First Days in Egypt

My First Written Journal Entry:
"So I just discovered this really weird thing, I'm in Egypt! It's a hard thing to grasp and I'm pretty sure that I won't make the realization entirely until I'm standing in front of the pyramids or on top of a camel. Driving to Boston was easy compared to the eleven hours of plane rides we endured. Lufthansa is a great airline but I can feel my body dragging. I met Abdo and Karim at the airport and they are perfect. The city looked oddly beautiful on the way to the hotel from the airport. Decrepit buildings next to beautiful gardens - a mixture that I'm not sure how to feel about. You can tell some of the most beautiful buildings are the mosques and churches. After arriving we spent some time exploring places near the hotel. Dinner was fun at the cafe No Big Deal, where I had my first shwarema and grapeleaves, both excellent. Then we purchased large amounts of water for the pyramids and ventured back to the hotel. On the way back, we passed by a spot where we got a lot of attention, lots of cat calls.. "If i was a donkey.."- yeah, whatever. The problem is that it gets really uncomfortable walking with only girls, but the group just happened to get stretched out that way. The internet situation sucks, and we all continue to crowd around the window in our room to get service. Plus out hotel room's lack of electricity on one wall might prove to be pretty challenging."


I've now decided that trying to write in a journal every day or every other day isn't really working for me. I like to get my thoughts out but writing them down in a journal seems to take up too much time. So instead I'm going to try this..

Here's my updates from that first journal entry since it has been a day or two:

Pyramids day was perfect. We ate a hearty breakfast, doused ourselves with sunblock, and hopped on our camels. "Camels are the new puppy!" They were so much fun to ride, my was named Shakira, dubbed by Grace, because "her hips don't lie"... and she seemed to be the camel that was swaying her hips the most, probably because she had an advertisement for a bank on her butt. She was working hard for her money. But anyway... we parted ways with the camels to walk up the pyramids which are huge and beautiful. How a pile of giant stones can be so beautiful, I'm not too sure.. but they were. After the pyramids was the Sphinx.. smaller than I expected but still amazing. I got called a spicy girl about four times while at the Sphinx.. and heard a lot of things along the lines of "Aloha! Welcome to Alaska!" from vendors. After the sphinx we went to an authentic Papyrus shop where we were first shown how to make Papyrus.. and then purchased some beautiful papyrus artwork. I couldn't stop buying! (haha)
After we finished with the pyramids, parked our camels, and aired out our sweaty clothes and sandy socks, and a five hour nap (haha) a few of us headed over to Cilantro for dinner. Grace, April, Alyssa, and Andrew went with me there where it took soo much time to get food.. because the waiter only took Grace's order and most of the food was gone. I had some ginger cookies which I shared with a scruffy dog sitting next to us. New Best Friend! We called it a day after that crazy dinner, and the hotel finally fixed our electricity so that we could have a cool sleep and a cold refrigerator and some television to watch. (The Mask of Zorro!!)