Today after coming back from the temple of Horus some guys are trying to sell us some water. They offered it at a decent price (one dollar) but after a few seconds I got them to give me two for that price :)

Here’s the cheating part – after about five seconds he chases after two of us and tries to tell me I didn’t give him a dollar and he’s holding up one Egyptian pound. Now this is possible that I gave him the wrong thing and then I realize would have never gotten one foot away if it was the wrong amount and I’m telling him no (but in the back of my mind there is a little doubt still). Then I notice it’s not an Egyptian pound it’s a 25 pesters note (one-fourth of a pound) and I know I didn’t have any (I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen any) since they’re so cheap I would have saved them as a souvenir, the doubt went away and I had to yell at him to get away.

Later: So after that temple trip, we were heading over to take a picture of something that I saw as we were heading to them temple. And we’ve got some guy following us saying “excude me” and “pssst” and we’re totally ignoring him, it’s proably the same guy or someone else trying to sell us something but he was pretty persistant. Finally Lea realized it was someone from the ship so we let him catch up. It turns out the ship was supposed to leave immediately when we got back. I knew this and forgot all about it! (I would have still gone to take the picture but I would have told someone I’d be right back)

So today we went inside the Valley of the Kings and then over to the Valley of the Queens. It was completely amazing. I just couldn’t believe it. No photos allowed inside but I’ll post some of the photos of the actually valley in the Valley of the Kings (VotK). So there are 63 discovered tombs in the VotK, anything you read will say 62 but they just recently discovered a new one.

The construction they did as they dug into these mountains and was incredible. Tunnels and the chambers were very interesting. Lots of colors still vibrant after all these years (3,000+). In side the huge chambers it felt very moving to see all this work that these people put into constructing these rooms. I bet one of them were 50 feet x 25 feet and 20 feet high and it had to be a few hundred feet into the mountain.

Just incredible. This is what I came here to see.

We are on the ship M/S Royal Orchid and it’s incredible. It’ll hold 60 guests and it’s just the 15 of us! I’m on the top deck right this, I’m in a lounge chair right next to the hot tub and pool. The stars are out and there isn’t a cloud in the sky, I wish we weren’t next to this “city”. It’s just beautiful on the ship and there are so many staff here. I really wish I had taken the 4 nights on the boat instead of just 3, it’s so nice to set up the room and know I’m going to be here for a few days. We’re docked in this tiny little town that I’ll have to look up the name for called Esna.

We’re just going south down the Nile (it flows north) and making stops at different places. We had to go through some locks today to get onto the higher level of water and that was fun to watch from the inside. And I’m watching a goat cross a side-street right now. It’s 9:29pm and it’s still pretty warm out, it’s been very hot lately and it’s going to get worse as we head south towards the Sahara.

We did wander around town for a few minutes, it took us way longer for us to walk the roundabout way past the guards and back to go up the stairs than to walk down the street and back. And we spent a bit of time negotiating for a candy bar too. Here’s how it went:

Me: How much for a Galaxy Ripple

He: 10 LE (pounds egyptian)

Me: I laughed it was so high (about $1.86)

He: 7 LE

Me: Shrugged

He: 2 for 10 LE

Me: 3 for 10

He: Sold! (or something like that).

Me: Happy with my purchase of 3 dusty candy bars that I probably still paid too much for.

So earlier our Guide told us we’d see pirates down by the dam. Sure enough, as we slow down dozens of rowboats surround the ship. And it’s “street” vendors trying to sell us stuff.

What they do is toss it up 4 floors for us to look at and it hits the railing and falls back down into the water. He throws another and it goes over us and lands in the pool. It’s really hard to negotiate when they are down so far. A few of the ladies bought some nice table cloths, I didn’t see anything I liked enough to have him send up (and then have to send back down arguing all the way). But it was just hysterical to see, we were all laughing the whole time. It’s just so bizarre.

Then we watched them leave to lay siege on another ship…

In Luxor we’re staying at the Sofitel Pavilion Winter Palace it’s pretty grand (but our rooms need a refurbish) and I’ve got a great view (see photos).

