First Day in Egypt!

Hello readers! My name is Sophie, and I’m thrilled to take you on Global for a day! Today was our first day in Cairo, Egypt which is the first country that we’ll be staying in for a month. We arrived at our luxurious hotel, the Hotel Flamenco, around 3 am. All of us crashed until breakfast at 10, grateful for sleep and ready for the first day of touring. Our first adventure was locating an ATM and withdrawing super large sums of Egyptian pounds -- one US dollar is equivalent to about 17 Egyptian pounds, so you can imagine the huge wad of cash! We put some of the money to good use at a local market getting essentials like water and fruit.

We left for the Cairo Museum around 12:30 with our coordinator Walid and our lovely tour guide Amany. It takes a village for us Oles to be safe and on time, so we also met our driver Tariq and a series of security escorts who will accompany us on tours. Amany will be leading us on tours for the rest of our time in Egypt and she is sassy and extremely knowledgeable!  

The Cairo Museum was huge and magnificient. It was a good thing we had Amany to guide us on our 3 and a half hour tour. Highlights included the 2nd most beautiful statue in the world (we saw the first - Michaelangelo’s David - in Rome), King Tut’s tomb artifacts (too much gold to process) and the beautiful painting of the Meidum geese. Amany also gave us a general overview of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms as well as some religious information which we will learn more about in our upcoming class at the American University.

After the museum we went back to the hotel for a delicious dinner, followed by class and some much needed rest. We are all excited to visit Giza and the pyramids tomorrow as well as ride camels! Goodbye for now!

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