Dec 2010
Because the third camel was a liar!
Wed December 08, 2010 Filed in: Israel 2010-2011
SCOTT’S BLOG
Aviva and Scott in front of the Great Pyramid at Giza during their
recent Egypt adventure.
A few weeks back, our friends Erin and Ethan invited us to join them for some backpacking-esque travel over our Chanukah break. The idea of this sort of thing has intrigued Aviva and me for some time, but going ahead and planning a trip as first-timers was a bit intimidating. Erin and Ethan took us under their wing and gently introduced us to the process. As a group we decided on Egypt as our destination and the planning began. Preparing for the trip was pretty easy. Aviva made a few trips to the Egyptian Consulate in Tel Aviv to acquire visas. (An adventure in and of itself!) I made some phone calls and signed us up for travelers health insurance. We borrowed large backpacks and some other backpacking equipment from friends, purchased the Lonely Planet’s Egypt Travel Guide and with an array of travel snacks we were ready to roll!
We met Erin and Ethan at Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station to board a midnight bus that would bring us to Eilat 4.5 hours later. When we arrived in Tel Aviv, we noticed that Erin and Ethan had managed to pack in one backpack (against our two) and they were planning on staying two days longer than we would stay! Our green horns were definitely showing! Upon our arrival to the Eilat Central Bus Station, we hopped in a cab that took us to the Taba border crossing. We walked across the border on foot. All in all, it went smoothly. The officials on both sides of the border were helpful in getting us on our way.
Once in Egypt proper, we were quickly approached by drivers wanting to take us to our first destination. Erin, our fearless leader, bargained our driver down to an acceptable price and we boarded a minibus to Dahab. After we selected our driver, one of the other drivers made fun of him by telling us that he didn’t really have a car, only a camel. After getting in the minibus, the driver took us only a few feet before stopping at a small government office. When in the sinai desert, the government requires that each driver register their passengers by name and passport number. This way, the government can keep tabs on who is going where within the country. At first this seemed a little scary, but shortly after we realized it was for our protection. As we passed from protectorate to protectorate, we were stopped at checkpoints and asked to show our passports again and again. This was the Egyptian government making sure that the same four people that got in the car in Taba would still be in the car upon arriving in Dahab. At one of the checkpoints, an officer who noticed that we were New Jersey residents asked us if we were familiar with Woodbridge, New Jersey, where he had lived for three years. This was the first of a couple of “small world” moments on our trip. Later, in the Cairo bus station, we would run into an Egyptian naval officer who dated a girl from Sussex, New Jersey and whose brother took Middle East Studies classes with Aviva at Rutgers.
After another couple hours on the road, we arrived in Dahab. Dahab is a beautiful resort town on the Gulf of Aqaba. You can stand on the boardwalk and see across the water to Saudi Arabia! The coast is lined with restaurants and budget hotels some of which are in much more acceptable condition than others. We checked out a few hotels and quickly realized that we needed to feed ourselves before making this decision. We settled on a restaurant called “Penguin” and sat down for an Egyptian breakfast.
The view of the Gulf of Aqaba from the balcony at the Penguin restaurant.
The boardwalk in Dahab. It looks deserted as most people were still
sleeping off the night before when we arrived early in the morning.
Satiated, we took a room at the Penguin Hotel associated with the restaurant. For 13 USD a night, the price couldn’t be beat! We were living the good life in Dahab. After a short nap, it was time for lunch. In our pre-lunch wanderings, we came across a man offering sunset horseback rides. We couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
Aviva rides off into the Dahab sunset.
Scott gets to know his horse, Carmella.
The rest of our time in Dahab was fairly uneventful. We dismounted our horses and retired to the upper deck of the Penguin Restaurant. Did I say uneventful? I may have lied a bit. There was that one moment when the guy sitting on the edge of Penguin’s upper deck leaned back too far and almost ended up on the table of a family eating dinner on the lower level. Thank God, he caught himself and was quickly assisted back onto solid ground.
After dinner that evening, we retired to our hotel room to light the hannukiyah for the first night of Hanukah. As you can imagine, Egypt isn’t the biggest fan of we Jews. Unfortunately, we were not able to publicize the miracle of Hanukah as is traditional. Rather, we quietly sang the blessings in our hotel room with the door and windows closed. I am glad to say that we were able to do this safely for each night of our trip.