We’ve been to Karnak (I just posted a few more pictures some with people in it go give a sense of scale) and the Luxor Temple (shots also posted, the night shots are from here) and the temple and more. I’ve got so many more photos (and stories) but not enough time…

We did a sunset boat ride. And tomorrow we’re crossing the nile to see the sun rise. I’ve got to be up and ready to leave at 4:30 am, plus I’ve got to be packed because we go the ship right after and we’ll be on the Nile for 4 days!

I’m so excited to not have to pack again for 3 nights! And it’s the boat, so it doesn’t have to be “airplane neat” just so I can carry it all!

I’m assuming that the Internet will be sparse for a while since I was told that ATM machines probably won’t be at most of our stops (I’m assuming WiFi is more sparse than ATMs are).

As a reminder here are my flickr Egypt photos .

After we flew to Luxor we went to the Temple of Karnak. It was very hot (I finally found a hat to buy) and everyone (and there were lots of people there) were all always trying to get into the shade. They started building this complex 3,000+ years ago and it took over 1,500 years! This place supplied me with a lot of great photos (I just don’t know if I can get them uploaded).

FYI: Luxor contains 1/3 of the world’s monuments (the rest of egypt contains another 1/3), I’m not sure what exactly defines a monument.

So here’s a picture of me in front of The Museum in Cairo Cairo Museum for Egyptian Antiquities..

INTERNET: The hotel I’m at only offers wired Internet in the business center (it is 24/7) they want 20 LE (egyptian pounds) which is probably about $4-5 for 15 minutes, I think it’s a little better deal if you get 30 minutes. But when it’s closed (most of the time) you have to get someone to open it. The bonus for me is I have the laptop pretty prepped for what I want to do: I’ve already written e-mails and hit send, I’ve written posts (such as this one) and saved them, I only have to hit send and I’ve organized the photos I want to upload. So 15 minutes is actually quite a bit of time since I have the laptop. Anything more and I’d probably just be screwing around. They are working on wireless in certain areas but it’s not complete enough to work (but it is complete enough to stop you from using it).

MONEY CONVERSION: I did what I usually do, I went to the ATM. I took out 1000 LE (think of it as a cursive L like the Brits show it) and when I checked my bank’s web site I see they took out $174.56 with a $1 surcharge (that’s about what I thought it should be). I should have checked the sign at the bank for their conversion…

PHONES: No one can tell me what it’ll actually cost to use the phone in the room (actually they’ll tell me but if you ask two other people you get three different answers) and they have no pay phones here. They said I can use my AT&T calling card (but I’d still pay some undefined rate), but last week when I called AT&T they told me Egypt didn’t allow foreign phone cards to be used. So I went back up to the business center and Skyped out (using Skype computer phone software). I had to pay for the computer time and a few cents through Skype but it was still pretty cheap and now my Mom knows I’m alive (she can’t check the net to see if I’m posting, which infers I’m alive).

PENS: I couldn’t find the pen they supplied with the room so I went to the desk and asked for another one, you’d think I had gone and asked for a second television set. A call to housekeeping and hassling a maid I did finally get a new pen.

I do have a few more photos my Flickr feed from Egypt, click to see my flickr Egypt photos (hopefully I’ll work on the descriptions later) you should be able to get some idea if you click on the photo and read the “tags”. If you haven’t seen them yet you can view a slideshow.

Internet access isn’t as easy as I hoped so we’ll see have the rest of the trip goes…

Here’s two photos of the pyramids to hold you off until I get better/closer shots.

The one on the let was my first view on the way over (you have to look through the windshield), the second is the view from the pool at the hotel!

Click any of them to enlarge for a better view!

This one is my outside porch at the hotel.

