Happy Halloween!

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Today is Halloween. My brother's family came over to my parents' house to show off their costumes.

The boys were the Super Mario Brothers: Mario and Luigi!

Linc was Mario. They had cute white gloves pinned on their back pockets.

Nash, aka Luigi, had a moustache.

The boys liked Grandma's gourds. Nash kept asking what they were.

The kids got a kick out of the slinky. It didn't like to go down the stairs too well, but they played with it all the same.

Nash worked much better than the slinky.

Mr. & Mrs. Mario Brothers

Nash even got to read the Fodors' guide to Greece.

Day 8: Pyramids

Today is a huge day. Most people can only dream about this day...

Here we are getting ready to go exploring in the desert. We're wearing hats and loose-fitting clothing. And lots of sunscreen!

It was a short cab ride to the Pyramids of Giza. Most people don't realize how urban the area around the pyramids is. There are shops and hotels and restaurants right up to the entrance of the complex. Some day, I imagine the city of Giza will completely encircle them. It would be a shame because the desert is as much a part of the pyramids as the pharaohs were. It would sort of ruin the effect.

This picture shows the Mena House Oberoi Hotel. It's an upscale hotel just outside the gates. It's famous for being the place where Churchill and Roosevelt hatched the plan for D-Day. You could walk to the Pyramids from here.

And suddenly, we're here! To me, the pyramids didn't seem that big. I think it is partly because you have to be so far away from them to see the whole thing. Another reason might be that Cairo is so smoggy and hazy that their profile is fuzzy. I don't think it had rained in a long time, so the dirt in the air was almost palpable.

This is the Great Pyramid of Khufu. It is the oldest pyramid at Giza but not the oldest pyramid in Egypt. In fact, it is among the newest. This one is certainly the biggest.

You could climb up to a certain height.

It was awesome to touch the limestone and see centuries of "graffiti" carved into the rocks. It's hard to believe these stones were laid here 46 centuries ago.

I climbed up a ways and took a picture of Ma below. There were some tombs (called "mastabas") to the side of the pyramid, but we didn't go to see them.

There were "touts" everywhere selling souvenirs. They would harass you anywhere you went. The cab driver told us to watch out for "monkey business". He was right.

This is the middle pyramid: Khafre. Khafre was Khufu's son but not his direct successor. It still retains a small portion of its original smooth exterior. It looks like a hat on top.

This is the smallest of the three pyramids: Menkaure. Menkaure was Khafre's son and successor.

The gash was caused when Saladin's son tried to disassemble it in 1186. I'm glad he didn't succeed.

There were plenty of opportunities to ride a camel. We didn't. We took a cab to the different areas on the site instead. It would have been a really long walk. The site is enormous.

Day 7: Egyptian Museum

For our first full day in Cairo, we elected to see the Egyptian Museum.

The hotel provided a free shuttle into downtown. The trouble is that its hours of operation sucked. The first shuttle wasn't until 10am, and the return shuttles were at 5pm, 10pm, and 12:30am. Not exactly great for sightseeing, but we made it work.

The shuttle lets you off at the bus station just behind the Egyptian Museum. From this vantage point, you could see dozens of billboards. These were just a small testament of how commercialized this area of Cairo was.

Let me take a moment to talk about Cairo itself. It's the dirtiest, most polluted city I've ever encountered. There were vagrants and trash everywhere. The buildings and other infrastructure were falling apart. The air smelled like diesel fuel. You took your life in your hands just crossing the street. There were very few traffic signals, and the ones they had weren't obeyed. Lane markers were more of a suggestion than a rule. You used your horn in lieu of your turn signal. Everything was backwards and turned around. You'd take an exit on the highway only to take the next exit back the way you came. It was a crazy place. I wouldn't live there if you gave me a million dollars.

We weren't really in Cairo to see the city. We had specific places to go. Today we were seeing only one place: The Egyptian Museum. The museum is massive. Even so, it isn't big enough to house the avalanche of artifacts, statues, documents, mummies, chariots, jewelry, you name it, that has been scavenged from the thousands of years that the pharaohs ruled Egypt.

As you walk in, you go through one security check where they screen your bags. Then you buy your tickets and go through the turnstiles. Then you go through another security check where they screen your bags. Cameras are not allowed. Somehow Ma made it through the security check #2, but I didn't. They sent me back out to the courtyard to give my camera to someone. Well, I wasn't about to part with my camera. So, I stuck it into my money belt and walked back through the metal detector. No beeps. I smuggled my camera in. I had no intention of taking photos; I just didn't want to give it up.

TRAVELERS' TIP: Take lots of water and a fan (electric or folded). The inside of the museum is like an oven. Despite the fact that it houses some of the world's most precious objects, it is NOT air conditioned.

Once inside, you can go to the second floor where you buy another ticket to see the mummies. That room is air conditioned, and the mummies look well-preserved and well-displayed. If only the rest of the museum were like that...

The King Tut area is also air conditioned. You can't miss the 24-pound solid gold funeral mask. It's so famous they put it on the 1 LE coin. There is also an air conditioned room that stored some royal jewelry and another room showing artifacts from the tombs at Tanis (in the Nile Delta).

