On the evening of June 21st, Carrie and I decided that we needed to get out of Cairo. We had been planning on going on a Nile cruise in Luxor and Aswan, which didn't happen, so we decided to just go to Luxor and spend a few days in a nice hotel there. That evening, we booked plane tickets and a hotel. The next morning, June 22nd, we took the one hour plane flight down to Luxor (much preferable to the 10+ hour train ride alternative).
Ooooh the relief of getting out of Cairo! The two weeks before this I had been feeling an intense readiness to get home to Boulder… I had completely lost my appetite for every food item available in Cairo, which I'm pretty sure was making me sick from not eating. I'm so excited to get home and eat REAL SALAD and NOOSA YOGURT and delicious, familiar, healthy hippy food!!!!
Luxor was just the break I needed though to get me back on my feet. It is so beautiful and green and fertile there - and QUIET!! There are flowers everywhere, and of course the absolutely stunning Nile! Our hotel (the Sofitel Karnak hotel) sits just outside of town, is right on the nile, and has beautiful grounds with trees and places to relax, along with a fabulous swimming pool, where we could wear bikinis!!!! The beds were beyond comfortable compared to my apartment's beds in Cairo, and the pillows were practically luxurious! The air conditioning worked efficiently, and the male hotel staff were only *slightly* creepy! :D
Our first night at the hotel, Carrie and I spent the afternoon at the swimming pool relaxing and tanning, then waited starving until 7pm to go to the gorgeous outdoor restaurant (right on the Nile) for dinner. They had a huge dinner buffet, complete with delicious lentil soup, salads of all sorts (at least by Egyptian standards, which still doesn't live up to my Boulder, Colorado salad cravings), main courses of chicken and lamb and beef, and a large table of beautifully displayed pastries and desserts (which Carrie ate, but I was too full, and still feeling slightly sick to my stomach from not eating much for the past few days)! Around the time we were eating our main courses, a bellydancer came out. Except … she hardly deserved to be called a bellydancer. She was HORRRRIBLE - she could basically only do a few movies, mostly just shimmies, even when it really didn't go well with the music, and worst of all, she was going up to all of the men (most of whom were older married British dudes, sitting next to their wives) and doing shoulder shimmies with her boobs right in their face, then kissing them on the foreheads! SOOOO not classy or skillful - this is an example of why bellydancers get a bad reputation… she was also getting people up to dance (and when I say "people" i mean mostly men) and chest and hip bumping them very sexually. Not OK!! What a horrible representation of bellydancing…
Her second or third song came on… and it was "Shik Shak Shok" - a very famous song that Carrie and I both know well and have both performed to. The dancer noticed that Carrie and I were dancing in our chairs a bit, and asked us to get up to dance with her….. Good move on her part, because we stood up there in our jeans and t-shirts and completely showed her up!! We had people from the hotel coming up and telling us that we were way better than her and should get hired, and from that night on, we were somewhat of celebrities at the hotel.
Anyways, after the bad dancer, there was a whirling dervish, who I felt bad for, because he was talented, but the audience wasn't very receptive after the bad dancer's completely un-captivating show.
When we were finished with dinner, we went back to our room and stayed up laughing in bed for a few hours before we could fall asleep. The next morning, we woke up around 8am, went to a yummy (and free!) buffet breakfast, then noticed that the hotel had a company that takes people up in hot air balloon rides above the Ancient Egyptian temples and stuff! It sounded so awesome that we almost immediately decided that we had to do it and signed up for a ride leaving at 4am the next morning! Once we had signed up for that, we took the 9:30am complimentary boat shuttle (totally sweet!) down the nile into the town of Luxor. Once in town, we went to the Luxor museum, which was pretty cool - lots of badass Ancient Egypt stuff, statues, and a couple of random mummies. Then, we wandered along the Nile Cornish for a while and chanced upon the Mummification Museum. It was very interesting and had a completely uncovered mummified alligator (my favorite mummy to date)!! We wandered more after that and eventually turned a corner and found the Luxor Temple, which we wandered around inside for a while and took pictures with the larger-than-life statues and little rooms full of hieroglyphs. We were so overheated at this point that we gave up on town and took the 1:45 boat back to the hotel. We ate some lunch there, and headed out for more pool time to catch some rays and relax in the cool water.
