felucca

felucca
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Don't take the bus from Jerusalem to Cairo with a six year old.

But if you do, go with a six year old (seven today!) like Benjamin, who will read to himself in Hebrew for two hours and mid-way through the trip, tired and wan, will say "Thank you for taking me to Cairo - even though this is hard it's also already fun."

We arrived near midnight, and the streets were still quite busy. We took a cab over to our hotel (Hotel Osiris), on the twelfth floor of an office building and run by a French/ Egyptian couple. In the morning we had breakfast on the terrace overlooking the smoggy, multitudinous city. All the buildings have been stained the same dull brown of a smoker's teeth, so it's easy not to notice that some of them are glorious - laundry strung across elegant stone balconies. Our first day we walked over to the Egyptian museum. There is a glorious chaos to the collection, though it makes the visit impressionistic rather than educational. Dusty unpacked crates of antiquities still cluttered the corners. We saw two mummified crocodiles and several mummified kittens. A princess was buried with her pet baboon. The royal mummies had labels that identified the illnesses they suffered from in life: obesity, bad teeth, herniated scrotum, smallpox. On one mummy's leathery skin you could still see the marks of the pox. Ben sat on the floor and drew sarcophagi. King Tut's death-box still glitters.
And at night, we hired this felucca and drifted on the Nile, where we spotted "Nile Bowling." A reason to go back ,maybe?