So the EgyptAir flight from JFK to Cairo took off way late, we sat in line on the tarmac for a long time (about an hour?). The really cool part is the had a camera up from and they pumped the picture to the TVs in the plane so you could watch the take off as if you were up front. Not too bad so far but I’m about ready for a nap. Dinner was salmon (bleh!) they were out of beef :(

I’ve got a few movies and TV shows I brought along so I’ve been catching up on those. Plus, I finished the new Alex Rider novel Ark Angel which Target accidentally put on the shelves a few days early so I was excited to buy that for the trip the night before I left.

It was a really long flight and I couldn’t sleep at all, I finally got about 90 minutes sleep and woke up with about 90 minutes until we land. But when combine this with the fact I’ve been on the go for about 24 hours and only had about 4 hours sleep to start I’m really thankful for the 90 minutes sleep…

It’s about four times the size of Michigan with about eight times the number of people. Although I think Michigan is about 40% water and Egypt is less than 1%. Click the map for a detailed view of the country (I’ll be traveling from Cairo to Aswan and spots in-between).
Total area: 1,001,450 sq km = 386,559.7 sq miles
Land only: 995,450 sq km = 383,857.7 sq miles
Water only: 6,000 sq km = 2,316 sq miles
Border countries: Gaza Strip, Israel, Libya and Sudan
Population: 78,887,00

More info at the CIA World Factbook Egypt page and at Wikipedia.

Since it’s all I’ve been thinking about lately I finally changed the layout to match the theme of my upcoming trip! If you see any of the old theme (blue and/or snowflakes) popping up please let me know!

So I got my Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP Digital SLR Camera (with an 18-55mm Lens) and I really like it! I’ve wanted it for a while but it’s the upcomming Egypt trip that inspired me to finally purchase it. (This was also one of the items on my 101 in 1001 items list so you can read a little more about the purchase itself in it’s completed entry over there.) So I got it with the 2GB card (and a spare 512MB) and the last few days I picked up a mini memory reader, a case, a filter (mostly to protect the lens) and one of those things with the rubber band around the lens to hang onto the lens cap so you don’t leave it anywhere.

I really like the fact when you “click” the button it instantly takes the picture. And I like the control it gives me over the pictures. I dislike the fact that the knob has confusing symbols and letters on it (I think I’ve got most of them figured out now). It’s got an LCD screen on the back, would it be so hard to have a mini manual built into the camera for review when you’re not so sure? I think any device should have this: iPod, camera, mp3 player, DVD player or anything with a display (it can’t take that much effort).

So on my local news tonight they were talking about this Jet Lag Calculator (needs pop-ups turned off). It asks you a half-dozen questions and gives you recommendations on when you should expose yourself to light (bright lights help) and when to avoid it (dark sunglasses help to avoid light). Kinda interesting, I may give it a try…

For more tips go to the British Airways Jet Lag information pages.

For my trip to Egypt (when I arrive there) they suggested:

Day 1
Avoid light between 9:00 am to 11:30 am
Seek light between 11:30 am to 14:00 pm
Day 2
Avoid light between 5:00 am to 7:30 am
Seek light between 7:30 am to 10:00 am

Hmmm… I should check the time difference now with the changes last week.

So the results of the School auction are in!!! Actually all thats in is my results. I’ve got lots of items I bid on and many I lost, I won way too much chocolate and lots way to many margarita baskets… And me in the cat suit weere also bid on (see below). So my loot consisted of:

So I’ve got this podcast with the enhanced images working!

Two kinds of podcasts:
this is the “better” enhanced AAC podcast (for iTunes, iPods and Quicktime).
this is the mp3 podcast (for everything else).

The enhanced file is a AAC/MP4 (m4a) file so you probably need an iPod or iTunes (or Quicktime) to see the images. The MP3 will just be on it’s own for any software/hardware player.

I now have both a Enhanced RSS Feed and a MP3 RSS Feed set up.

