Tourism on two continents - exhausting!

Please excuse my long hiatus. I left Cairo to spend Christmas in New York on December 20th and was sick for more than half my ten day American vacation. I did manage to buy Target out of cold and cough medicine (the Egyptian stuff just doesn’t cut it), vitamins, and other essentials I can’t find in Egypt. I also built up my business wardrobe for my new job but I still own barely enough professional clothes to get through a single week so my new coworkers will be treated to the same cycle of outfits for the first few months of work until I can afford to hit the mall again.

My cousin Suzie joined my family in New York for a few days of sightseeing, then flew with me back to Cairo to begin our grand tour. The audio in the tail section of the plane, where we were seated, was malfunctioning and after resetting the video system three times, and watching the first five minutes of three different movies, they finally settled on the worst of the bunch, He’s Just Not That Into You. Our flight left around 11pm so it may have been that I was exhausted, or it may have been that the movie was mind-numbingly boring, but I couldn’t even stay awake through the first fifteen minutes. I woke up in time to catch the last fifteen minutes and eat dinner, then crashed again. I woke up like seven hours later, in the daylight of a distant time zone, as befuddled as if I’d taken a sleeping pill but this was one of the only flights in my life I actually fell asleep before I could take anything. Breakfast was unexpectedly pesto pizza.

We spent three whirlwind days in Cairo. At first it was just my friend Sarah, from college at the University of Oregon, Suzie, and I, and although we did get up to eat breakfast and watch Win a Date With Tad Hamilton on my crappy TV, which is almost completely in black and white now, we pretty much slept most of the day. That night, New Year’s Eve, Suzie’s friend Helen, also from the University of Oregon, arrived from Prague, where she was spending the holidays with her grandparents. Helen arrived at 2:30am and Suzie took a taxi all by herself to meet her at the airport and escort her to my apartment and although I didn’t have to do anything but wait by the phone in case of emergency, I was worried about them and didn’t sleep well at all.

The next day, Saturday, we set out on our Desert Tour, which was supposed to include many sites around Cairo, but we started so late in the morning (around 11) that we couldn’t fit everything in. We hit the pyramids and the sphinx, saw how Egyptian silk carpets are made, visited the step pyramid at Saqqara, which was built a dynasty before the pyramids at Giza, and ate dinner in an Egyptian restaurant.

Although we had planned to hit the Egyptian museum the following day, Sunday, primarily for the purpose of seeing King Tut’s head and the jewelry room (history, schmistory, show me the sparkly things!), I didn’t notice until around 1:30 that the royal mummy room closed at 3:15, which wouldn’t give us enough time to make it through the hour-long lines. Instead we shopped at a few quality gift stores I discovered in my neighborhood a couple weeks ago and then Sarah, Suzie, and Helen went to explore Old Cairo, the Citadel and two mosques, while I took care of bills, rent, and some overdue email correspondence.

I also got a frightening call that morning from my new office saying that they thought I was supposed to start work that day. I explained that I had agreed in my interview to start on the tenth and that I was leaving on a Nile Cruise with guests the following day and could not possibly start this week. They acted like I hadn’t read my letter of engagement closely enough, since the letter did list my starting date as the third, and for a while I believed them and apologized for not noticing the discrepancy but held my ground that I had agreed in my interview to start the tenth.

They said that this was fine, if that was the day I had arranged with my new boss, and I confirmed I would be in the office on the tenth. But within a couple hours, a memory crawled to the surface of my stressed mind of receiving my letter of engagement, noticing the error that listed the third of January as my start date, and including in my letter of acceptance a notice that this was not the correct date and that I would in fact be starting on the tenth. Now I don’t know whether to go through my sent messages, find and re-send this message to prove I didn’t actually screw up, or whether this would be beating a dead horse since they were willing to let me postpone my start date until next week without hassle. This is only one of the ten million things that worry me about starting this new job!!