The last day in Cairo

The next morning we all slept in, going for breakfast at 9 am. After breakfast, we gathered our things and checked out, leaving our bags at the hostel for the day while we did more touring. The first stop was to be the Egyptian Museum. Once again, student IDs were handy. After a few hours of hieroglyphs and mummies, we left to go to Khan el Khalil market to get some lunch and do some souvenir shopping. I hadn’t finished my meal, so I packaged it up in my purse and brought it from the restaurant. The stray pooch who I gave it to really appreciated it. The market place was huge, with a local side selling fabrics and clothes and wares, and a tourist side, with 7 or 8 varieties of shop selling belly dancer clothes, hookahs, pyramids and the like. While perusing the wares, we ran into our friends from the border, the students from the university in Ramallah, so we all stopped to have tea. This evening was then a huge soccer match between Egypt and Algeria ( I think), so everyone was going crazy for it the entire day, carrying flags, wearing painted faces, banging drums etc. This craziness inspired Chelsea, Caroline and I to want to get to the bus station early to avoid any problems with traffic, etc. So even though our bus didn’t leave Cairo until nearly 10, we were at the station by 8. After buying our bus tickets and getting our change literally all in change (we each had handfuls of single pound coins—felt like pirates), we made camp upstairs in the station by a burger café, were a dozen or so men were gathered to watch the game. We ordered some dinner and played cards while the hooligans went through ups and downs with their team, and the poor performance led to a couple of big fights breaking out in the mall. In Egypt, they don’t drink alcohol: just goes to show you that men can be stupid and belligerent while completely sober, too. On the plus side, the custom of service in Egypt is so high that even the burger and fries I ordered were served to me on a silver tray, with my tea in a real tea cup. We finally boarded the bus, braced ourselves for the long, uncomfortable, and freezing night ride ahead of us, and tried to go to sleep.