(If you get goofy characters you’ll need to save it to the computer first, sorry. This should be fixed, but you never know…)

I apologize to those using feed software, this (and the feed from the next podcast or two) will be goofy as revise and work out the bugs…

So while I don’t have the tickets I now have my flight arrangements. To put it mildly the first day of my trip is going to suck. I’ve got a direct flight from New York to Egypt (5800 miles) but I have to get to New York (JFK) from Detroit (just under 500 miles). Here’s the sucky part, to get to JFK from Detroit they are flying me via Atlanta, GA so I’m going 1350+ miles instead of 500 miles, plus it’s probably an extra half traveling to do all the connections. Now I’m not a travel expert (or a geography expert) but it just seems odd (see the picture) that there isn’t some better way to route me less than 750 miles out of the way. Next time I’m make that part of the reservations myself and pay the extra for two different airlines one way or something.

Part of the annoyance was when I called to see what they could do to help they said, “that’s because you’re flying on Sunday and they only have one flight from Detroit to JFK, if you went on some other day it wouldn’t be a problem”, well I’m not the one who scheduled the tour on a Sunday, they did, I picked the tour company, they picked the day not me! And it’s true there is only one direct flight from from Detroit to JFK to get me there in time for the Egypt flight, it’d be nice to have some other options. I’d have paid extra for another airline or if they told me it was going to stink I’d have made my own reservations or I’d pay extra to get a direct flight the day before and spend the night in NY…

So I’m traveling with Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) on the EG3 Egypt tour. There a part of Grand Circle Tours. We will go to Cairo, Luxor, Aswan and a Nile Cruise.

(I hadn’t mentioned those specifics before).

So I’ve set up another blog called My Trip To Egypt appropriately URLed with http://mytriptoegypt.com/

This new blog is only for posts related to my Egypt trip. Don’t worry, all the Egypt posts will all show up here, I’m just showing them the Egypt category from here (so they don’t see my other posts). When I give them (co-workers/family) a vacation web site I don’t want them getting more than they bargained for…

You may want to poke your head over there, I’ll be showing the local time and weather and who knows what other fun gizmos I’ll find for the margins of the pages (any suggestions?). As of now it’s got the pre-Egypt messages I’ve posted here over the past year but it’ll have more later.

FYI – I don’t generally give people my blog address, I don’t advertise it to family and friends, I generally don’t even mention it to co-workers. If they want to find it I’m sure that they can (it’d take about 2 seconds if they googled me) and I’m okay with that (but I’m not giving them direct links to the personal blog). But with my trip coming up I’ll want to share those entries and photos so I’ll give them the address to that site.

You might get a few more posts than they do, if anything that I want to blog that I might feel is not appropriate or more personal for co-workers and/or family it’s only going to get posted here. It’s not like I often (ever?) post things that are inappropriate but that site is for specific vacation information so that’s what they’ll see.

I’m not sure if comments will work there, I’m trying to decide if it’s worth the extra work to rig it so they can comment there and not get bounced back here. So if you want to comment (and please do!) you’ll probably have to comment from here. I’ll copy that theme over to here as the trip nears.

So I’m listening to the Egyptian Arabic Pimsleur Language CD in preparation for my trip. It’s hard!! I have no aptitude for language but they say it doesn’t matter (I say it does). I’m only on the first lesson. It’s kinda hear what the guy says so I can’t always repeat it, I’ll probably go over that and sounnd like the woman on the tape.

Most of the reviews on Amazon are favorable (except for the person who said there wasn’t enough info on grammer and more in the four hour course) so maybe it’s just me, we’ll see how I feel after a few more hours…

So I’ve got a few maps for my trip to Egypt. I have the Cairo Insight Fleximap and the Egypt Insight FlexiMap. These are regular-type maps that fold out to 26×18 inches but are laminated and contain extra information like: distances, climate, getting around, ten sites you shouldn’t miss and some smaller maps of cities and pyramid diagrams. In addition, the Cairo map has a metro map. These will be really handy during my trip, I think I spend more time in Cairo than anywhere else so these will be great to have.

I got one of these as a gift and the other might have been a gift too or else I bought it with a gift card. A lot of the items I wanted in relation to this trip I added to my wishlist and some have appeared at gift times or I’ve used gift cards that I received. I’ll be talking about them before and during the trip.

Originally uploaded by Mindaou.


