Day 2 - Fact Finding

After 12 hours of sleep, I finally rolled out of bed at 7:30 am. Jay was up at least an hour earlier. We had bread, cheese, and jam at the hostel. As we have enough time in Cairo, we don't have to rush around just taking in the tourist sites only. We saw that today was fairly cool and slightly overcast. So, we didn't see the need to run to Giza to see the Pyramids yet. We instead just walked around this area as we are pretty much in the old city center. We made it to the river and walked across the bridge to the island where the Cairo Tower stands. Look it up on Wikipedia, it is older than me.


After we crossed another bridge, we went to the old, government ferry boats. It costs one Egyptian Pound which is around 15 cents. We weren't in any hurry so we returned the same way.


It was getting to be noon by this time but we decided to get into a taxi to "Ramses Square" near the main train station. Well, Jay remembers it as containing an 11-meter replica statue from his visit in 1987. We had a hard time making people understand us when giving directions as it was removed quite a number of years ago. It will eventually be housed at the new national museum out near the pyramids. There is no longer a square there either!

While close, we did try to buy tickets to Aswan at the train station. We wanted express tickets but not sleeper ones. We were told that foreigners had to pay $109 for the sleeper train for security, although I thought it probably had more to do with making more cash from people who could afford to subsidize the train system. Nope, wasn't about to happen. We came back the hotel and bought them online for less than 9 dollars. We will go next Sunday at 7:00 pm. As it takes 13 hours we'll be competing with the sleeper train just not as comfortably.

Mostly today, I'll remember as a lot of walking.