Finally, we came back to the room for showers before dinner, and I actually got to blow-dry my hair for the first time in over 6 months!!! It has gotten so so long, which becomes very apparent when it is strait! :D yay!! After another delicious buffet dinner, we were off to bed because we had to wake up at 3:30am the next morning to go on our hot air balloon ride!!!!! I'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO GO IN A HOT AIR BALLOONNNNN!!!!!! Talk about childhood dream about to come true!!!!
3:30am came very very early, but it was sooooo beyond worth it!! The balloon ride was so fantastic - I stood there in the basket as we slowly drifted over the lush Nile vegetation and deserty temples… singing the song from one of my favorite childhood movies, Five Weeks in a Balloon…. grinning about all the dumb jokes that mom and I make based on this movie and my other favorite childhood movie that involves a hot air balloon. Wish you could have been there Mama! This was really really a dream come to life, and I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to make it reality!
We got back to the hotel around 7am, where we shared a yummy buffet breakfast with the most stereotypical possible Asian tour group… haha. ha. ha. haaa. K. anyways. We then met up with a really nice cab driver who this nice Dutch couple had recommended to us, named Hamdy, who took us out for a morning at the Valley of the Kings! As per usual in Egypt, we had to walk through this touristy bazaar area full of shops trying to rip you off on the way to the ticket booth and entrance to the valley. Conveniently, my stupid shoe decided to break in half right as we were walking in front of one of these shops that was selling King Tut sandals….. I could practically see the young guy working at the shop shimmer with excitement, as if to say "BWAHAHA!! An easy victim!" Sooooo I really had no choice but to haggle for the stupid King Tut sandals. The guy started by telling me that they cost 500 Egyptian pounds (around $85) to which Carrie and I promptly laughed in his face and offered him 20 pounds. To which he told us that we were trying to kill him, and that he would give me a special "Egyptian price" of 450 pounds… and so on and so forth until I got him down to 60, which was still a total rip off (about $10) but I didn't really have a choice because I needed shoes…. I tried the "i'm not interested, i'm walking away" bargaining trick, but I guess when you are walking away from a pair of shoes barefoot it isn't entirely convincing. haha. After that we headed to the ticket booth and got our tickets. Walking around the valley of the kings was really fun actually, as I ended up speaking a lot of Arabic, joking around with a bunch of the Egyptians who were trying to sell us stupid statues and such, did some fun haggling (a sport that I really have come to enjoy) and saw some really awesome tombs!! We went to see King Tut's mummy… which wasn't worth the money we paid to get into that particular tomb, but whatever. The rest of the tombs made up for it. Overall it was a fantastic experience, and on the way back Hamdy had gotten us cold Fanta and water to beat the heat - he was a really cool guy and we enjoyed talking to him extensively about American/Middle Eastern politics (another interest that Egypt has really inspired in me).
It amazes me how much we accomplished before 1pm that day because we woke up early! I had a brief moment of wondering if I should wake up early more often… but that passed rather quickly :D
We spent the rest of the afternoon tanning by the pool and napping to make up for the approximately 3 hours of sleep that we had gotten the night before and finished the evening with our final delicious buffet dinner (along with some creative avoidance of one of our stalker waiters).
We were due to fly back to Cairo the next day at noon, but we decided to go to the Karnak temple before going to the airport, since it was close to our hotel and we had heard really great things about it. I'm very glad we decided to do this, because it was about 20 times more awesome than the Luxor temple - full of endless rooms and statues and halls with hieroglyphs and sphinxes. etc. Very very worth it and fun! A great culmination to a really wonderful few days and a much needed vacation! Oh the wonders of relaxation, independence, and best friend adventures!
