Being back at home in Belgium for nearly a week now makes me suddenly realise what I'm missing from my life in Egypt. First of all, there's the lemon juice. After living for about a month in a villa, we moved to a different compound-hotel, where they had excellent lemon juice. I'd drink large glasses of it for breakfast and for dinner. There were all kinds of other juices and milkshakes too, also the mango and the strawberry juice was great, but the lemon juice was the best. Then, I miss eating strawberries for lunch every day. I love strawberries, at first it was weird eating them every day in the middle of the winter months, as eating strawberries usually means it's nearly my birthday. I had a bit of that feeling every day in Egypt. I miss the laundry-luxury, just leave the bag of laundry in the room every morning, and every evening it would be there again all clean, every single day, for 3 months. I miss the sauna and the jacuzzi in the hotel, so perfect to relax. I miss sitting in the sofas in the hotel bar with my friends, I miss the country music they played in that bar :-) I miss the palm trees and the flowers. I miss how much fruit and vegetables there were, I quite liked eating stuffed artichoc and fried egg-plant and corn on the cob even though after three months of it you start to notice the oil it's been cooked in more that the food itself. I miss some parts of my 'special treatment' (which I think came free with being blonde in Egypt), I miss being called 'habibi' (Arabic for 'baby') by the people from the catering, I miss the way the guards at the door knew my name and moved the magnet with my name on it from 'out' to 'in' every morning for me, I miss how nice some of the taxidrivers were to make. Not only driving me to hospital but also coming inside with me and taking care of me. I still can't believe I flew back from Cairo with more than 60 kilos of luggage spread over 3 suitcases, a backpack and a guitar, and didn't have to pay any excess weight! On the other hand, I don't miss hearing 'welcome to Alexandria' 10 times every 100 meters of shopping street, and I don't miss being followed about by hords of kids screaming at me and trying to touch me and sell me stuff. I don't miss chasing the stray cats out of the rubbish bin, my gosh, there were so many of them! I don't miss the heaps of garbage littering the sides of the roads, and I don't miss the crowdedness and the noise and the fact that I couldn't go anywhere on my own. And I don't miss standing under a tree with two friends being all depressed at new year cuz we had to work the next day.
Between all this missing and not missing what I miss the most is clear to me. They are little moments, now memories, millions of them, related to the people I so intensely lived with. Playing the guitar and singing out of tune with the girls in the villa, smoking shisha and talking, the outings we did, one of my friends dancing on the bus on our way to the pyramids, the jokes we had in the classroom and on our little holiday up the Nile, the parties where we all danced and took cray pictures. The nicknames we called each other, the amazement of the instructors that our class got on so well together...
Here are some more pictures, for me they are strongly linked to what I miss the most, for you I hope they will be a way to share some of these memories and moments:
Where it all started: putting flowers in our hair on the welcome dinner, more than three months ago.
The first month we lived in identical villas in a compound. This is the villa next to mine, where we used to gather for breakfast and dinner.
And this is my villa, where I lived with three other girls. Too bad it was just a little too cold for the swimming pool...
This is a picture from the inside, with some of us studying (after all that's what we did most of the time).
After that we moved to another compound-hotel, where we spent the remaining two months. I missed living in the villa with the girls a lot, but the hotel was very cosy and we were all living closer together. Here's a picture in front of it, you can't see it but we're standing on the side of a busy dusty desert highway:
And here's the child in me, wild and free!
Since we're at it, here's the teen in me, just plain crazy:
Aren't we all?
The first time we went to Cairo we stayed in the Nile Hilton. This is what sunset looks like through the bedroom windows. I couldn't decide which picture was nicest to put, so I put both.
In the evening we ate some pizza (very universal but after living 2 months in Italy, I'm able to tell a real one from a, euhm... other one!) Notice all the fruit juices we were always drinking:
Then we partied all night and got up early to climb onto some camels, not such a straightforward thing to do :-)
Here's a picture of me taking a picture. Notice how tall those camels are compared to the cars.
We travelled along desert and dirt, for what seemed like ages because camels are not that comfortable (as you can see in the front of the picture, some of us who had tried it before preferred walking) untill we saw this (starring: the head of our camel, I forgot its name...):
And were able to take some amazing pictures:
We continued by camel all the way up to the pyramids:
And went inside the biggest one (the pyramid of Chefren, the one in the middle). I ordered my entrance ticket in Arabic because Arabs have to pay only 1/10th of the price... but failed to convince them :-(
Here is a picture of me lying in the tomb in the middle of the pyramid, where 3000 years ago the mummy of an Egyptian king was buried. Let's not complain about the fact that it's not that flattering, at least we managed to smuggle the cameras in and get this forbidden shot ;-)
When we'd seen enough pyramids we relaxed in this bar called 'Sangria' where they have excellent sushi and shisha on a terrace with a view of the Nile.
Some fun in the elevator at the end of the first Cairo trip.
The second time I went to Cairo was with just two friends. We stayed in the 'Windsor Hotel' which was only half the price as the Hilton and at least twice as interesting. It's a Jugendstil building that used to belong to the British army, in the days when Egypt was still a part of the Commonwealth. There was a beautiful elevator that was driven manually with a winch. Here's a shot of it going up along the floors of the building:
Amongst other things, there was another interesting detail about this hotel. Check this out:
It's an old center for receiving telephone calls and then passing them on to the right line. And it looks like it's made in Belgium. Since Belgium exists since 1830, that's possible :-D (I'm just not sure if American Express etc cards existed then...). They told us at the hotel the 'thing' is still working. If somebody knows the right name for it, please let me know, I forgot.
We spent our evening in the Windsor Hotel in the lovely old bar (mama, they had chandeleers with deer antlers there), the guys drinking beer and me alternating between red and white martini, which I'm pretty sure came from equally old bottles.
The next day we raced around trying to get a visum for my friend (impossible) and visited the Cairo museaum. Here's a shot:
Inside is a big and impressive mess of treasures that haven't been dusted since they were placed there 100 years ago I guess. Sarcofage (how on earth do you spell that?) stacked upon sarcophague (like this?), golden warrior carriages, jewels, statue after statue after statue. Tuthanchamon's mask, two of his three coffins and his treasures are there too. We allmost missed them in the mess, and were starting to think maybe we were mistaken and they were in the Louvre or the museum in London when we finally found the room dedicated to him. No kidding, it's enough to take your breath away for a long long time...
Somewhere between these two trips to Cairo it was the beginning of Februari and me and some friends went to Luxor and had our little cruise on the Nile. I talked about that in a previous post, here are just some more pictures:
Crossing the Nile at Luxor to see the Valley of the Kings etc. on the same little boat we'd be spending the next two days.
We found some alcohol in Luxor and stocked up for the next two days. They had fakes of any kind of liqueur you can imagine in that shop.
Our little boat, some views and some more pictures of temples in Luxor and along the Nile:
We passed a banana boat... for some reason everybody just loves this picture :-)
These last two pictures were taken in Aswan. We didn't have time to see the dam, we just ate pizza. I want to go back some day to see the sites we didn't have time for, but it will never be the same...
Here is the final picture of this long long blog post... See the date, 10 days ago. We were all still happy and smiling (and looking slightly wasted) and now we're all sitting in our respective countries missing and mailing each other... that's life. And these... are friends for life!
