To start the day yesterday, we visited the Grand Egyptian Museum – GEM and saw the King Tut mask along with various other sundry artifacts from 0 to 1,400 BC. I’m not much of a museum person, but the dates on these artifacts were hard to fathom. On our walk from there, we were absconded twice by locals wanting to just show us stores with great deals. It was harmless and we went along for the short walks, but since we have little to no desire to purchase anything, we politely excused ourselves. (The lack of tourists here is clearly devastating the economy. I’m considering what we can do in place of not fulfilling the roll of spendy tourists.) Next, we headed for the Cave Church, but it was completely miss marked (by many miles) on Google Maps. We abandoned the search and instead headed to the Abdeen Palace Museum. Unfortunately, it turned out to be another museum – and the one seemingly gilded room I had wanted to see was closed. Oh well! Next on our list was a quick trip to the Mohammed Ali Palace.
We decided to get back on track with our search for the Cave Church via an Uber, but our driver repeatedly missed turns and drove way off course. Once we entered Manshiyat Naser, “Garbage City” in English, because of the people’s work, we ended our ride and proceeded on foot.
See my next post: Traveling to Egypt: Day 3.5 – Garbage City
To navigate our way back to the main road after visiting the Cave Church we took a tuk-tuk. From the main road, we hailed a taxi (intentionally trying an alternative to Uber) and got parked in gridlock. We decided to travel the rest of the way on foot. Unfortunately, the taxi driver insisted on charging us more than double what the Uber ride would have cost (the gridlock was irrelevant as Uber had accounted for that already). Grr!! We returned to our luxury hotel (feel free to gag in disgust here), hung out in the lobby until it was time to head to dinner. For dinner, we headed to a local Italian affair before walking the rest of the way to our train. At the train station, one of the station attendants called to us just as we were trying to determine our platform. He then proceeded to take us to the correct platform (which was actually helpful this time). When our train finally arrived, the same attendant then helped us board the correct carriage and find our seats. (We tipped him.) The train was moderately full and very old – what I would affectionately call 3rd world first class.
Loving this. It is somewhere I would like to travel too but I fear that I would not be safe. If you think about it in your travels please take a pic of the flowers there and maybe so of the shops.
Hi Lauriea, Is your concern for safety a health concern (COVID) or a crime concern? The COVID concern is worth thinking carefully about but regardless, hopefully, it is temporary. From a crime perspective, Egypt is remarkably safe – impressively so in fact. As a male, concern for safety is (unfortunately), less of an issue so that means I can’t give you an authoritative perspective, but our experience here has been very good. The only time you have to be careful is when people try to haggle for a higher price than is reasonable or change the price to something higher because you are not Egyptian.