We quietly enjoyed the candlelight in our hotel room each night. How do
you like our egyptian lighter!?
The next morning we negotiated our way onto another minibus and headed to St. Katreen. The driver brought us straight to Fox Camp, a well known bedouin-style camp. We were greeted by the Fox himself and let Erin negotiate our room down to 8 USD per couple. We dropped our bags in our room and returned to our minibus driver who dropped us off around the corner at St. Katherine’s Monastery.
The monastery was gorgeous. As the oldest working Christian monastery in the world, St. Katherine’s had quite a few impressive artifacts to inspect. There are no photos allowed inside the sanctuary of the monastery, but I have never been so good at following rules:
A shot snapped from the hip as I walked out of the sanctuary at St.
Katherine’s monastery. They were quite serious about people not taking
photos!
One of the monastery’s many claims to fame is that it contains within its walls a shrub that it identifies as the burning bush from which God spoke to Moses (Exodus 3). Our tour book said that the plant is actually a descendant of what they think is the real burning bush. Either way, there were plenty of folks lined up to see it. It was humorous to hear how visitors reacted toward the bush. I overheard several discussions about whether or not folks thought that it was, in fact, the real thing. One such gentleman mocked his wife as she asked this question noting, “Sure it’s real. Didn’t you see the fire extinguisher?” (The monks had placed a large fire extinguisher beneath the bush that you can see in the picture below)
The burning bush at St. Katherine’s Monastery. If you were there and
it spontaneously combusted, would you try to put out the fire?
Aviva, Scott and the burning bush!
After the monastery, we returned to Fox Camp for lunch and some rest. Little did we know how much rest we should have given ourselves in order to have the strength to climb Jabl Mousa later that day. Jabl Mousa, or Moses’ Mountain is what the locals call the mountain believed to be Mt. Sinai, the place where the biblical Moses received the law from God (Exodus 19-20). The kind folks at Fox Camp arranged for Faraj, a very kind seventeen-ish year-old local Bedouin, to be our guide. Now, I know that I have been singing the praises of our Lonely Planet guidebook, but here it failed us. The guidebook describes the climb to the top of Mt. Sinai as being an easy 2-hour hike. In truth, it is a challenging 3-hour hike. With Faraj’s guidance and the patience of our friends, we hauled ourselves up all 7,500 ft of that mountain to look down on the setting sun.
Atop Mt. Sinai
(From L to R) Scott, Aviva, Erin, Ethan, Marcos, Scott and Faraj
After the requisite pictures, we used the last bit of dusk to climb down the stairs of repentance (3,000 or so hand-made steps from St. Katherine’s monastery to the top of the mountain. Created by a monk as penance for God only knows what. We walked up about 1,000 of them). Before the remainder of our descent, we stopped in a Bedouin tent for some delicious and well-deserved coffee. Shortly after, we hiked back down the mountain under a starlit sky like none I had ever seen before.
When we arrived at the bottom of the mountain, we were not immediately welcomed with the warm clothes and hearty dinner that we had expected. We were stopped by the Egyptian police who were not angry with us, but with our guide for trying to take us up the mountain a back way and sneak us back down without having to go through the police. We paid our guide, no doubt so that he could pay off the cops who were just angry that they almost missed out on their share.
Our crew finally returned to Fox Camp where we ate dinner and sat around the campfire until bedtime. While around the fire, we were entertained by Hemdi, an employee there, who poured us tea and told us corny jokes and riddles. One such riddle had to do three camels. Here it is:
There are three camels in a line. Let’s number them from left to right as Camel 1,2 and 3:
The first camel says that there are two camels in front of me and none behind me.
The second camel says that there is one camel in front of me and one behind me.
The third camel says that there are two camels in front of me and two camels behind me.
How is this possible? You got it....Because the third camel was a liar!
But we did not have the benefit of a blog title to give us the answer. So, like idiots, we spent some time discussing all of the possibilities with the other folks in the tent. Our friend and tour guide, Faraj, even tried to tell us the answer. However, he did not know how to say the word كذاب in English. (We should have known. The word pronounced kathab in Arabic is the same as the Hebrew root כזב/kazab, which means to lie.)
