Egypt - Old Cairo and Sweating at the Train Station

Yesterday was super hot. I went around town with my Swedish friends. We went to the train station so that I could buy my train ticket to Luxor. We took the metro to the train station. The metro was jam-packed with people and was hot as well. We sweated on the way there. Then once we got to the train station, I went to wait in line at Platform 11 to buy a ticket. People pushed behind me and it was really a line but a mob with me at the front. I was sweating like crazy, because of the extra heat from all the people around. I was nervous because I wasn'tsure if the ticket lady understood English, but luckily she did. I purchased the ticket and we got out of there.

We jumped back on the Metro and went to Old Cairo. Old Cairo was a collection of churches from the 9th Century. We saw a Greek Orthodox Church, a coptic church and synagogue, all right close to each other. Everything was very old. We called it quits early because we were so hot.

Later in the evening, we went on a cruise down the Nile. The entertainment included belly dancing. We were pretty tired from walking around all down and Jonas wanted to go to the top deck to get some fresh air. He got up and went by the belly dancer. She grabbed him and said she would kill him if he left. Jonas promptly returned to our table. We all got a good laugh out of it and quietly snuck out.

I'm pretty thankful for meeting up with Magnus and Jonas from Sweden. We explored Cairo together and had a great time. These guys were pretty funny because they didn't understand how someone could spend a day in Petra, Jordan. They were talking about this with Tosh and May, the girl that came with him. May asked if they saw this particular church, even showing them a photo on her camera. Turns out, that they didn't walk far enough at Petra and missed one of the great sites. Similarly, we were in the Egyptian Museum and we thought we were down with the second floor. Jonas, even said "I am done with this floor." We walked towards the stairs and I saw signs for the other Royal mummy exhibit and I asked if we had seen it yet. We hadn't so we went in. We all laughed becuase they almost left without seeing it.

An interesting thing about our hostel is that new people would always sleep in our dorm room. There were two extra beds and someone who worked at the hostel was always in there taking a nap. It could be night, day, basically anytime. We always wondered who would show up next. The bad part is that they never changed the sheets after sleeping there. Glad, I'm outta that place tonight.