Aaron and I celebrated his 29th birthday in Egypt. Cairo is a beautiful and ancient city, with monuments that span thousands of years. We stayed in Egypt for ten days and most of our visit was in Cairo, with an additional four days on a Nile cruise. We stayed with my cousin Mohamed in a newly built community, called El-Rehab, half an hour’s drive from Cairo.

Egypt was a bit overwhelming at first, with the noise, heat and sheer amount of people (20 million in Cairo.) Mohamed was nice enough to let us use his driver Tariq, which was a good thing since we could never drive in Cairo. The painted dividers separating lanes seemed to be for decoration only, as most cars straddled the lanes and zipped by one another with only a honk to signify that you would be hit if you didn’t move. Meanwhile, pedestrians strolled through the highways and streets at a leisurely pace, seemingly unaffected by the danger. Walking anywhere seemed like a constant stream of near-death experiences. I warned Aaron that Mumbai would be much worse, since in India we would also have to contend with cows and other animals sharing the road, and lots more cars.

Our first day in Cairo was spent touring the pyramids, including the pyramids of Khafre and Khufu, as well as a visit to the Sphinx. The pyramids were stripped of all the wealth and statues, but climbing through a pyramid was an experience in itself. I say climbing because we had to squat and wobble up a long passageway, and Aaron was bent completely double. Pyramids are not for the claustrophobic! I did feel a bit like Indiana Jones as we struggled ahead in the dim lighting and narrow passageways.

Outside, we saw the Sphinx, which is being corroded by a kind of monument cancer from within. And of course, camel drivers were everywhere, following us around and telling us “My friend, I will give you a good price for a ride.” Or, “You want to take a picture?” Overall, everywhere we went there were people constantly coming up to us and asking us to buy things. Having a six foot white guy next to me certainly added to the harassment level.

Afterwards, we spent the afternoon with Aaron’s friend Shady, his American wife Kate and their adorable six month old baby, Ray. Shady and Kate took us to lunch on the Nile, then we spent a relaxing afternoon at the beautiful Al-Azhar park that was recently built near the Citadel. The park was apparently once a garbage dump, but is now a beautiful and relaxing oasis in the city. We had dessert and drinks at a restaurant inside the park, and spent the afternoon chatting and catching up.

The next day we spent the morning at the Egyptian Museum, where we wandered around with our guidebooks on a self-guided tour. Aaron joked that everyone must have thought I was his Egyptian guide. In fact, many people asked if I was Egyptian on the trip, but of course once I opened my mouth the illusion was lost.

One of the more interesting and morbid exhibits in the Museum is the display of royal mummies. There were about a dozen pharoah’s mummies on display, including Hatshepsut, a few of the Ramses, etc. It was a bit eerie considering we were basically staring at ancient bodies. It was amazing how the facial features, and in some cases even the hair, were intact! Another highlight was the golden treasure of King Tut, the boy king whose tomb was discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter and is one of the only examples of an intact tomb.

In the afternoon, my college friend Monem treated us to a sumptuous Egyptian lunch at Abu el-Sid and told us he was recently engaged! Congratulations Monem! Later, we wandered around Khan Al Khalili, the biggest bazaar in the middle East, and enjoyed browsing around, though we didn’t enjoy the constant harassment by the vendors.

In the evening, we had made plans to meet Aaron’s friends Heba and Nahla at a restaurant on the Nile, called Sequoyah. Getting there was an adventure itself. We took a taxi for the first time alone. The ettiquette of taxis in Egypt is that you are supposed to get into a cab, tell the driver where you are going, then once you arrive at the destination you are supposed to just pay what you assume is the fare and hop out.

This was Aaron’s second visit to Cairo, so he knew that if we followed the normal ettiquette, we would be overcharged, and the driver would yell at us and cause a scene when we refused to pay more. So, we stood on the side of the road, as Aaron negotiated rates with every taxi driver that stopped. When they failed to give a good price, he waved them on. Finally, the third (or was it the fourth?) agreed to take us at a reasonable rate. We hopped in, told the driver the destination, and started the journey.

