Cairo

Highlights:
- Eating in an Egyptian food court with our new friend Hussein (who paid for our meal and kept calling us honey)
- Seeing the pyramids!
- Our cab ride with Farek, which included highlights such as Farek's obsession with Lindsay Lohan, Farek singing to the gas station attendant, and Farek grabbing the arms of people in minibuses next to us
- Seeing how papyrus (Ancient Egyptian paper) is made
- Seeing mummies at the Egyptian Museum
- Crossing the street in heavy traffic to get to the museum (extremely dangerous, but it's how the locals do it)
- The ten-year old kid we witnessed smoking at the train station
- The people here (at least the ones we met!)

Tidbits about Egypt and Cairo:
- 90% of Egypt's fresh water comes from the Nile, which is extremely polluted in Cairo
- The airport here has a prayer area
- Friday and Saturday comprise the weekend
- Traffic is insane... lanes are either really wide or non-existent, and drivers here use their horns liberally (people here joke that your car is totaled if the horn is broken)
- 17 million people live in Cairo
- The Rosetta Stone is currently housed in the British Museum in London
- Everyone here loves Obama, and it's nearly always the first thing people tell us when we tell them we're American
- For reasons that still elude me, all the kids here ask for pens
- As women are commonly home during the day, we have primarily encountered men here
- Similar to Morocco, many people hassle you for money here, including the police (and it's incredibly unnerving turning down someone carrying a gun)
- The quantity of cooking oils in the markets here is incredible
- Everyone thinks it's funny to welcome tourists to Alaska
- The metro in Cairo reserves two cars strictly for women (women are welcome to board the other trains as well, but men are forbidden from riding these two trains)
- Sales pitches here are remarkably similar (for example, nearly all spice vendors ask you to identify an unusual spice in order to strike up a conversation and hopefully reel you in)
- Egyptian cuisine is similar to other Middle Eastern cuisine. Our favorite foods here included kushari, shwarma, falafel, figs, Schweppes lemon, mango juice, rice pudding, and dolmas.
shwarma, felafel, figs, Schweppes lemon, mango juice, rice pudding, and dolmas.
- Joci and I get hit on by nearly everyone here (don't get me wrong - it does have its perks ;))