Big Orange Backpack

This has been, absolutely, positively, the weirdest day of my life. The bus left from Tel Aviv at 6, and the ride from Eilat to Taba (the border crossing) was fairly peaceful, I slept for two of the five hours. Then the bus company let us off at the border and we shleped our stuff over the border, which felt a bit sketchy at the time, but we were still feeling pretty jolly and taking photos. We got to know the people we were on the bus with a little bit, but it wasn't until we got to the Egyptian side that shit went south, and everyone on the bus became friends. Half the people on the bus didn't have a visa and when the rest of us got to the other side, waiting for our Egyptian connecting bus, we were greeted with crickets. We were in the middle of the Negev desert, stranded. No connecting bus. Nobody around but amused Egyptian soldiers. Everyone, however, kept in good spirits, still taking photos and laughing, trying to figure out what to do - how to get to Cairo. I met one kid from Regina, Canada that knew my friend Katherine, who I knew from Belgium. We waited, laughing, planning, talking, for two hours and then suddenly a man with a briefcase ran up and said "I AM WITH MAZADA, I AM HERE TO SERVE YOU!" He handled the kids without visas, obtaining them for them, and then put us in a bus. There was an Egyptian on the Israeli side that brought tons of shit with him, and he was already on the other side, and had packed the van up and layed himself out on the back row. So we piled in and rode across the Sinai desert for hours. We made one rest stop, and the woman's bathroom was a hole in the ground with a place to put your feet. I was so tired I didn't even care. Apparently there was a bucket for poop, which wasn't cleaned out ever so often, but I thankfully missed that in my haze. We were travelling for fourteen hours before arriving in Cairo. I brought way too much shit compared to the backpacking kids we hooked up with, a Brazilian named Mike and an American girl from Buffalo that nobody remembers her name. The decided to come with Jake and I to our hostel next to the Egypt Museum. We were led all around the city by assholes that wanted us to go to their friend's hotels, but I eventually got our hostel on the phone and they gave directions to a cab driver that got us here, finally, around noon. We settled in before going to the Egypt Museum, which was amazing and interesting, but falling apart and really quite sad. We hadn't eaten at that point in almost a day, but everywhere was closed, for lunch. Which makes about zero sense. We then grabbed some food, but it was gross and the heat totally killed my appetite. We then booked our tickets for Luxor, tomorrow night, and we're travelling with the two friends we made from the bus. The girl was on birthright, and we're thinking about coming back early and going back with her and spending a day or two on the beach in Tel Aviv before registration at Hebrew University, so we would return Sunday instead of Thursday, and skip Aswan. It's wicked hot in Cairo, I can't imagine what it'll be like down south.

I am really unsure about how I feel about Egypt. I took my star of David off at the prompting of Greg2 and Greg3, as well as the reaction I got from a border guard when he realised I'm Jewish. The traffic here is crazy, we just walk cross speeding traffic and hope for the best, and you have to argue with taxi drivers, there are no meters, well there are, but nobody uses them. The men have also noticed my friend and I with our white skin, light hair, and bright eyes, and the attention is not that welcome. The mosque announcements over loudspeakers is startling. It's so different here.. I've never experienced ANYTHING like Cairo, that's for sure.

Anyway, that's it. It's definately interesting, but I am excited to go home to Israel.