The Laughlins

OK - I am starting with our Egypt trip!! We went to Cairo for 4 days at the end of March. Unfortunately, when you take a bus there, it means two days on a bus and two days in Cairo. We saw a lot over our time there though. On the first day, we left Jerusalem at 8:45am, passed through Tel Aviv and picked up more passengers, and then went to Eilat where the Taba Border Crossing is into Egypt. We were on a nice, but completely full bus on this first part of the trip. By the time we got to the border, it was around 4 or 5pm, and it took a LONG time to cross the border through all of the checkpoints. We changed our shekels to Egyptian Pounds at the crossing.








By the time we boarded a new bus on the Egypt side (Taba - where Mark and I stayed in August), it was already dark, and we were on a rather dirty, uncomfortable, and completely full Egyptian bus. There are some funny stories that go with this leg of the trip - like how there were two old-school TVs on the bus: one in front and one halfway back that didn't work right. They turned most of the lights off in the bus, and started playing a Jean Claude Van Damme it was a stupid movie, Double Team, starring Dennis Rodman with Arabic subtitles. It was awful. Not to mention the fact that it was tape-recorded from someone's TV set, with commercials and all. AND, the TV half-way back (we were in the last seat of the bus), kept flicking on and off with a bright white screen, 30 shaky seconds of movie, and then snapped off, only to repeat the process 30 seconds later. It was enough to drive a person crazy after a million hours on a bus. Not to mention that the roads are extremely curvy heading into Egypt for the first hour or more. I put headphones on, pulled Mark's hat over my face down to my nose, and attempted to drown out the cheesy dialoge and static of the "movie" and sleep (to no avail). After a number of hours, we stopped at this restaurant in the middle of nowhere...literally. There was one building across from it and desert on all sides. We couldn't really see this in the dark, but we stopped there on the way back to Israel, so you can see those pictures later. We had been pre-warned about many things in Egypt, from the food to being ripped off, so we had rice in a pita and some soup - a meager meal to say the least, but it was nice to be out of the bus for a while.






We then drove another many hours and finally arrived in Cairo. We had to take a taxi the rest of the way to our hostel, so Alana flagged one down who would take us for 15 pounds (about $2.50). This was our first driving experience in Egypt, and it is like nothing you can explain to someone who hasn't experienced it themselves. It was an adventure to say the least - fun in it's own way. By the end of this particular ride, we came to the conclusion that our driver must have been on drugs or something - he had incredibly long "fingernails" (claws), a fur-covered steering wheel (the WHOLE wheel), and was playing rather psychotic trance music with a wailing woman in the background. In any case, we made it there, and Alana tried to pay him the 15 pounds, and he said, "15!!" And Alana said, "Yeah, 15 - that's what you said." And he says, "No. 15," and drew a 20 in the dirt on the hood of the car. We didn't care at this point. It was past 1am, we had been on a bus for over 15 hours, and we were exhausted, so we paid him the 20 pounds, and checked in. We were staying at the Canadian Hostel and decided after previously having a brief conversation with the taxi driver that it would be fun, better, and less stressful to pretend that we were from Canada instead of America while we were there (as Americans are not generally liked worldwide right now...except for their money) We then took showers (I wish I had a picture of the "showers"), and went to bed. What a day!! It was a rather funny, typical experience, and especially funny now that it's over :)