Click for a larger image.

So I was looking at flickr photos (not mine) and saw this interesting building. I’m guessing it’s in Egypt (but I’m not really sure…

I’ll let you know what I find out. From the comment I was able to find out more.

It’s the Memorial of the Unknown Soldier build in 1975 in the Nasr City district in Cairo.

It looks as if Anwar Sadat inaugurated the statue, was assassinated near it and was buried there also.

So did I tell you for sure that I am absolutely positively going to go to Egypt this spring? Details to follow…

This week in Circuits with David Pogue he’s interviewing Scott Gaidano president of Drive Savers (a hard drive recovery business):

This is our most famous computer: it’s a laptop that was rescued from the bottom of the Amazon River. A cruise ship hit an underwater barge, and sank down to the bottom. And the woman, an amateur diver, several days later, against all international law, broke in with a Maglight flashlight. Went down two flights of stairs underwater. Green, dark water. Found her stateroom. Remembered to bring her key, and rescued her laptop, and got it to Drive Savers. And we recovered all the data for her.

What makes that one extra interesting is that message came through while I was planning and trying to decide on the 3 or 4 day Nile cruise of my Egypt trip. Maybe just the 3 day (and I’ll back up all my data).

Four jobs you’ve had in your life:
Web Programmer
Computer Trainer
Cook
Camp Counselor

Four movies you could watch over and over:

The Flight of the Navigator

The American President

The Cutting Edge

A Christmas Story

Four places you’ve lived:
Berkley, MI
East Lansing, MI
Haslett, MI
Dearborn, MI

Four TV shows you love to watch:
Gray’s Anatomy
Two and a half Men
Medium
Veronica Mars

Four websites you visit daily:
Blogography
SlickDeals
The Daily Meme
Google

Four of your favorite foods:
Pizza
Hot Wings
Chicken With Pineapple (Chinese)
Beef With Brocolli (Chinese)

Four places you’d rather be:
Egypt
Costa Rica
London
The Moon

Four albums you can’t live without (for the moment):

Avril Lavign Under My Skin

Anna Nalick Wreck of the Day

Tori Amos Little Earthquakes

Indigo Girls Strange Fire

I’m stopping at four (2 new & 2 old) but I really couldn’t stick to four…

Via Webmiztris via Kimi and Wendy.

What are your Top 5 places you’ve never been to, but most want to visit?
In order that I’ll probably do these:

So I ordered some books from Amazon (for my Egypt trip). I think I ordered them on July 3rd and they finally shipped yesterday. The estimated delivery date is August 8th (that’s crazy, right?) so I checked the tracking and while the tracking is still listing August 8th I see they left a town 20 miles away at 9:15 AM so I’m assuming they’ll be here today. It’s just a pretty lousy estimation, they were off by 25 days!!! These days I expect something a little more accurate like: it’ll arrive at 2:17 PM today…

UPDATE: They showed up at 11:04 AM on Thursday the 14th! They look like good books!

This is my name using Egyptian Hieroglyphs (supposedly). Does anyone know if this is really related to anything hieroglyphic? There are no references on the generating page to anything authentic. I’m seriously interested. I’m still thinking Egypt may be my next trip…

LATER: I see now that these “letters” do have some meaning according to the Hieroglyphic entry in the Wikipedia. Although, even after reading the Wikipedia article, I’m still confused why some letters are stacked and some are side by side (my name doesn’t fit this schema).

So Eqypt has been on my list of places to go. I’ve always wanted to see the pyramids.

So I think I might have to make this happen. This one though I think I might have to do a tour with a group or something since I have no clue about anything in regards to this. I’m not even sure what else to see while I’m there besides the pyramids.

So I’m looking for recommendations for a tour or something along those lines that you might have taken that you’d recommend (or oness to avoid). I’d also take some suggestions on some places in particular to go to (or avoid).

You are given a gift of 1 million dollars (kindly adjust for currency in your location). There are some restrictions on how you can spend some of the money, as follows:

From Random Acts of Journalling