The Duck is the Bucket, Welcome to Cairo

As we walked out of the Odeon tonight, a hip bar that one of Annika's showed her when she first came to Cairo, I wondered exactly where our hotel was in relation to it... i mumbled under my breath - it's probably right across the street. And sure enough, it was. That was probably the only "easy" part of a rather long but very fun day.

We got up, after waking up often thru the night as it was the first time we had had more than 3 hours of sleep consecutively.

Back tracking, we left Seattle at noon on Saturday after a long, dancing, costuming night at Rat City Rollergirls' Derby Prom. (I mean we were packed - ready to go - why not kick vacation off with a big costume party.) The end results were super fun though a slight bit exhausting and hangover. Our plane took off for a 9 hour flight to Amsterdam... and it went very smoothly at first, with individual movies at each chair, games to play and plenty to keep ourselves entertained. Then fatigue set in and my comment about "Oh gosh this is turbulent..." turned into very turbulent and we rode out 10 very bumpy minutes with white knuckles. We landed in Amsterdam and it was 7 a.m. Sunday morning (with time zone changes) and 32 degrees. Somehow we weren't quite prepared.

Amsterdam is based on a very strong Euro compared to our very weak dollar and we drop $40 in 20 minutes buy train tickets to downtown (we go on the wrong train) and breakfast - which should have been $8 but was more like $18 (making me sad.) Not entirely sure what to do in 32 degree weather in a city where we only had 10 hours, we ran into a sign for the Anne Frank House and got in line. I had forgotten that she was in Holland (via Germany) and it was a very real and humbling way to spend a few hours. We then headed to a pub and grabbed a beer talked about our trip with fatigue set in. We had been awake for a long time at this point. We left to get some fresh air and there were, I kid you not, thousands of people it the streets. It turns out some festival was just letting out - and i know there was something cultural going on that I just didn't get but there were all of these characters, somehow related to St. Nick, that were essentially jesters dressed in 'black face' - curly hair wigs, painted faces, gloves and these bright jester costumes. It was so weird and some of the kids who were watching and being carted around by their parents were dressed like them too... (but before i freak out on the Dutch, I need to look it up and try and figure out what the heck that was). We headed back to the airport too tired for words and slept on a some "comfy chairs" mean just for that. A passenger on our flight, actually in the seat in front of me, was injured when a man dropped a laptop on his head (!) sending him in to a seizure (!), then the door on the plane broke. We sat on the plane for two hours before we were unloaded and reloaded - 5 hours later than expected arriving in Egypt early Monday morning.

We made it to our hostel, called Annika and promptly went to sleep in our first attempt to get more than 3 hours of sleep in 48 hours! Annika met us a Hardee's (yes, you heard me right) by the American University in Cairo. We left there and ate some kushari (local dish) and headed to her neighborhood where she had Arabic classes. We sat at the Starbucks of Cairo and sipped a coffee (Annika sent us there to kill time) before we headed off to her apartment, for chatter and back out the door for fool - a local bean dish that I didn't like the first time I tried it but enjoyed it so much more this time. Back to the hostel and to bed before we tried to conquer the Egyptian Museum today.

Which we did. And there is so much to write about - more stories about getting lost, meeting young students who want to take your picture, going to the very top of a mosque and overlooking the city at night, drinking fresh pomegranate juice, smoking a hooka and drinking Turkish coffee, buying a camel snow globe for a friend at home (because it just cracks me up) and the beginnings of all of that and the million of things that make Cairo so interesting and fun.

But I've been walking all day and need to save these stories for tomorrow...