Scary mummies

We arrived in Cairo around 1:00 this morning. We had arranged for a taxi from the hotel to pick us up, so we didn't have to deal with the expected hassel at the airport. Straight away the guy tried to rip us off by charging twice what we were quoted from the hotel in an email. We told the guy to take care of it through the hotel, and we quickly got a room, had a shower and slept until 11:30.

We were woken by loud chanting coming from outside. It turned out to be the guy in the mosque next door, calling out prayer time (one of five times throughout the day) through loud speakers on the street. This will become a very familiar sound to us, at all hours of the day, as long as we remain in a Muslim country. We had the crappy (but free) breakfast from our hotel, the Meramees, then headed for the Egyptian Museum.

We were able to walk to the museum from our hotel. Luckily it was a short walk, as it was about 36C/97F. Walking along the gates of the museum, we were pleased to see that such priceless items housed inside are so well-guarded. In fact, there is a police office with a machine gun about every 15 feet around the museum's perimeter. On the way in, we passed through 2 different metal detectors and had our bags x-rayed two different times. Once we were finally inside, we were free of the hasslers outside, but the museum is not air-conditioned, so it was a bit stuffy. We spent most of the afternoon viewing the more than 120,000 ancient relics and antiquities inside. We saw the Narmer Palette (a depiction of basically the start of ancient Egyptian civilisation), King Tut's stuff (including the famous gold death mask), and of course mummies. We had to pay a small fortune to enter the mummy room, where there are 11 mummies on display. These are the remains of some of Egypt's most famous pharaohs and queens, dating between 1650 A.D. and 945 B.C. We couldn't believe how 'in-tact' they look, given their ages. Admittedly, they are a bit frightening, but amazing all the same. We could see individual toe nails, hair still combed perfectly, old scars, and many of the details similar to a sleeping (yet shrivelled) person.

Basically we walked around the museum in awe of how old everything is. Everything seems fake it is so old. It was amazing. After we'd had enough, we went out and had our first Egyptian meal: kushari, a mix of noodles, rice, black lentils, fried onions and tomato sauce as well as shawarma, strips of beef or chicken sliced from a spit, sizzled on a hot plate and stuffed into bread with sauce, tomatoes, onion and parsley (like a gyros)(or Yiros in Adelaide). The food was cheap and fantastic. Kushari is like mixing all of the leftovers in your fridge and dumping a jar of spaghetti sauce on top. It doesn't look too great, but tastes excellent. After stuffing ourselves, we headed to an Egyptian coffee and sheesha shop (a scary looking contraption they smoke tobacco through, like a big bong really) where we had to sit behind shuttered windows to enjoy a few cold Stella beers (the Egyptian one not Belgium one). We then headed off for a cold shower and bed.