Where to start with Hristina? She and I first met my second summer in Bulgaria. I had been helping Matt run the summer day-camp he and I had put on and which I took over the next year. Hristina was dating another American volunteer at the time. He was in the same group as Matt was, so he and Matt were both about to leave the country. Hristina was driving him through Bulgaria to say goodbye to his friends, and they came through Zavet to meet up with Matt. That night she crashed on the floor with her boyfriend in my spare room after helping cook dinner. Ends up she was an archaeologist (how sexy is that!?) and cut hair in Sofia. The barber in my town had just left to go back to the Netherlands, and I could no longer get my hair cut in town since the ladies at the beauty shop didn’t cut men’s hair. So, I got Hrisi’s number, and told her I would call for an appointment when I got back in to Sofia, which I did at least every three months. It became a strong friendship.
I saw Hristina almost every time I went to Sofia. I’d call her, make sure she had an opening, and would go get my haircut. A couple of time we’d go out to a party together. Eventually she came back to Zavet a year after we’d met to participate in the camp. She volunteered to come and paid 40 leva to travel 12 hours round trip to get there (keep in mind most Bulgarians only earn about 300 Leva a month!). She spent two days volunteering and even chipped in for food and beer (meanwhile some Peace Corps volunteers – whose job it was to be there – were grumbling about 5 leva a day for food and beer and lodging at Chez Koubi). What a beautiful soul!
At the end of my time in Bulgaria she came out to my going away dinner, as seen in this post. It was a sad affair saying goodbye to her, but I had faith I would see her again. Continuing my friendship with her (we still email and chat online), is one of the big reasons I am hoping to get stationed in the Balkans with the Foreign Service.
Anyway, I’m surprised it took this long for me to do a post about her. Хриси- Лиспваш мен!
BFE Indeed. Excuse me, sir, can you tell me how to get back to Interstate Ten?
Alright, I’m super-pissed at WordPress right now. I FINALLY get back to trying to update this thing for once and it autosaves right when, for some reason while undoing some poor image entry with <ctrl>+<z>, I lose the whole post and wordpress autosaves the post! I lost everything, and I was almost done! Argh! Cairo continues to curse me even after a year plus! Curse you right back, Cairo!
So here goes rebuilding this post from memory…
Carey and I arranged with the hostel owner to have one of his relatives drive us out to the pyramids on the morning of day three. This was not a cab. This was us paying his cousin or brother of third uncle twice removed on his step-dad’s side or something. Keep that in mind for later. The ride over was interesting. Any car ride in Cairo as a visitor is interesting. It’s just so busy. I’d hate to have to drive in it, but it’s kind of fun to see it as a spectator, provided you’re in no hurry. By the time we got to Giza and started to see the Pyramids poke through gaps in buildings we began to see camels alongside the road pulling carts and stuff much like donkeys did in Bulgaria, only this was new and fresh and interesting to us again because, hey, there’s a camel! This mood was quickly spoiled by our destination outside of Giza – a shabby stable for a racket where our driver oh so kindly took us to a place where we could rent horses or camels very cheap to see the pyramids on. “Oh, it’s so far, and it’s so big. You’ll get tired.” Whatever, dude, we’re not falling for it. That may work for some fat middle-aged tourist from the industrialized West who isn’t used to walking anywhere exept to his bed, couch, table, desk, or car, but we Peace Corps veterans are used to walking around all damned day. Also, your camels and horses are not exactly the best looking animals in the world, and I refuse to support your business and the conditions it keeps them in. Also, I’m not too keen on the smell of the damned beasts and don’t want it to dominate my experience. So, after being harassed for five minutes there we walked up to the pyramids.
Sphinx, and Two of Three Great Pyramids
On of the first things that strikes you about the pyramids, besides their enormity, is how close they are to the city. In the nice pictures you always see of them they always look like their off in the distant desert with civilazation nowhere to be found. Not the case. As Clark Griswold would say, “I think they took this from a different angle.” The city is right there, and its pollution’s haze distorts your gaze if you look back at it. This picture from behind the Sphinx illustrates the proximity well:
The Sphinx Watches over Giza
The first thing you get to do is walk around the Sphinx, which is in a pit from when it was excavated. Some of it, as you can see above, has been reconstructed. It’s still pretty large and impressive, though. And beautiful.
Riddle Me This...
After the Sphinx you can walk up to the rest of the complex, dominated by the three Great Pyramids. It also includes a series of smaller ones, however. Tourists can enter the biggest one, Kufu’s, but they limit that to just a few hundred a day (and thousands come every day), so it’s hard to get in. The smaller pyramids are, on the other hand, open all day long to whoever wants to see them. We entered one such pyramid, as seen in these images:
A Smaller Pyramid
Where, Apparently, Queen Henutsen Was Buried
After a Long, Low, Narrow Stair in, You Go Through the Hole and Even Deeper
Carey Coming Down
Carey Checking out the Glyphs
Heiroglyphs!
Being inside a pyramid is pretty cool. It’s just amazing to know that your inside something that old. Of course the signs said no pictures, but the guard said it was ok to do it anyway. Of course, then he wanted bakhshish for it. We refused, of course. It wasn’t our style to pay someone to not do their job. After that small tour, we spent an hour or so just walking around and looking at the massive things. Carey wrote a bit in his journal while sitting on the Great Pyramid, I took lots of photos, etc. Basically we just marveled at the majesty of these huge structures. Here are the more interesting pics:
Look at the Size of These Stones!
And If You Thought THAT Was Big...
BFFs on the Great Pyramid
The Pyramid of Kharfe
It Is Also Big
Very Big
And to Think the Other Is Still Bigger
Hot Sun over Giza
Glyphs Inside a Temple
More Glyphs
Leaving Giza before Saqqara
After walking around for an hour and some more, we reunited with the driver and he dropped us off at Saqqara to walk around some more.
Walking through the Dessert in Saqqara
The Step Pyramid Peaks through the Distance
Carey Has a Little Captain in Him
The Step Pyramid of Djoser
A Redneck in Egypt
Saqqara went more quickly than we expected, and we were tired and ready to go, but the driver wasn’t there to take us to the next stop until the when we told him we’d be done, so we had to wait an hour. We just sat and the shade and waited. It actually wasn’t too bad of a break, really. Still, a good driver looking for a tip should have waited around (you still remember this wasn’t a cab, right?). Anyway, after an hour of waiting he shows up and we head for Memphis.
After Memphis, which really only took about 20 minutes, we headed back to the hostel. It had been a long day already and we were tired. Of course the driver wanted bakhshish for having done his job in physically transporting us which we had already paid him for, but we didn’t. Still, it kind of irked us that he would ask after we already paid for his services, especially since they weren’t that great.
So that night Carey and I went out and got some awesome food and shisha at Seqouia, a restaurant on the Zamalek island in the Nile. It was the best food experience we’d then had in Cairo. The place is all open air under a large tent, with shisha coal-boys running around constantly. It’s on the tip of the island, so all around us was the Nile. It was magnificent. Check out Carey blowing out shisha smoke and the video of what the place was like.
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