The next morning we packed ourselves into another minibus that took us from St. Katherine to Suez and put us on another bus from Suez to the city of Cairo.
Cairo was shocking from the beginning. Perhaps I am simply showing my ignorance with regard to the developing world, but still! Cairo is a huge city! 20 Million people live there! This isn’t some tiny village! Air pollution is reported to be between 10-100 times safe levels. Overall cleanliness is well below anything I’ve ever experienced. Many important laws go unenforced and as far as I am concerned, no American or Israeli has a claim to the title of most dangerous drivers in the world.
When we arrived in Cairo we took a taxi from the bus station to a hotel that had decent reviews. The Bella Luna Hotel suited our needs just fine. At 15 USD/night per couple it was our most expensive accommodations for the entire trip! After we settled up at the front desk we had three important missions and a limited amount of time as shabbat was approaching.
The view from our hotel room balcony.
The first mission was food. The concierge at our hotel directed us to a restaurant nearby that served koshary (كشرى), a traditional Egyptian food. We had no idea what a treat we were in for with this delicious treat! Koshary consists of a base of rice, brown lentils, chickpeas, macaroni, and a topping of Egyptian garlic and vinegar and spicy tomato sauce. Fried onions are commonly added as a garnish. By the end of our stay in Cairo, we would dine at three different Koshary restaurants: El Tahrir, another on Kuwait St. and the famous Abou Tarek restaurant. We quickly fell in love with this delicious, filling and inexpensive food. Depending on the size you order and the restaurant, a bowl of koshary will cost you between .50 and 1.75 USD.
The other delicacy we tried in Cairo was fuul (فول). Think of houmous, but with fava beans instead of chickpeas. Delicious! We tried this at Akher-Saa Restaurant.
Mission number two: With full bellies, we walked to the Shar Ha-Shamayim Synagogue. The synagogue was completed in 1899 and at one point had an active congregation. It is estimated today that there remains 30-40 members, mostly old women. The building is heavily guarded by the Egyptian police. In order to enter you must give over your passport. No photos are allowed inside or outside of the building. When we entered the woman at the door tried to get us to give her money, but we did not. It was clear that she was hired to welcome tourists and that the money would never have actually made it to the Jews of Cairo. She began to spout off facts about Judaism, the synagogue and the Jewish community of Cairo. It seemed as if she had googled Judaism and was regurgitating what she could remember from the articles she read. Some facts were correct and others were not. This was quite depressing. The building was beautiful inside and out. However the reminder of the destruction of vibrant Jewish communities throughout the Arab world where Jews lived as second-class citizens put a damper on our afternoon.
As we left the synagogue, Ethan made a remark that challenged my gloomy mood. He agreed that the story of Jewish Cairo today is quite depressing. However, he challenged me to think about what the synagogue’s early members would think about the fact that most of the surviving members of Arab Jewish communities were now residents of the modern State of Israel. Surely they would see this as a dream come true.
Onward to mission three: Shabbat preparation. We brought shabbat candles, a bottle of kiddush wine purchased at the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station (yuck!) and other assorted food items. At the market (سوق), we purchased the other items we would need to make shabbat in our hotel room. We ate dinner, quietly sang some songs and played a game of cribbage (which I won!) before bedtime.
We caught up on a bit of sleep on Shabbat morning. After which, we went for a stroll around Cairo. We checked out the Khan al-khalili neighborhood. This area is home to a large bazaar and many impressive mosques. Among the mosques we visited were the al-Husseini and al-Azhar mosques. Some of the worshipers inside were more than happy to show us around inside with the hopes that we would give them a small donation (baksheesh/بقشيش)
Late Saturday afternoon we walked to the Garden City area along the Nile River. Seeing the Nile was pretty cool, but a bit sad as the Cairo smog kept us from seeing any sort of sunset or even the other side of the river. After Shabbat, our plan was to head back to the khan al-khalili neighborhood, but an ill-intentioned cab driver ruined those plans for us. We tried to shake this one off and headed for some koshary therapy instead!
