150308: Cairo

Hobart was supposed to reach at 1300h today. We decided to go to Islamic Cairo instead, so he doesn’t miss much of the prime sights. Great Pyramids can wait till Sunday.

Cairo traffic is reminiscent of Bangkok, all captured in one word: chaos. We gotta cross roads like you never care about cars ever. Our walk to Islamic Cairo took an hour, and it’s characteristically different from other places by the abundance of souvenir shops and people calling out “Japanese? Korean? Chinese?” and blah blah blah. A boring place I think, and we don’t even know our exact location. At least we got police to help us locate ourselves though they hardly know English.

Took another walk to the citadel, burned 2 hours on that. We stopped along the way at a pastry bakery, and the pastries are dirt cheap and pretty good. Sugar rush like mad, and got to skipped lunch. Got on the wrong side of the citadel, and had to walk roundabout real bad to reach the entrance. Most of the citadel is destroyed, with nothing much left except the mosque. Pretty much like the Blue Mosque of Istanbul, only smaller and very un-blue. Eve was made to wear a green cloak, I supposed they think she wore too little haha. Weather is burning hot, and she had her woollen scarf on as well. Lucky I’m not a girl.

Out of citadel, we took a cab back to our hostel. We left a note for Hobart saying that we’ll be back to meet him at 1530h. And the cab took damn long. The distance is short, but jams dragged it out to half an hour. Damn traffic.

Hobart said his luggage gonna be arriving at 1500h on Sunday. Our coach is scheduled at 1730h, so there’s a chance he’ll be without his luggage should it be late. Walking to the bus station is a tough 30 minutes, not to mention it’s very hard to find. Even asking policeman doesn’t really help, he knows nuts about English and we don’t know Arabic. Sign language barely got us there, and surprisingly the bus station is very modern and new.

Next was the train station, which is easier to find. But hell, there wasn’t any sleeper train available from Ramses station so we gotta change our plans. And the price got inflated as well, 5 USD more. Guess we may be able to get the right tickets from Giza instead.

We got hungry as we arrived in night time Islamic Cairo. Had some food at a café (?) sandwich bar (?) whatever. A lot of sandwiches using pitta bread, and all vegetarian too. Fed all of us for only 15 LE, that’s about 1.50 GBP! Next we passed by a fish place, and so dinner II. Calamari @ 48 LE a kg, fish @ 28 LE a kg, that’s dirt cheap. Somehow feels like we over-ordered when we asked for a kg of each. Damn filling.