As I say blissfully often lately… Life is so good!! :)
Ooooh the relief of getting out of Cairo! The two weeks before this I had been feeling an intense readiness to get home to Boulder… I had completely lost my appetite for every food item available in Cairo, which I'm pretty sure was making me sick from not eating. I'm so excited to get home and eat REAL SALAD and NOOSA YOGURT and delicious, familiar, healthy hippy food!!!!
Luxor was just the break I needed though to get me back on my feet. It is so beautiful and green and fertile there - and QUIET!! There are flowers everywhere, and of course the absolutely stunning Nile! Our hotel (the Sofitel Karnak hotel) sits just outside of town, is right on the nile, and has beautiful grounds with trees and places to relax, along with a fabulous swimming pool, where we could wear bikinis!!!! The beds were beyond comfortable compared to my apartment's beds in Cairo, and the pillows were practically luxurious! The air conditioning worked efficiently, and the male hotel staff were only *slightly* creepy! :D
Our first night at the hotel, Carrie and I spent the afternoon at the swimming pool relaxing and tanning, then waited starving until 7pm to go to the gorgeous outdoor restaurant (right on the Nile) for dinner. They had a huge dinner buffet, complete with delicious lentil soup, salads of all sorts (at least by Egyptian standards, which still doesn't live up to my Boulder, Colorado salad cravings), main courses of chicken and lamb and beef, and a large table of beautifully displayed pastries and desserts (which Carrie ate, but I was too full, and still feeling slightly sick to my stomach from not eating much for the past few days)! Around the time we were eating our main courses, a bellydancer came out. Except … she hardly deserved to be called a bellydancer. She was HORRRRIBLE - she could basically only do a few movies, mostly just shimmies, even when it really didn't go well with the music, and worst of all, she was going up to all of the men (most of whom were older married British dudes, sitting next to their wives) and doing shoulder shimmies with her boobs right in their face, then kissing them on the foreheads! SOOOO not classy or skillful - this is an example of why bellydancers get a bad reputation… she was also getting people up to dance (and when I say "people" i mean mostly men) and chest and hip bumping them very sexually. Not OK!! What a horrible representation of bellydancing…
Her second or third song came on… and it was "Shik Shak Shok" - a very famous song that Carrie and I both know well and have both performed to. The dancer noticed that Carrie and I were dancing in our chairs a bit, and asked us to get up to dance with her….. Good move on her part, because we stood up there in our jeans and t-shirts and completely showed her up!! We had people from the hotel coming up and telling us that we were way better than her and should get hired, and from that night on, we were somewhat of celebrities at the hotel.
Anyways, after the bad dancer, there was a whirling dervish, who I felt bad for, because he was talented, but the audience wasn't very receptive after the bad dancer's completely un-captivating show.
When we were finished with dinner, we went back to our room and stayed up laughing in bed for a few hours before we could fall asleep. The next morning, we woke up around 8am, went to a yummy (and free!) buffet breakfast, then noticed that the hotel had a company that takes people up in hot air balloon rides above the Ancient Egyptian temples and stuff! It sounded so awesome that we almost immediately decided that we had to do it and signed up for a ride leaving at 4am the next morning! Once we had signed up for that, we took the 9:30am complimentary boat shuttle (totally sweet!) down the nile into the town of Luxor. Once in town, we went to the Luxor museum, which was pretty cool - lots of badass Ancient Egypt stuff, statues, and a couple of random mummies. Then, we wandered along the Nile Cornish for a while and chanced upon the Mummification Museum. It was very interesting and had a completely uncovered mummified alligator (my favorite mummy to date)!! We wandered more after that and eventually turned a corner and found the Luxor Temple, which we wandered around inside for a while and took pictures with the larger-than-life statues and little rooms full of hieroglyphs. We were so overheated at this point that we gave up on town and took the 1:45 boat back to the hotel. We ate some lunch there, and headed out for more pool time to catch some rays and relax in the cool water.