Sunday was a very busy and exciting day! We hired a car to take us to Giza, just outside of Cairo. Giza is the home to the sphinx and the great pyramids. People had told me that seeing these wonders was a bit underwhelming. I couldn’t disagree more! Never in my life did I think I would have the opportunity to stand next to these ancient and giant monuments. It was unfortunate that we had to wait three hours for the Cairo smog to rise enough for us to really see the pyramids, we were constantly fending off camel drivers asking for money and at times we had to trudge through garbage in order to get from one pyramid to another. But all in all we had a fantastic time.
“Kiss the sfankus” yelled one of the locals!
How could you not?
From L to R: Erin, Ethan, Aviva and Scott - We had a fabulous time with
our travel buddies!
After Giza, we returned to Cairo proper to check out the Cairo Museum. I was very excited to see many of the ancient Egyptian artifacts up-close. This too straddled the line between really cool and really sad. While seeing all of the museum’s contents was amazing, the place is filthy. The Cairo smog comes through the open windows and layers much of the museum with dust and grime. Most of the items are poorly labeled if they are labeled at all. Our guidebook told us that some of the artifacts that were being stored in the basement of the museum (the museum is much too small for everything they house there) have sunken into the basement floor and are being re-excavated by archaeologists.
Unfortunately, we do not have any pictures from the museum as cameras are not allowed inside. A guard at the door tried to get me to hand over my camera to the guards outside the museum while we walked around. No way in hell was that happening. I took the camera tripod in my hand and pretended to walk outside and give the camera to the guards. Before I did so I gave Aviva the actual camera bag and told her to make a run for it into the museum. Our little play distracted the guard enough that he eventually gave up on us and my camera remained in my possession. (Earlier in the day, the second time we walked up to the Sphinx, someone tried to stop me from taking pictures as well. Ethan and I performed a similar routine.)
We were sad to leave our friends Erin and Ethan on Sunday, but Aviva had to get back to school and I think we had taken in our fill of Cairo. We boarded another overnight bus from Cairo to Taba and crossed back into Israel first thing Monday morning.
All in all we had a fabulous trip. Aviva and I are so thankful to our friends Erin and Ethan for taking us on this little adventure. Egypt is a gorgeous place that oozes history and ancient artifacts. With a little elbow grease, (in the form of huge cultural changes) it could be so much more.
Aviva and Scott in front of the Great Pyramid at Giza during their
recent Egypt adventure.
A few weeks back, our friends Erin and Ethan invited us to join them for some backpacking-esque travel over our Chanukah break. The idea of this sort of thing has intrigued Aviva and me for some time, but going ahead and planning a trip as first-timers was a bit intimidating. Erin and Ethan took us under their wing and gently introduced us to the process. As a group we decided on Egypt as our destination and the planning began. Preparing for the trip was pretty easy. Aviva made a few trips to the Egyptian Consulate in Tel Aviv to acquire visas. (An adventure in and of itself!) I made some phone calls and signed us up for travelers health insurance. We borrowed large backpacks and some other backpacking equipment from friends, purchased the Lonely Planet’s Egypt Travel Guide and with an array of travel snacks we were ready to roll!
We met Erin and Ethan at Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station to board a midnight bus that would bring us to Eilat 4.5 hours later. When we arrived in Tel Aviv, we noticed that Erin and Ethan had managed to pack in one backpack (against our two) and they were planning on staying two days longer than we would stay! Our green horns were definitely showing! Upon our arrival to the Eilat Central Bus Station, we hopped in a cab that took us to the Taba border crossing. We walked across the border on foot. All in all, it went smoothly. The officials on both sides of the border were helpful in getting us on our way.
Once in Egypt proper, we were quickly approached by drivers wanting to take us to our first destination. Erin, our fearless leader, bargained our driver down to an acceptable price and we boarded a minibus to Dahab. After we selected our driver, one of the other drivers made fun of him by telling us that he didn’t really have a car, only a camel. After getting in the minibus, the driver took us only a few feet before stopping at a small government office. When in the sinai desert, the government requires that each driver register their passengers by name and passport number. This way, the government can keep tabs on who is going where within the country. At first this seemed a little scary, but shortly after we realized it was for our protection. As we passed from protectorate to protectorate, we were stopped at checkpoints and asked to show our passports again and again. This was the Egyptian government making sure that the same four people that got in the car in Taba would still be in the car upon arriving in Dahab. At one of the checkpoints, an officer who noticed that we were New Jersey residents asked us if we were familiar with Woodbridge, New Jersey, where he had lived for three years. This was the first of a couple of “small world” moments on our trip. Later, in the Cairo bus station, we would run into an Egyptian naval officer who dated a girl from Sussex, New Jersey and whose brother took Middle East Studies classes with Aviva at Rutgers.