Aside from these few areas, the way the objects are displayed is shameful. In any other museum, these pieces would be showcased as the most prized possessions of their collection. Here, they're randomly placed wherever there is room. People use them as footrests. People scratched their name into tomb walls. Descriptions were pitiful, wrong, or non-existent. It's a travesty to see things so poorly marked, so poorly lit, so poorly taken care of.

Despite all that, the Egyptian Museum is a must-see. You'll never forget it. My favorite items were the enormous black granite blocks covered in hieroglyphics. The carvings were so perfect. They appeared to have been carved by state-of-the-art CNC machines instead of many millennia ago by hand.

The courtyard had some interesting statues and obelisks, too.

The cafe in the museum's courtyard knows just how to gouge the tourists. There, a small bottle of water is 10 LE ("livres égyptiennes", or Egyptian pounds). That's about $2. If you go across the very busy street (run like hell, or walk a ways and use the metro as an underpass) to the Mobil gas station, you can get four big bottles of water for the same price (which is exactly what we did). We're taking it back to the hotel with us. At the hotel, a big bottle of water costs 16.50 LE or $3.30. That's also the price for a can of soda.

This picture was taken by a British couple named Dan and Susan. They were also staying at the Oasis Hotel and visiting the Egyptian Museum that day. We ran into them a couple more times during our stay.

Oasis

Once you got out into the unsecured area of the airport, you were fair game for all the shysters who were wandering around. We found ATMs and after trying a few different things eventually we got one to give us some money. Our next task was to find the airport shuttle desk. We found the shuttle desk, but I'm not sure the guy we talked to actually worked there. He was wearing a suit and seemed to be official, but upon reflection, he was probably just an opportunist. He did get us a cab, and he charged us an exorbitant $30 to take us to our hotel. Then we had to endure our first request for baksheesh (tipping). It was definitely not our last.

Our hotel was called Oasis, and it truly was. Ma and I affectionately called Egypt "the land where stuff didn't make sense". Well, the Oasis was a bit better than the rest of Cairo. It was relatively clean and stuff mostly made sense. The staff were pretty indifferent though. It was definitely not the warm welcome we enjoyed at the Economy Hotel in Athens.

The accommodations were nice, definitely up to Western standards. The room had two full (or were they queen?) beds, but they didn't use fitted sheets. Instead, they just tucked a flat sheet around the mattress.

TRAVELERS' TIP: Just like in Athens, there were no washcloths or alarm clock provided.

You see the left door of the dresser? Tucked behind this door you will find a fridge.

There were several English channels on TV. They showed lots of American TV shows. CSI came on channel 3 at 7am with Arabic subtitles. We could also watch Lost, NCIS, and others. Every night they had at least one good movie on. Ma and I watched the Bourne Identity, Risky Business, and fell asleep during Air Force One.

The bathroom was big. It had a bidet, but we didn't know what to do with it. It also had a hairdryer and even a retractable clothesline.

We spent a lot of time out here by the pool. At dusk, they would float this fountain light thing into the pool, which made swimming (or even touching the water) a hazard.

We ate poolside every night. The prices and menu were the same no matter where you ate. The temperatures cooled off when the sun went down, so you could definitely enjoy the ambiance while sitting out here. I read some reviews before I came, and despite what they said, we were not really bothered by mosquitoes out here. In fact, eating poolside was very pleasant. The only things that spoiled the evenings were the ubiquitous hookas (water pipes) that everyone smoked.

The other place we ate was the breakfast room. They served up a hot buffet breakfast every morning. They had European offerings like yogurt and fruit, plus some American things like cereal and toast. They also had some Egyptian things, like fiteers (a sort of rubbery pancake) and fuul (mashed fava beans). I ate a lot of the hashbrown-like potato things that were shaped like chicken nuggets. They had "orange juice", but it tasted more like a flat Fanta orange soda.

The Oasis Hotel was meant to be kind of a resort. It wasn't quite the Four Seasons, but they did manage to have a few fountains and some pretty courtyards. All the rooms were on the ground floor, so you didn't have to mess with elevators or noisy people above/below you. We were in room 1501, adjacent to a well-lit courtyard toward the middle of the map. It was a good place to be.

The Oasis Hotel is on a very busy road, but the rooms (or at least our room) were far enough off the street that we could only barely hear the street noise. In the mornings we would occasionally hear the melodic sound of a truck horn. (Egyptian truck horns are nothing like American ones.)

Day 6: Africa, here we come!

The last morning it rained in Athens, but we managed to get out and do a little shopping. Then it was time to start the second leg of our trip.

Here's Ma on the EgyptAir plane we took to Cairo. Naturally, everything was in Arabic. Surprisingly though, everything was also prominently displayed in English. And since we were going from a Greek speaking country to an Arabic speaking country, they made all the announcements three times: Arabic, Greek, and English. How nice!!!

