trouble me. I don't recall sleeping well since I started eating there. We've been eating there every night, the past few nights.

The next day we got up and went to the pyramids, which were awesome. They are huge actually, thought the Sphinx wasn't that big.

The camels were fun, and the drivers were great. Here is Masumi about to get his ass kicked. Luckly, I saved the day.

Cairo: Day 3-4

The third day we went to Fatimid Cairo. Wait, first we went to the grand market, great bazaar, whatever its called. We walked thru millions of people, looked at loads of souvenirs, and got over a million sales pitches thrown at us.

After a bit we got tired of that, so we went to these old buildings, that were from the Fatimid period, around 500-800AD.

Interesting, we saw some private peoples houses and some mosques. The way the Fatimid's built was very different than the Ottomans that later took over. In fact no one builds like them. Their mosques are distinctly Classical looking. They didn't use minarets either, the built some kind of echo system into their mosques.
The forth day we did more of the same. We went to see some Coptic churches, and had this short, enthusiastic, kind of cute, fanatic, Coptic christian girl give us a tour, enthusiastically, about Copicness, and all things good about it. She told us how other (non Coptic) bibles don't tell the "real words' or something. It was fun, though she didn't think it was funny when I was joking about killing people instead of being martyred. That's alright, I did my best to make here day, it didn't work.
We learned some interesting things, like this story about 'moving a mountain'. I knew of this story, but had no idea it happened in Egypt. Simon the one eyed Tanner was tanning something and he made a mountain move. His body is supposedly in the church that we were in, somewhere.

Then we went to this mosque, we were just siting around in there, when suddenly this bus load of these old tourists unloads in front and they all start pouring in. The great thing was that all the women were wearing these green environment suits, so they don't show any skin. They were elf suits or like druid clockes, but they were bright green.
They were trying to look really P.L.O. or something. Hamass, that's it, really Hamass. They had this Hamass thing going with these green suits. Speaking of Hamass, you know those really corny head dresses, the thing that Arafat was always wearing?

There were these Japanese wearing them in the Egyptian museum. These idiots, I really wanted to kill them for some reason. I had this strong urge to murder them, just because they thought they were cool, and that offended me, because I knew that they weren't cool. They weren't up to my standard of coolness. It just wasn't good enough.
Anyway, after seeing these Imams gingerly clothing these women (with glee), we went outside and kicked the ball at some Egyptian kids on the road. I was trying to be nice and play around with them, letting them take the ball from me, to show them that not all Americans are bad, so they wont be suicide bombers in the future. Then for no reason, Masumi decides to go beat them up and take the ball from them. Japan will probably experience terror in the future because of this.
Then we went thru some huge garbage heap and saw some donkey eating garbage. Next we were trying to take the metro back, and we jumped in the women's car or something. All these veiled women freaked out. Well actually, they just kind of stared at us in a weird way, so we jumped out swiftly, and ran to a normal carriage.

The men all thought the whole thing was great fun. They tried to hold the door to their car open for us, but they weren't strong enough, they don't have those muscles from building the pyramids anymore. So we caught the next train, it was alright.

We went back and watched a movie, but more on that later.
Well their you have it. All I can say is that so far Egypt is a great place, and Cairo is...well... Cairo?

Can I buy a carpet? PLEASE? CAN I?

Im curently in central Turkey. I escaped from Istanbul, only after coming down with bird flu twice, getting bombed once, and being overcharged perhaps 100 times. (That I know of)

Its amazing, everyone in Turkey seems to be related, as they all have the same brother who is a direct desendant of the maker of the first 'Turkish' carpet, and lucky me, he is willing to sell to me. (I'm special) He doesnt do it for the money, you know. Its only for the family pride. His mother has been weaving this small carpet for ten years, just waiting for someone worthy (me, of course, yet more undeniable proof of my devine nature) to come and apricate her Herculean labors.

How much does it cost? Why does that matter? This woman wove it over TEN YEARS!!!! What is ten years worth to you?

This has led me to wonder exactly what carpet weavers are doing during those ten years. I mean, the carpet clearly says 'made in China' on the tag. What took ten years? The shiping perhaps? In any case, I now hold the Turkish post office in the deepest suspicion.

That being said, I just turned 25. So I figure, if I take good care of myself, dont drink to much, and stay away from fast food, I'll be able to make three, maybe even four carpets.

I will then retire on the vast sums of money generated by their sale. I've already sent the order to China. More on this to come.....