After another couple hours on the road, we arrived in Dahab. Dahab is a beautiful resort town on the Gulf of Aqaba. You can stand on the boardwalk and see across the water to Saudi Arabia! The coast is lined with restaurants and budget hotels some of which are in much more acceptable condition than others. We checked out a few hotels and quickly realized that we needed to feed ourselves before making this decision. We settled on a restaurant called “Penguin” and sat down for an Egyptian breakfast.
The view of the Gulf of Aqaba from the balcony at the Penguin restaurant.
The boardwalk in Dahab. It looks deserted as most people were still
sleeping off the night before when we arrived early in the morning.
Satiated, we took a room at the Penguin Hotel associated with the restaurant. For 13 USD a night, the price couldn’t be beat! We were living the good life in Dahab. After a short nap, it was time for lunch. In our pre-lunch wanderings, we came across a man offering sunset horseback rides. We couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
Aviva rides off into the Dahab sunset.
Scott gets to know his horse, Carmella.
The rest of our time in Dahab was fairly uneventful. We dismounted our horses and retired to the upper deck of the Penguin Restaurant. Did I say uneventful? I may have lied a bit. There was that one moment when the guy sitting on the edge of Penguin’s upper deck leaned back too far and almost ended up on the table of a family eating dinner on the lower level. Thank God, he caught himself and was quickly assisted back onto solid ground.
After dinner that evening, we retired to our hotel room to light the hannukiyah for the first night of Hanukah. As you can imagine, Egypt isn’t the biggest fan of we Jews. Unfortunately, we were not able to publicize the miracle of Hanukah as is traditional. Rather, we quietly sang the blessings in our hotel room with the door and windows closed. I am glad to say that we were able to do this safely for each night of our trip.
We quietly enjoyed the candlelight in our hotel room each night. How do
you like our egyptian lighter!?
The next morning we negotiated our way onto another minibus and headed to St. Katreen. The driver brought us straight to Fox Camp, a well known bedouin-style camp. We were greeted by the Fox himself and let Erin negotiate our room down to 8 USD per couple. We dropped our bags in our room and returned to our minibus driver who dropped us off around the corner at St. Katherine’s Monastery.
The monastery was gorgeous. As the oldest working Christian monastery in the world, St. Katherine’s had quite a few impressive artifacts to inspect. There are no photos allowed inside the sanctuary of the monastery, but I have never been so good at following rules:
A shot snapped from the hip as I walked out of the sanctuary at St.
Katherine’s monastery. They were quite serious about people not taking
photos!
One of the monastery’s many claims to fame is that it contains within its walls a shrub that it identifies as the burning bush from which God spoke to Moses (Exodus 3). Our tour book said that the plant is actually a descendant of what they think is the real burning bush. Either way, there were plenty of folks lined up to see it. It was humorous to hear how visitors reacted toward the bush. I overheard several discussions about whether or not folks thought that it was, in fact, the real thing. One such gentleman mocked his wife as she asked this question noting, “Sure it’s real. Didn’t you see the fire extinguisher?” (The monks had placed a large fire extinguisher beneath the bush that you can see in the picture below)
The burning bush at St. Katherine’s Monastery. If you were there and
it spontaneously combusted, would you try to put out the fire?
Aviva, Scott and the burning bush!
After the monastery, we returned to Fox Camp for lunch and some rest. Little did we know how much rest we should have given ourselves in order to have the strength to climb Jabl Mousa later that day. Jabl Mousa, or Moses’ Mountain is what the locals call the mountain believed to be Mt. Sinai, the place where the biblical Moses received the law from God (Exodus 19-20). The kind folks at Fox Camp arranged for Faraj, a very kind seventeen-ish year-old local Bedouin, to be our guide. Now, I know that I have been singing the praises of our Lonely Planet guidebook, but here it failed us. The guidebook describes the climb to the top of Mt. Sinai as being an easy 2-hour hike. In truth, it is a challenging 3-hour hike. With Faraj’s guidance and the patience of our friends, we hauled ourselves up all 7,500 ft of that mountain to look down on the setting sun.
