Alexandria, Egypt: Days 4 and 5

On our fourth day in Egypt, we received our wake-up call at 6 AM, and it surprisingly felt even worse to wake up after 6 hours of sleep than after 3 or 4! We ate breakfast and left the hotel for the Karnak Temple, an ancient temple that, according to our guide, brings grown men to tears. We arrived at the temple and spent an hour there viewing the enormous ruins (60 acres or something..). Afterwards, just as in every other site we had been to, we were herded down an alleyway separate from the entrance we had come through. This alleyway was filled with shops and about twenty men holding trinkets and such, who swarmed the tourists when they were exiting. As I was the first in the crowd, I got the bulk of it and by the end felt very mean as I found myself shouting at these people to “LEAVE ME ALONE!” I had gone through the same deal at Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple, the Alabaster Mosque, the Great Pyramids, and just about every other place we needed a ticket to get into. It was quite ridiculous; they need someone to coach them in approaching foreigners. For example: Steph admitted that she had wanted to shop but was too intimidated to do so, and if they had left her alone she would have been far more likely to make a purchase. Culture clash.

After the Temple we (Group A) left for the airport for our flight back to Cairo. Once we arrived, we returned to the Le Meridian Hotel for a buffet lunch before the drive back to Alexandria. I spent the night playing cards with Tom and went to bed early as I was incredibly tired. The next morning, Tom and I went to an internet café, where he learned to skype and I had a nice two-hour video chat with James. I was scolded by a bitter Semester-at-Sea-er who asserted that skyping uses too much bandwidth and we should refrain so that she could use the internet. I basically told her to shove it.

After four hours in the internet café (at one dollar an hour it was quite the deal), Tom and I returned to the ship, where we were invited by Jill to go to lunch with her, Steph, and her new Egyptian friend. He picked the four of us up and we drove to a restaurant where we settled into a large table on the outdoor patio and discussed the differences in our cultures (for a solid two hours), after which we returned to the ship before our departure for Casablanca.