Going to Cairo

We were in Cairo in the last week of January, and the weather was excellent.
High sunshine every day, yet cool enough to wear long pants.
Important for people planning to venture outside the tourist areas, since Egypt is a mainly Muslem country, and although many local women wore 'Westernized' clothes, none of them showed any bare flesh.

The trip was a sudden impulse, we bought a package travel a week before we left, without doing any research about Egypt beforehand. We knew practically nothing about Cairo or it's tourist attractions before we left, apart from the fact that it was warm there, compared to the Scandinavian winter.

The only preparation we had time for was a trip to the library; I found a Rough Guide to Egypt the day we left, and read it on the flight. As I read it I grew more and more apprehensive, worrying about spending a whole week in this noisy, dirty, poor place, where haggling seemed to be a perogative to shopping, transportation, or anything else that required an exchange of money.
Especially since it seemed to be a mostly 'dry' experience, bars being few and far between, and alcohol not sold in most restaurants.

Arrival

We flew into Cairo from Amsterdam, and arrived at terminal 2 at Cairo Airport at four in the morning.
As I discovered while reading the travel guide on the plane we needed a visa to get into Egypt, being from Denmark and US.
Visas were happily sold from boths in the arrival hall, strategically placed before the passport control.
They cost 15$ a piece, in the beginning of 2003, and they wanted US dollars, cash.
The visa was two small stamp-like squares, prettily orange and purple. As if it was stams we glued them into our passports, and joined the queue for the passport control.
While we waited, and waited, we filled out the obligatory forms, licked our stamps, and waited.
When we finally handed over our passports the cumstoms officer actually wrote down our passport# and studied them.
The EU passport got processed faster than the US one, but only marginally.
The arrival hall was, mildly put, primitive.

Money Matters

We had brought along 100 Egyptian Pounds (bought in Kastrup airport before we flew to Amsterdam) and had expected to get some more at a Forex in Cairo Airport, and otherwise use our Visa cards.
Well. That plan didn't really work out, since there was no Forex in the airport, and we didn't find one during the week we were in Cairo. And besides we couldn't pay with Visa cards, or any other kind of card, anywhere. Egypt has a cash based economy. Big time.
That freaked me out completely, coming from a plastic economy.
We were in the goldsmith sector of the bazaar to look at jewellery, and they took Visa, but otherwise noone did.

When we came through customs we were approached by numerous men trying to convince us to take their taxa.
We chose someone who looked moderately trustworthy, and who overcharged us just as much as any of the others would have done. In other words, we paid 50 EL, and the 'fair' price would be more like 25 EL.
This guy took us to someone with a ledger, who wrote him a receipt. Then he found someone else who was handed the receipt. This person took us on a long trek over the parking lot to a car where three men were sleeping. They were woken up, and one of them in turn was handed the receipt, thereby becomming our driver.
Cairo has no traffic lights, and those that are are ignored. Fortunately the streets were mostly empty at that point, otherwise I would have had a seizure over the way our chauffeur drove. We asked him something, and in his efford to speak English, the car slowed down, and finally ground to a stop.
On the highway.

The next day we went out to find some cash. Urgently.
Several of the Egyptian banks have ATMs, and they are all guarded by machine gun toting policemen.
Once we found one that worked, we had no problem extracting cash from it with our Visa cards.
Since the exchange rate went down 15% while we were there it was much cheaper, and safer, to withdraw money as we went along than to bring it all from DK.

Hotels

With the travel package we had bought we got two nights in a hotel, to have somewhere to spend the remainder of the night when we arrived.
The hotel was located halfways to the pyramids, rather at a distance to the centre of Cairo, and it was quite substandard, although they folded our towels in artistic shapes. So the first thing we did, after having procured some cash, was to find better lodgings.
There are several nice places downtown, if you want to experience the local ambience instead of the tourist pens.
We chose the Grand hotel, situated on 26. of July street, right next to the shopping streets. Since it was on a major road it was somewhat noisy, except for 3-5 in the morning. Grand hotel is from the 1930's and decorated in nifty original Art Deco style. Very pretty.
Most of the middle priced hotels, the ones that aren't only catering to Westerners (Westerners in this case being European, American and Japanese tourists with high hair and shrill voices, more interested in keeping up with the tourbus than actually seeing Egypt) are Art Deco buildings from the 1930's.
Apart from the Grand Hotel which was quite nice, and central, I would recommend ... and ....
...has a bar, which anyone spending any time in Egypt will appreciate.
Sitting in the bar, sipping G 'n T's and looking out over the dark mahogany interior, it is quite easy to imagine oneself in a British colony at the beginning of the 20'th century. This hotel was incidently also the local style hotel with the highest number of resident westerns.

Food

Egypt style food is cheap food. Bread, lentils, beans, pasta.
They even put bread in their stews. One evening I ordered a local dish ... It was served as a mound of rice and on top of it was a spoonful of sauce and three cubes of lamb. Fine. Digging into it I found that in the rice was secreted pieces of bread. The rice was full of shredded pita bread, soggy with sauce. No