Cairo

Looky who is taking a turn to blog!  It is Michael.  I stayed put so I could rest my weary body, especially my knees.  It seems as though one of the side effects of the antibiotic I was taking for my infected thumb can cause tendinitis   I don't know if that is why my knees hurt so bad, but the timing is suspicious.  So here it goes:

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Well, it’s my (Michael) turn to shine as I escorted an all day excursion to Cairo while Beverly remained aboard the Quest to get a massage, play bridge (huh?) and tend to her aching knees.

Cairo hasn’t changed much since we were here three years ago, except maybe the Muslim Brotherhood is now in charge, Hosni Mubarak’s party’s building has been burned down, unemployment is up, illiteracy is up, and over one million Egyptians live in graveyards.  Such progress!!!

So, a little background first.  Cairo is s city of some 20 million people out the total Egyptian population of 85 million.  It is crowded, dirty and heavily polluted.  It is estimated to be the third most (after Mexico City and Beijing) polluted city in the world.  It is old, old, old.  In fact, Cairo is 1,000 years old, while Giza, right next door, is some 4,500 years old.  Politically, the place is a mess.  While Mohammed Morsi garnered a majority of the vote some eleven months ago, it is estimated today that if he ran now he would get about ten percent.  Believe it or not, most Egyptians wish for Hosni Mubarak to return.  Our tour guide put it most eloquently when he said the Egyptians traded in a corrupt (Mubarak) regime for a corrupt and inept (Morsi) Regime.  There were over 1,300 strikes in March of this year alone, and so hopefully the end of the Brotherhood is close.

Egypt derives the largest amount of its annual revenue from the Suez Canal (some $55 billion US annually), tourism and cotton, in that order.  However, tourism is off some 80%.  Three years ago there was one vendor at the Pyramids for every eight visitors.  Today it is one to one, and they have become super aggressive.  I had one woman on my bus who was groped by a vendor, to the surprise of absolutely no one.  Our guide, who is a university trained Egyptologist told us that this was his first assignment in over 18 months, and consequently he is having a very hard time surviving.  He voted for Morsi but now can’t wait for him to be removed from power.  Even while I was in Cairo, the Justice Minister resigned in protest and several vehicles were set on fire. Oh, did I mention I visited Tarir Square?  Believe it or not, the single biggest problem right now is the lack of diesel fuel.  Trucks, buses, etc. are lined up literally for days at the pump.

The city of Cairo is expanding in a most unusual way.  Just before Mubarak was overthrown, an enormous number of building projects were begun.  Today, they sit unfinished, while millions cannot find a place to live.  The new housing projects undertaken under Morsi are almost all illegal.  That is, they are built without permits, inspections, and so forth.  I am sure you have read that they also collapse from time to time with little notice or concern from the government.  And now the army is doing some very strange things.  For example, while I was at the pyramids, a big army helicopter landed a soldier on top of one of the pyramids so he could raise their flag.  This is totally illegal, but that means nothing.  Back to the city, the traffic is simply unbelievable.  Nothing moves, horns never stop honking, no laws are obeyed.  It is just a mess.

Nile River

Typical apartment buildings

Have they heard of sanitation?

City street

Your guess about what is going on is as good as mine!

Another interesting thing about new construction is that they virtually never finish anything on the outside.  The inside of a new apartment building may be fine, but the outside is poorly laid bricks, with no effort to finish the work at all.  For example, window frames abound, but there are no windows.  Nothing is painted or plastered over.  Did I mention the garbage?  The infrastructure in Cairo is so bad that they don’t even bother to get rid of the garbage.  They throw it in the canals around town, or just leave it on the street to be blown away by the wind. 

Unfinished construction abounds

Well, now for a little bit about the excursion itself, which I enjoyed very much.  Our first stop, after the two hour drive to Cairo from Sokhna where the ship was moored, was the Egyptian Museum of Antiquates, which is an antiquity itself, at 104 years ago.  It is a mess.  Dirty and totally falling apart, but housing some of the most priceless art in the entire world.  There are some 120,000 pieces on display, and all but one (a replica of the Rosetta Stone) is an original.  The high point of the museum is the King Tutankhamen exhibit which is frankly unbelievable.  It includes his 250 pound solid gold coffin, his 25 pound solid gold breast plate, and so forth.  The only thing more unbelievable than the treasures was the sloppy way in which these priceless pieces were kept.

We next had a very unmemorable lunch at the Hotel Meridian.  Fortunately, this was a brief stop as it was time to move on to the Pyramids, the last standing of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  Here we saw the Cheops Pyramid which is 480 feet tall.  It is made up of 2,300,000 individual blocks (twelve times the volume of the Empire State Building) and weighs in at 16.5 million tons.  It took 100,000 people over seven years to construct.  We also saw the Chephren and Mycerinus Pyramids which are right next door.  These three pyramids are over 4,500 years old. It truly boggles the imagination.  Finally, we stopped briefly at the Sphinx which is even more decrepit than the last time we were here.  They really need to fix this and soon.  Now it was time for the required stop at the souvenir shop followed by an agonizingly long trip back to Sokhna and home.

 

Cheops Pyramid (center) with brothers Chephren and Mycerinus

The sphinx taken at an angle with the great pyramid behind it