Day 2: Cairo

I wrote in word documents in my laptop small journal entries each day I was in Egypt so that's why I can easily write about each day here.

We landed in Cairo around 11:00 on May 19th! I remember the moment I stepped off the plane, I thought, "This is freaking it! I'm HERE. I can't believe I'M HERE." When we got on the bus that took us to our hotel (and various other locations throughout Egypt - we basically lived on those buses), we got these ARAMFO gift bags that had a notebook and pen, laundry soap, a power converter, and an ARAMFO t-shirt that only came in two sizes: large and extra large.

Every day, we had the option to eat falafel or fool sandwiches or this AMAZING dish called kushari, which I will get to in future entry, for lunch. Falafel is basically fried chickpeas or fava beans in a patty. I wasn't too big a fan of it mainly because it was suppperrrr dry. I probably would've enjoyed it better with any sort of sauce. I called fool "Egyptian burritos" because they're just fava beans in a pita-like bread. And it tasted like a burrito to me, haha.

This was our hotel during our entire stay in Cairo - the Cataract Pyramids Resort. 

The view from the window from my hotel room. Pretteh!!!

We had a couple hours to ourselves to unpack and shower and then we were scheduled to tour around Cairo. Look at the drastic change in appearance between this part of Cairo and how nice the view from our hotel was! 

We immediately got a tease of the pyramids on the tour!

We took our first shopping trip around Cairo that day. Here, I bought myself a cartouche of my name in hieroglyphs! While talking to the guy who sold it to us, I asked if I could get the ankh after my name and instead, he put it on the back of the cartouche...for FREE!

  

Here's a picture of my cartouche and the free scarab beetle I got with it! Everyone in Egypt has been so friendly and kind so far! I was SO tired though. I wish they gave us more time to rest! Yes, you should take advantage of every moment while you're away in a foreign country exploring it BUT I'd also like to do so on a well-rested mind, haha. I still had a GREAT first day in Cairo but let's just say I had no trouble getting to sleep that night. :)