Thursday, October 30, 2008

Egypt 2008: Cairo

We arrived in Cairo at what, 3pm? Ish. Someone was supposed to be there to pick us up, and indeed someone was. Explanatory note: we booked the trip with Egypt Reiser which, despite some minor incidents with their handling of our booking here at home, handled everything during our stay with pretty much total professionalism. They took great care of us and we were very happy with their service. We had booked a basic two week trip Cairo/Luxor/Cairo with cruise, and then they offer lots of extra excursions that you can pick and choose from. Just tell them what you want to see and they will draw up your itinerary. Everything in Egypt went smoothly and we had absolutely no hassle. Schedule-related hassle, anyway. >:-)

Back to the story ... when we got off the plane, a guy was there in the arrivals hall with a sign that had the yellow Egypt Reiser logo on it. We also had the logo as tags on our luggage, so we all three spotted each other. :-) I don't remember this guy's name, but he wasn't very important anyway, he was just there to take us out to our minibus where our coordinator was waiting with the other Norwegians who were booked into our hotel. There were four of these people and you will definitely hear more about them later. The coordinator was a nicely turned out young man called Wael who spoke good English and obviously could not possibly function without his cell phone.

A tiny piece of Cairo International Airport. It's currently undergoing reconstruction; a new international terminal, Terminal 3, will be ready ... maybe this fall, though it was originally supposed to open this spring. So ... not entirely on schedule. :-) It will have a capacity of around 11 million passengers.

A tiny oasis surrounded by a walkway going down to the parking lot.

As we drove to the city towards our hotel, which was in the Garden City district, Wael told us various facts and figures about famous landmarks that we were passing. The military stadion, the Egyptian Museum, etc. While we were driving I shot some videos. They aren't very long, but they may be fun to watch, maybe. :-)


This will be my last post till Sunday. My grandmother's funeral is tomorrow and we're driving up there this afternoon. Take care, everyone. Have a good weekend.

3 comments:

Paz said...

great that you got the feet of the statue in the Video clip, I really got a sense of egypt :P

Fifty K said...

What is it with drivers and their cell phones? Doesn't seem to matter if I am at home or abroad, all the drivers are the same?

Nice that the driver gave you some info along the way. Makes for a more interesting drive.

Leisha Camden said...

I got more videos coming up - some with much more than just the feet of statues ... ;-)

Wael who told us various things during the drive actually wasn't the driver ... he was in charge of coordinating everything during our stay. The drivers were generally people who seemed to not speak English much or at all and did nothing but drive. But they were pretty addicted to their cell phones too. The traffic was, ahem, erratic, so we thought that maybe they were calling ahead to people they knew who'd be further along the route and could tell them how things looked there.

We certainly had a lot of interesting drives, I gotta say that. :-)