Atop Mt. Sinai
(From L to R) Scott, Aviva, Erin, Ethan, Marcos, Scott and Faraj
After the requisite pictures, we used the last bit of dusk to climb down the stairs of repentance (3,000 or so hand-made steps from St. Katherine’s monastery to the top of the mountain. Created by a monk as penance for God only knows what. We walked up about 1,000 of them). Before the remainder of our descent, we stopped in a Bedouin tent for some delicious and well-deserved coffee. Shortly after, we hiked back down the mountain under a starlit sky like none I had ever seen before.
When we arrived at the bottom of the mountain, we were not immediately welcomed with the warm clothes and hearty dinner that we had expected. We were stopped by the Egyptian police who were not angry with us, but with our guide for trying to take us up the mountain a back way and sneak us back down without having to go through the police. We paid our guide, no doubt so that he could pay off the cops who were just angry that they almost missed out on their share.
Our crew finally returned to Fox Camp where we ate dinner and sat around the campfire until bedtime. While around the fire, we were entertained by Hemdi, an employee there, who poured us tea and told us corny jokes and riddles. One such riddle had to do three camels. Here it is:
There are three camels in a line. Let’s number them from left to right as Camel 1,2 and 3:
The first camel says that there are two camels in front of me and none behind me.
The second camel says that there is one camel in front of me and one behind me.
The third camel says that there are two camels in front of me and two camels behind me.
How is this possible? You got it....Because the third camel was a liar!
But we did not have the benefit of a blog title to give us the answer. So, like idiots, we spent some time discussing all of the possibilities with the other folks in the tent. Our friend and tour guide, Faraj, even tried to tell us the answer. However, he did not know how to say the word كذاب in English. (We should have known. The word pronounced kathab in Arabic is the same as the Hebrew root כזב/kazab, which means to lie.)
The next morning we packed ourselves into another minibus that took us from St. Katherine to Suez and put us on another bus from Suez to the city of Cairo.
Cairo was shocking from the beginning. Perhaps I am simply showing my ignorance with regard to the developing world, but still! Cairo is a huge city! 20 Million people live there! This isn’t some tiny village! Air pollution is reported to be between 10-100 times safe levels. Overall cleanliness is well below anything I’ve ever experienced. Many important laws go unenforced and as far as I am concerned, no American or Israeli has a claim to the title of most dangerous drivers in the world.
When we arrived in Cairo we took a taxi from the bus station to a hotel that had decent reviews. The Bella Luna Hotel suited our needs just fine. At 15 USD/night per couple it was our most expensive accommodations for the entire trip! After we settled up at the front desk we had three important missions and a limited amount of time as shabbat was approaching.
The view from our hotel room balcony.
The first mission was food. The concierge at our hotel directed us to a restaurant nearby that served koshary (كشرى), a traditional Egyptian food. We had no idea what a treat we were in for with this delicious treat! Koshary consists of a base of rice, brown lentils, chickpeas, macaroni, and a topping of Egyptian garlic and vinegar and spicy tomato sauce. Fried onions are commonly added as a garnish. By the end of our stay in Cairo, we would dine at three different Koshary restaurants: El Tahrir, another on Kuwait St. and the famous Abou Tarek restaurant. We quickly fell in love with this delicious, filling and inexpensive food. Depending on the size you order and the restaurant, a bowl of koshary will cost you between .50 and 1.75 USD.
The other delicacy we tried in Cairo was fuul (فول). Think of houmous, but with fava beans instead of chickpeas. Delicious! We tried this at Akher-Saa Restaurant.
