I think I’m catching my dad’s cold and I have seemed to have lost my voice. We had a nice breakfast at the hotel. Our first stop was the Alabaster Mosque or Mohammad Ali Mosque (not named after the boxer). One of the women in our group tripped over a step and fell because of a crazy vendor that was in her face. Later we found out that she broke her ankle.
We went to the Egyptian Antique Museum and spent about two hours in the museum seeing various Egyptian artifacts and the highlight was the King Tut exhibit with the golden head piece. Unfortunately we couldn’t take any pictures in the museum. We learned later on that the head of the museum was arrested and he was being tried while we were in Egypt. He was arrested after the March uprising for allegedly turning off the security cameras in the museum during the uprising allowing thieves to take several artifacts. Fortunately most of the stolen items have been found and returned to the museum.
The museum building was right next to the government building that was burned during the uprising in March. They are not going to demolish that building, but are going to keep it as reminder of that day. The government building and museum were right on the edge of the Tahrir square where the Egyptian’s were demonstrating against Mubarak.
On our way to lunch today, we were driving across a bridge and we were stuck in some traffic when all of a sudden another bus driver decided to drive on the sidewalk with his vehicle, a full size city bus. As he passed us, a section of the bridge collapsed under him, but he kept on going. We were hoping that nobody was under the bridge area and that we would get off the bridge before any more of it collapsed. We could see the river below through the hole which was about 4 ft x 6 ft. I wonder how long it took for someone to rope off the area and then to fix the huge hole.
Lunch was at a Nile River restaurant. It was a buffet and it wasn’t too bad. Since traffic was so bad, our tour guide arranged for us to have a boat ride on the Nile where we would later catch up to the bus. The boat was a small motorize boat called a felucca. This boat just fit the 20 of us. Our guide said that sometimes families live on these boats. It was hard to imagine that. As we first took off, the boat driver had to siphon gas from a 5 gallon can into his tank. Immediately after he siphoned the gas, he lit a cigarette near the open gas container. Jay, being the fire protection guy, was looking how to escape the boat if it caught on fire. I’m not sure if my parents noticed, but if they did, I could only imagine what they were thinking. As we were at the shore and getting off the boat, another boat hit us. The lady with the hurt ankle was knocked on to our tour guide. Jay was helping people of the boat and caught my mom as she was getting ready to step off the boat. Everyone made it safely ashore. As our boat drive pulled away from the shore, he made sure that he bumped into the other boat. There were some words exchanged between the boat owners, which I am sure had some to do with the other driver’s heritage and camels.
As we started our drive back to Alexandria our driver took a short cut and ended up on a one way street going the wrong way. There were 7 lanes of traffic coming right at us. You could hear my mom in the front of the bus saying “Oh my God”, “Oh my God”. We finally made it to the highway without any further excitement. As we were getting close to the main area in Alexandria, there were people everywhere. It must have been shopping night since everyone was out. Traffic again was not moving and it was getting late. At one time our security guard was ready to get off the bus to clear the traffic in order to keep us moving. We finally made it safely back to our ship. We were the last group back to the ship and we were about 20 minutes late. After the last person in our group made it on board, they pulled the ramp in preparation of the boat leaving the dock.
Our tour guide mentioned several times to us that this would be a trip that we would never forget and he was right. It was quite an adventure and one that we will never forget. Especially since I have no plans in the future to ever go back to Egypt.
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