We soon realized the driver did not speak English. He said he spoke some French so I tried that, but he only knew greetings. We called Heba to tell him where to go in Arabic, and he said he understood, but then kept stopping and asking people if they spoke English and could tell us to tell him where to go. Since we had no idea where the restaurant was, this was imposible, and after much discussion in broken Arabic, French and English, we decided to get out on the Nile and figure it out from there. By some miracle, we found ourselves at the restaurant and enjoyed the evening with Heba, her fiance Sami, and Nahla.

We went on a Nile cruise for several days, which deserves it’s own blog entry. When we returned to Cairo, we had planned to go to Alexandria for Aaron’s birthday, but we had both eaten something that made us sick (or what I call, the real curse of the pharaohs) and had to take it easy for the rest of our visit. We enjoyed spending time with Mohamed, who we also visited at his office in Heliopolis. Mohamed is regional director of ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) which is a UN agency, and we enjoyed the tour of his office and the chance to meet his staff.

I loved Egypt and its history, and we both especially enjoyed getting to know Mohamed and spending time with our Egyptian friends.

We spent two nights and three days in Germany before flying to Egypt from Frankfurt. We decided to stay in Mainz, a bustling town about half an hour from Frankfurt. Mainz is on the Rhine River and we spent lots of time walking around the central area, appreciating the massive cathedral that looked like a castle. We were surprised by the commercial area in this town, we were actually routed through a mall to get to the Tourist Information Office! We had Eurorail passes and spent a lot of time on the trains and ferries, taking daytrips to different towns on the Rhine and Mosel Rivers.

Our first daytrip was Cochem, a charming little wine-making town in the Mosel River Valley. Cochem looked like a scene out of a storybook, with it’s medieval, winding, cobbled streets and castle overlooking the town. I love visiting castles so we climbed up to the castle and took a tour. Unfortunately the tour was in German but we had a printout in English to get the main points. The castle dated from the middle ages but had been revamped in the eighteenth century and was made into a comfortable home for the inhabitants. The castle also had impressive stone statues that overlooked the town, which I thought were frog-kings but were actually strange looking lions.

While in Cochem we enjoyed bratwurst for the price of 1.80 euros each, which was a real bargain compared to most of our meals. We also stumbled on a wine festival in the town square. Cochem and the Mosel Valley is a center for wine in Germany, and we spotted many tourists and locals enjoying the sunshine and the views of the Rhine while sipping their wine.

While in Germany we found it more difficult to communicate than we expected, as most people we met didn’t speak English and we know French and Spanish between us, but unfortunately no German. All the other tourists seemed to be German senior citizens. Aaron picked up a few German words pretty quickly and we were able to communicate in sign language, broken German, and occasionally English.

We spent the last day before our flight on the Rhine River, which was beautiful, with green cliffs and castles everywhere. It seemed every town had a castle and I lost count of all the castles we passed.

From the ferry we stopped in Koblentz, the spot where the Rhine and Mosel rivers converge, as well as the town of St. Goar, home of the famous Loreley statue. The Loreley was a sort of siren, found in German operas, poetry and stories, that lured sailors to their doom on the cliffs adjacent to the Rhine. St. Goar was also very charming and we enjoyed relaxing on the river before our flight to the Middle East.

Despite its reputation as the home of the notorious Red Light District, Amsterdam is quite a romantic and charming city. Tourism officials often boast that Amsterdam has more canals than Venice and it is true that just about every street corner in the city center could serve as a postcard image.

We flew to Amsterdam from Dublin on May 19th and spent two days in the city. The highlight was the Anne Frank house, which provides a wonderful insight to what life was like for Jewish families in hiding during WWII. The museum also has a great temporary exhibit that encourages visitors to think about and weigh individual freedoms with the wishes of the majority in a society – the exhibit is called Free2Choose.

We spent the rest of our time wandering around the canals and sampling international cuisine found in this highly diverse and progressive city.