Mission number two: With full bellies, we walked to the Shar Ha-Shamayim Synagogue. The synagogue was completed in 1899 and at one point had an active congregation. It is estimated today that there remains 30-40 members, mostly old women. The building is heavily guarded by the Egyptian police. In order to enter you must give over your passport. No photos are allowed inside or outside of the building. When we entered the woman at the door tried to get us to give her money, but we did not. It was clear that she was hired to welcome tourists and that the money would never have actually made it to the Jews of Cairo. She began to spout off facts about Judaism, the synagogue and the Jewish community of Cairo. It seemed as if she had googled Judaism and was regurgitating what she could remember from the articles she read. Some facts were correct and others were not. This was quite depressing. The building was beautiful inside and out. However the reminder of the destruction of vibrant Jewish communities throughout the Arab world where Jews lived as second-class citizens put a damper on our afternoon.
As we left the synagogue, Ethan made a remark that challenged my gloomy mood. He agreed that the story of Jewish Cairo today is quite depressing. However, he challenged me to think about what the synagogue’s early members would think about the fact that most of the surviving members of Arab Jewish communities were now residents of the modern State of Israel. Surely they would see this as a dream come true.
Onward to mission three: Shabbat preparation. We brought shabbat candles, a bottle of kiddush wine purchased at the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station (yuck!) and other assorted food items. At the market (سوق), we purchased the other items we would need to make shabbat in our hotel room. We ate dinner, quietly sang some songs and played a game of cribbage (which I won!) before bedtime.
We caught up on a bit of sleep on Shabbat morning. After which, we went for a stroll around Cairo. We checked out the Khan al-khalili neighborhood. This area is home to a large bazaar and many impressive mosques. Among the mosques we visited were the al-Husseini and al-Azhar mosques. Some of the worshipers inside were more than happy to show us around inside with the hopes that we would give them a small donation (baksheesh/بقشيش)
Late Saturday afternoon we walked to the Garden City area along the Nile River. Seeing the Nile was pretty cool, but a bit sad as the Cairo smog kept us from seeing any sort of sunset or even the other side of the river. After Shabbat, our plan was to head back to the khan al-khalili neighborhood, but an ill-intentioned cab driver ruined those plans for us. We tried to shake this one off and headed for some koshary therapy instead!
Sunday was a very busy and exciting day! We hired a car to take us to Giza, just outside of Cairo. Giza is the home to the sphinx and the great pyramids. People had told me that seeing these wonders was a bit underwhelming. I couldn’t disagree more! Never in my life did I think I would have the opportunity to stand next to these ancient and giant monuments. It was unfortunate that we had to wait three hours for the Cairo smog to rise enough for us to really see the pyramids, we were constantly fending off camel drivers asking for money and at times we had to trudge through garbage in order to get from one pyramid to another. But all in all we had a fantastic time.
“Kiss the sfankus” yelled one of the locals!
How could you not?
From L to R: Erin, Ethan, Aviva and Scott - We had a fabulous time with
our travel buddies!
After Giza, we returned to Cairo proper to check out the Cairo Museum. I was very excited to see many of the ancient Egyptian artifacts up-close. This too straddled the line between really cool and really sad. While seeing all of the museum’s contents was amazing, the place is filthy. The Cairo smog comes through the open windows and layers much of the museum with dust and grime. Most of the items are poorly labeled if they are labeled at all. Our guidebook told us that some of the artifacts that were being stored in the basement of the museum (the museum is much too small for everything they house there) have sunken into the basement floor and are being re-excavated by archaeologists.
Unfortunately, we do not have any pictures from the museum as cameras are not allowed inside. A guard at the door tried to get me to hand over my camera to the guards outside the museum while we walked around. No way in hell was that happening. I took the camera tripod in my hand and pretended to walk outside and give the camera to the guards. Before I did so I gave Aviva the actual camera bag and told her to make a run for it into the museum. Our little play distracted the guard enough that he eventually gave up on us and my camera remained in my possession. (Earlier in the day, the second time we walked up to the Sphinx, someone tried to stop me from taking pictures as well. Ethan and I performed a similar routine.)
We were sad to leave our friends Erin and Ethan on Sunday, but Aviva had to get back to school and I think we had taken in our fill of Cairo. We boarded another overnight bus from Cairo to Taba and crossed back into Israel first thing Monday morning.
All in all we had a fabulous trip. Aviva and I are so thankful to our friends Erin and Ethan for taking us on this little adventure. Egypt is a gorgeous place that oozes history and ancient artifacts. With a little elbow grease, (in the form of huge cultural changes) it could be so much more.
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