This summer has been the most significant in my life. While I don’t often write about personal matters in this blog, I will make an exception. On July 12th my son Leon was born. Healthy, happy and obviously, from the perspective a father, perfect. Going through this fundamental life change has made me decide to re-evaluate a lot of things. Most importantly, I wanted to evaluate my career. In the last few years, I have spread my focus thin.

Honking Cars in Egypt, especially Cairo honk all the time. Day and night. If we woke up at 4 am in the hotel room, there would be cars honking outside. The honk to wake up pedestrians or other cars, taxis honk to attract the attention of potential customers, and often, it seems like they honk just for the fun of it. Security There’s a ton of policemen in Cairo, easily recognizable by their white uniforms.

After a rather unsuccessful day, we decided to have a more aggressive program the last day in Cairo. We started out early with a subway trip to Coptic Cairo. It seems that very few tourists are using the subways, which is a pity because it is a pretty good system. If they only could have any information in English. We had to trust the ticket guy who said it was LE 2 for both of us.

We had a late start on Wednesday. We are going to take the train to Alexandria, and we want to make sure that we get the tickets, so we start with a trip to Ramsees railway station. I had expected the trains (which seem nice from the guidebook) to be much used by tourists, but as it turned out, all the information was in Arabic, with the platform numbers, and the word “platform” as the only thing in English.

In Cairo, we have noticed a recurring theme. Many places that are visited a lot by westerners are sectioned off from the rest of the city. When Egypt was a British colony, the colonialism was expressed by importing British culture into Egypt. With modern colonialism, a section of the western world is placed wholesale as a small colony inside the city. After a rather tiresome day, we didn’t feel like we had the energy to go egyptian style again for dinner.

Abou el-Sid is located in Zamalek along the Sharia 26th of July. The doorman for the hotel hailed a cab for us (and got a bit of baksheesh for that, I don’t know if that was right), and negotiated an overpriced fee. :-) The traffic is seeming more and more what people warn that Cairo traffic will be like. Previously, we’ve felt that despite the messiness of the picture, things have been managable.

Today’s trip was like taken directly out of the lonely planet guidebook. Our guide Said Azawi (todo: double check last name) picked us up at the hotel at the appointed time. Driving over Gezira, past the Cairo Opera house and into Giza we arrived at the pyramids at the Giza Plateau early. We were a bit suspicious about the whole deal, but the guide recommended we get horses or camels to take us across the plateau.

(The “kobyuutr” on which I am writing this has an arab/english keyboard, so I will write in english) We arrived late at night at Cairo international airport, and got a first impression of Egyptian bureaucracy that has remained. We ended up standing in lines for a long time, and when we finally were through, it was 2 am, and we did not feel like dealing with Cairo’s infamous taxis. So we took a “limosin service” to the hotel.