Finally, we came back to the room for showers before dinner, and I actually got to blow-dry my hair for the first time in over 6 months!!! It has gotten so so long, which becomes very apparent when it is strait! :D yay!! After another delicious buffet dinner, we were off to bed because we had to wake up at 3:30am the next morning to go on our hot air balloon ride!!!!! I'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO GO IN A HOT AIR BALLOONNNNN!!!!!! Talk about childhood dream about to come true!!!!
3:30am came very very early, but it was sooooo beyond worth it!! The balloon ride was so fantastic - I stood there in the basket as we slowly drifted over the lush Nile vegetation and deserty temples… singing the song from one of my favorite childhood movies, Five Weeks in a Balloon…. grinning about all the dumb jokes that mom and I make based on this movie and my other favorite childhood movie that involves a hot air balloon. Wish you could have been there Mama! This was really really a dream come to life, and I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to make it reality!
We got back to the hotel around 7am, where we shared a yummy buffet breakfast with the most stereotypical possible Asian tour group… haha. ha. ha. haaa. K. anyways. We then met up with a really nice cab driver who this nice Dutch couple had recommended to us, named Hamdy, who took us out for a morning at the Valley of the Kings! As per usual in Egypt, we had to walk through this touristy bazaar area full of shops trying to rip you off on the way to the ticket booth and entrance to the valley. Conveniently, my stupid shoe decided to break in half right as we were walking in front of one of these shops that was selling King Tut sandals….. I could practically see the young guy working at the shop shimmer with excitement, as if to say "BWAHAHA!! An easy victim!" Sooooo I really had no choice but to haggle for the stupid King Tut sandals. The guy started by telling me that they cost 500 Egyptian pounds (around $85) to which Carrie and I promptly laughed in his face and offered him 20 pounds. To which he told us that we were trying to kill him, and that he would give me a special "Egyptian price" of 450 pounds… and so on and so forth until I got him down to 60, which was still a total rip off (about $10) but I didn't really have a choice because I needed shoes…. I tried the "i'm not interested, i'm walking away" bargaining trick, but I guess when you are walking away from a pair of shoes barefoot it isn't entirely convincing. haha. After that we headed to the ticket booth and got our tickets. Walking around the valley of the kings was really fun actually, as I ended up speaking a lot of Arabic, joking around with a bunch of the Egyptians who were trying to sell us stupid statues and such, did some fun haggling (a sport that I really have come to enjoy) and saw some really awesome tombs!! We went to see King Tut's mummy… which wasn't worth the money we paid to get into that particular tomb, but whatever. The rest of the tombs made up for it. Overall it was a fantastic experience, and on the way back Hamdy had gotten us cold Fanta and water to beat the heat - he was a really cool guy and we enjoyed talking to him extensively about American/Middle Eastern politics (another interest that Egypt has really inspired in me).
It amazes me how much we accomplished before 1pm that day because we woke up early! I had a brief moment of wondering if I should wake up early more often… but that passed rather quickly :D
We spent the rest of the afternoon tanning by the pool and napping to make up for the approximately 3 hours of sleep that we had gotten the night before and finished the evening with our final delicious buffet dinner (along with some creative avoidance of one of our stalker waiters).
We were due to fly back to Cairo the next day at noon, but we decided to go to the Karnak temple before going to the airport, since it was close to our hotel and we had heard really great things about it. I'm very glad we decided to do this, because it was about 20 times more awesome than the Luxor temple - full of endless rooms and statues and halls with hieroglyphs and sphinxes. etc. Very very worth it and fun! A great culmination to a really wonderful few days and a much needed vacation! Oh the wonders of relaxation, independence, and best friend adventures!
As I say blissfully often lately… Life is so good!! :)