The flight from Chicago to Atlanta took two hours and they barely had time to serve us drinks and peanuts. The flight from Athens to Cairo took exactly the same amount of time and they had two separate drink services and a full meal. Amazing! Our flight attendant was very friendly. He kept pouring different exotic fruit drinks to see if I liked any of them. I think I tried mango and guava, although I couldn't really tell. It seemed very important to him that we were enjoying ourselves. And we were! I also think he liked trying out his English and getting attention from two American ladies.

We landed in Cairo and steeled ourselves against what the guidebooks had warned us about. We were pleased to find that the new EgyptAir terminal (Terminal 3) was very clean and modern.

The security in the Athens airport let us take food and water on the flight. We threw away our grapes before hitting customs in Cairo, but even if we had kept them, I don't think they would have stopped us.

Here's a picture of the baggage claim area: plenty of seating and lots of space to move around. No litter or filth in sight. If you look closely, you can see the Arabic numeral alongside the Western numeral on the column. They had great signage in multiple languages. We had no problem getting around knowing just English.

TRAVELERS' TIP: If you get the opportunity to fly EgyptAir into Cairo, I strongly recommend it. Not only do you get great service in the air, but you also get to land at Terminal 3. I'm told it is so much better than the older Terminals 1 and 2. All of the Star Alliance airlines (like United, Turkish Airlines, and others) will eventually be using Terminal 3.

ANOTHER TRAVELERS' TIP: You can buy your visa ($15) from any of the banks that are clustered around the passport control area. You'll need U.S. Dollars and exact change.

Other sites in Delphi

The rest of the Sacred Way was closed, so we couldn't get up to see the Theater (for a once-every-four-year ancient song contest) nor the Stadium (for the once-every-four-year Pythian Games). But there's still plenty to see in Delphi...

There's a nice modern walkway out to the other sites: the Kastalian Spring (closed to visitors), a gymnasium, and the Sanctuary of Athena. The Kastalian Spring is where the oracle, the priests and the pilgrims would purify themselves before the rituals.

We had a picnic lunch (mostly purchased at the Central Market in Athens yesterday) while sitting on this wall. Those are olive trees in the background.

At the bottom of the hill some distance away from the Sacred Precinct lay the ruins of a gymnasium where the athletes trained for the Pythian Games.

OK, so we're not ancient Pythian wrestlers.

A steep path leading from the gymnasium took me to the Sanctuary of Athena. (Ma stayed behind at the gymnasium.) Supposedly of lesser importance than the Temple of Apollo, it appears on far more postcards.

There's also a museum in Delphi. Among its many treasures is the Sphynx of Naxos that used to sit on the black rock in an earlier picture.

A glass case near the exit showed what the Sacred Precinct would have looked like in its prime.

It was a long walk back to the bus station, a long ride back to Athens, another long walk to the metro station followed by a short walk back to the hotel. We ate what was left of our picnic lunch, packed our bags, and got some shut-eye. Tomorrow: Africa!

Sacred Precinct

The big historical site in Delphi is called the Sacred Precinct. It clings to the side of a hill. The Sacred Way (a ceremonial road) starts here at the Roman Forum.

Legend has it that Zeus released two eagles, and they met at Delphi. Thus, they decided that this was the belly button of the universe. This stone cone (a replica), called an omphalos, marks the spot.

The Sacred Way is lined by several "treasuries", lovely little temples that housed offerings for the gods. This one is the Treasury of the Athenians. It's is a faithful reconstruction completed in 1906.

On the black rock once stood the Sphinx of Naxos. She now stands in the Delphi Museum.

Here's another gift from the Athenians: the Athenian Stoa. They used it to display their their plunder from wars with Persia.

Behind us is the Polygonal Wall. Above that is the destination of the Sacred Way: the Temple of Apollo. Only a few columns still stand.

Back in the day, pilgrims would arrive with two gifts for the gods. At the Great Alter (just outside the temple), they would present one and then proceed inside the temple where they would present the other one. Then the oracle, sitting on a tripod in a giant cauldron, would go into a trance and mumble or screech or whatever, supposedly predicting the future. The priests would interpret her babbling into a little poem. Then you'd head back the way you came, likely no wiser than when you arrived.

The rest of the Sacred Way was closed for our visit. A sign said it was due to "technical problems". There was some speculation as to whether that meant the French were doing research there, or whether a rock slide had happened (or was imminent).

Day 5: Delphi

We got a very early start today. We were lucky that the Economy Hotel had enough of their breakfast set out early for us to get a bite before our long day. We took the metro to the bus terminal instead of bus #024.

We had a pretty nice coach bus for the three-hour ride on the way there. The bus on the ride back was a bit older and not as warm. They make one stop along the way at a mostly deserted hotel/restaurant called Erato.

The countryside was filled with cotton farms, olive groves, and vineyards. It was quite mountainous, too. We saw lots of power-generating windmills, too. Looks like Greece may be trying to go green.

The woman pictured on the left was named Irene. She was from New York state and was traveling on her own this day. We crossed paths quite a few times in little Delphi, and she took the same bus back with us.

Speaking of little Delphi, here's the main drag. The building with the red awning on the left is the bus station. Quaint, hey? Everything in town screamed "tourist trap". Thankfully, we were there to see the sites and not much else.

If you looked down over the stone wall across from the bus station you could see the seaside town of Itea.