6.30.10 - Intro to Cairo

The adventures continue. Today I arrived in Cairo after a 10 hour flight with more babies and children than I have ever seen on a plane. Ever. You can imagine how pleasant and quiet the flight was. It was a long and mostly sleepless flight, but this whole trip started to feel real when we flew over Giza, and I looked out the window down onto the pyramids. There they were, surrounded by dusty-tan desert, looking enormous and solidary out there in the sand, ancient and beautiful. In and instant, all of the difficult nights I spent at the hospital working my butt off, the lack of social life, the moving of my entire apartment down three flights of stairs and then 1,000 miles across the country in a U-haul, the goodbyes I had to say to my friends, all of it became worth it to be able to be doing this!
My favorite part about arriving at an airport, is to walk out and see all of the families that are lined up to greet their families and friends coming off the plane. I scanned the crowd for my name on a piece of paper by the driver sent by the hostel...there he was, and we were off. Until, minutes before leaving the airport for the highway, we got a flat tire. Most of what ensued was communicated by charades, as my driver spoke only a little English, and of course I don't know any Arabic. What followed was me sitting in the car, baking, while he went to find someone who could change the tire, then went to find a tire, then put the car up on a jack with me still in it and changed the tire.
THEN, we were off, into the wild, crowded, noisy streets of Cairo. And I have learned already, that a honking horn could mean one of many, many things. For example it could mean "hello, I'm here" or "Thank you". It could also mean "I'm about to pop this car into reverse on this one way highway because I just missed my exit please stay out of my way" or "I'm about to run you over". Also, I have learned that lanes here are not so much lanes as just suggestions for where you might want to drive. Nobody stays in the lines...there could be three lanes clearly depicted on the road, and there will be four cars staggered at various widths apart and one or two mopeds weaving in between them. The traffic here makes NYC look curteous and mild mannered.
All this business of getting here has made me pretty hungry, so I'm heading out to try some Egyptian food!