SwiftRambles

Spain, Egypt and Thailand At-A-Glance

Days spent: Spain = 6, Egypt = 5, Thailand = 29

Transportation taken:Planes = 4, Buses = 6, Taxis/tuktuk = 16, Boats = 8, Trains = 4, Subway = 25, Motos rented: 3

On a tuktuk in Thailand:

The Skytrain:

Learning to relax among an angry mob - Cairo, Egypt

I was looking forward to Thailand for at least a month: the food, the cheaper prices, the beaches, and the culture.  For our flight to Bangkok, we got to the Cairo airport nice and early (Amber and I have different travel styles when it comes to the airport: I like to get there early and relax and Amber likes to get to the airport so you have to run through the terminal and onto the plane) and got into the check-in line for Qatar Airways.  What airline was that? you ask.  Yes, I booked our cheap flight from Cairo to Bangkok on Qatar Airways (the tagline is "World's 5-star airline").  I was excited that our flight would actually fly through a stopover in Doha, Qatar's capital.  Well, truthfully, I had never heard of Qatar before the airline showed up on cheaptickets.com and I had to look up where the country was.  But after booking the flight, I was kind of hoping that maybe we would get delayed and have to stay in Qatar for a night, just to experience a new country.  Of course, these thoughts of a delay jinxed us...

Walk like an American - Cairo, Egypt

Arriving at night in Cairo, we were whisked through dense traffic by our speed demon cab driver.  I gave him a tip, not only because it is customary to do so for everything in Egypt, but because we arrived to our hotel in one piece.  We stayed in an older neighborhood in Central Cairo in an even older hotel.  The hotel was on the fifth floor and we got to ride up on the elevator of death (luckily for our few days there we only had to walk up once).  Our room was simple with two fans (no Air Conditioning...).  Once we settled we realized a couple of things: 1. Whoa, we are in Egypt! and 2. It is really hot here.  I was whiny because I was hungry so we went to a fast food place, Gad, around the corner from the hotel which was in our guide book.  This is when we had our first culture shock: not a thing was written in the roman letter alphabet, not even prices.  Everything was in Arabic.  (Later we figured out that there was an upstairs sit-down area where they had menus with English).  I eventually figured out the system of paying first and then giving the receipt to the correct station.  We saw people getting meat sandwiches from a shwarma meat stand outside the restaurant and asked for two.  We got our two sandwiches and were delighted with our choice.  We would make more visits to Gad and ordered one of each item off the menu by the end of our stay.