Globe trottin': Egypt

"I'll buy you for 12,000 Camels!"
This is the line that a woman will hear from a male merchant when she goes to Egypt. I heard this line being used a couple of times towards women tourists while touring the pyramids. Oddly enough, the guys would increase/decrease the number of camels according to the particular woman they were looking at. My magic number was 12,000. I didn’t know if I should have said thanks or that’s it!?! Instead my answer was, "That’s nice but I’m married…to that big guy over there with the tattoos. He just got out of jail and he’s so excited to be here. Would you like to meet him?"

Ooh, Egypt. This is the country that developed the first paper (papyrus) and holds one of the great wonders of the world, the Great Pyramid in Giza. With such a rich history that started around 3000 BC, it’s almost forgivable that male merchants harass women. I say that because I did go "Ugly American" on a few merchants who harassed and cheated my grandparents onto riding a camel. This story gives me high blood pressure so I will try to make it quick and short.

First off, if you don’t know what "Ugly American" means I’ll define it for you…Straight from wikipedia. Ugly American is a stereotypical offensive American: a loud, boorish, nationalistic American, especially one traveling abroad, who is regarded as conforming to a stereotype that gives Americans a bad reputation.

I only really went "Ugly American" once in my whole life before Egypt. It was in Australia when a Taxi cab driver cheated my roommate and me and told us to pay 5x as much because he thought we were stupid tourists that didn’t know our way around Sydney. Boy, was he wrong…But anyways, that’s another story for another blog.

Back to Egypt…My grandpa was basically coerced to sit on a camel and then they wouldn’t let him down unless we paid them some outrageous price in American dollars. My grandma was so scared; she panicked and took out her traveling passport/wallet that she hid underneath her clothes (Oh, grandma. Let me remind you that my grandma has post traumatic stress from the Vietnam War). They spotted her wads of $20 bills and had a group huddled around her and they started pointing at the money. I ran over there with my Big ugly American mouth and started saying random things about "being an American tourist harassed and taken advantaged by Egyptian merchants….yada yada…This is outrageous…blah, blah, blah…I’ll break your camel’s neck." I honestly don’t remember what I said. I just know that I was pissed and my BP was sky rocketing. Needless to say, things were settled for $5 and he was let down. My poor granny stayed on the tour bus for the rest of the day and missed out on many stops following that. She was paranoid that someone was going to kidnap her. As for my grandpa, he was oblivious that people were taking advantage of him. It was hilarious, actually. After the whole episode, he came up to me and said "did you get a chance to take any pictures of me on the camel?"

The answer was YES.

Three pyramid pictures

The sphinx and pyramid at Giza

(Granny on the right looks all nervous and she's tugging on her passport holder)

Other than that experience, I enjoyed the pyramids and the sphinx. In our visit, we were also able to visit the first pyramid ever built, the step pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara. We then visited the tomb exhibition of the Pharaoh Ramsey II and ended with a quick glance at the Nile River. We finally finished and made a few stops in the cities of Cairo and Alexandria (named after Alexandria the Great).