Egypt (Cairo) - November 2014

After returning from the Pyramids, we decided to spoil ourselves a little bit by visiting one of the most restaurants / bars - Sequoia. The restaurant is in Zamalek on the island in the middle of Nile (a neighborhood that is probably equivalent to Chelsea in London). We sat on the bank of Nile and watched the boats coming and going, and occasionally saw the fireworks. I really enjoyed my special drink - milk and date smoothie.


Our second day in Egypt, we went to visit the Citadel, the Copic area, and the Egyptian Museum.

According to the lonely planet, the Citadel is the most busy tourist attraction in Cairo but they are not sure why. Well, we definitely think the writer is not in a good mood that. We were all quite impressed by the Citadel.

The Citadel was built in the 12th century. It looks huge from the outside, but once you are inside, the places where you could visit are much more limited. We first visited the main mosque. I think in general I have a big fascination with mosques, I found the simply design and the geometric patterns really soothing. Inside this mosque, you have a courtyard with beautiful white marble floor, inside of the mosque, the decoration of the walls is made from many different precious and semi-precious stone inlaid. Very beautiful.

We then visited the second mosque, which has a style of Cordoba, with red and white stones layered to form the arches. Over here, my dear Alex got stung by a bee (Florian insists that it is a wasp) on his foot. We think it is because his foot smells like flowers. Florian also gave us a lecture of on bees based on his personal experience.

From the terrace of the Citadel you can see a dusty, polluted birdview of Cairo. In the rest of the Citadel, there is a military museum and a police museum, which we skipped entirely.

From the Citadel, we then went to the Coptic area. Coptic Orthodox Christianity is one of the oldest Christianity founded around 3AD. The area was heavily protected by soldiers, we think probably it is an easy target of the terrorists.

We first went to the Cavern church  (St Sergius church). It is a very small unimpressive Church, but according to history, this is where the Holy Family (Jesus, Mary and Joseph) lived when they came to Egypt. We saw a lot of people coming in to be blessed by the nuns.

We then visited the Hanging Church, which got its name because it was built on top of a Babylonian fortress (this area was once called Babylon!). It is a christian church but the decoration is entirely Islamic. Very beautifully decorated walls.

We stopped quickly for lunch, and then went to the world famous Egyptian museum. Unfortunately camera is not allowed in the museum, so we couldn't take any pictures. The museum has over 100,000 objectives. We hired a guide which followed us for 2 hours to explain everything, but it still feels like we haven't seen 1/10 of its collection.

Some of the really impressive objects are from the tomb of Tutankhamun (he was buried in the valley of the Kings). Although he only ruled for 9 years, his burial site was filled with treasures, solid gold coffin (nicely decorated), gold mask for the mummy, jewelries, blah blah blah. Basically lots and lots of gold.

We also saw the royal mummy collection, which I have to say is not really worth the extra fee if you can visit the British Museum Egyptian collection.

Some of the other objects that really interest me are the top of the pyramids (2), Ramses II's underwear, tomb with beautifully painted inside (still very visible), sculpture of the writer, two huge statues of (?), the jars to store human organs, etc. The list goes on and on.

In any way, as our guide said, it is UNBELIEVABLE!

Egypt (Giza, Darshur, Saqqara, Memphis) - November 2014

We arrived in Cairo at midnight. Got our visa, went through the custom, and the driver is already waiting outside to take us to the hostel. First impression of Cairo – this looks like China, or rather my hometown back in the 90s. Dusty, chaotic, mysterious.

At 1am, we made it to our hostel, and met up with our friend Florian. Since 2011, our last backpacking trip to Middle East, we have really missed the backpacking culture. It is too easy these days to travel by private tours, stay in 5 star hotels and overpay for every service you get. So for this trip, we decided to go back to our roots – that means backpacking style.

The hostel is in on the 7^th floor of an 1874 building. It’s got a nice terrace, root top area, but no towels in the room. We had to borrow pillow cases from the front desk instead.

After some late night snack and catching up with our friend, and some friendly fellow backpackers, we went to sleep.

The next morning, we woke up early to go to the Giza pyramids. The pyramids is about 20 kilometers outside of Cairo. Our driver took us directly to one of those camel ride tours places. After some haggling (which involves the tour operator pretending to be mad at us), we agreed on a price, and set for our pyramid tour.

The first challenge is to get on to the camel. It is quite funny when you get on the camel and wait for it to stand up. These beasts are huge. When it suddenly stands up, you go from ground level to be on top of the world. And when the camel moves, you cannot help but move your hips with it. It feels like you are dancing with your hips.

We walked along some sand dune and got a very nice panoramic view of the three pyramids (Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure). Together with the smaller pyramids for the Queens. The view is trulye impressive. We also manage to get there in a good time, there is almost no other tourists expect us. The guide made us do some funny poses (they are all very good at that).

We walked down the dune and visited each of the pyramids. The Pyramid of Khafre still has part of its original casting cap. It also appears to be the tallest because it stands on a higher plateau.  We made an attempt to climb, but it is much more difficult than I had imagined. The stones are massive at the bottom, some of them are 2/3 of my height. We tried and went up several levels and stopped. Near the Pyramid of Khufu, there are five pits with boats inside. 2 of them are in the Egyptian museum, one on display near the pyramids and two not yet excavated.

We then walked down to visit Sphinx. We saw the small template surrounding it, and then got closer. Unluckily, you cannot walk directly in front of the Sphinx. So we are not able to capture a good view of it with the pyramids. In any case, it appears to be quite well preserved. You can still see the stones layered out one by one along its body and its long tail.

We finished the pyramids tour, and then visited a few more ancient sites nearby.

In the Darshur, we saw the Red pyramids and the Bent pyramids. The Red pyramid is the first pyramid built and it belongs to the father of Khufu, and it is possible to get inside. The entrance of the pyramid is in the middle of its north side (all pyramid entrances open that way). You have to climb quite high to get there. Once you are there, you need to bend down and go through a 60 meters long tunnel going down to the very bottom of the pyramids. It is quite challenging to go through the tunnel, especially since you have to bend your knees the entire way. Once inside, you will see two linked chambers; those are the hollow part of the pyramids where the coffins and sacrifices were stored. I had initially thought pyramids are just a bunch big stones piled together to make a pyramid shape. But once inside of it, I truly appreciated the engineering / architectural beauty of this. You can clearly see in those chambers that each stone is cut and arranged very precisely to give you the shape of the chamber, and each chamber stretch so tall. In the last chamber, there is a stairs you can walk up which leads to a third chamber. The bottom of that chamber is at the ceiling level of the previous two chambers. I’m quite curious how it is designed and why it has been done that way.

After climbing back and exiting the red pyramids, you can really feel the two legs are shaking very hard. From there, we made a quick tour to the bent pyramids. It has an interesting shape as it is not straight up but the angel of the top portion flattens out a little bit. We cannot get too close to the pyramids so we took some pictures and left.

We then moved to Saqqara and stopped by the step pyramids, which is the oldest pyramids-like structure. We didn’t get too close since the ticket price is too high. We then went to Memphis to see the open air museum. In the museum you will see a massive piece of status of Ramses II (apparently the biggest). It seems the entire statue was carved out from one piece of stone. To get a good view, you have to go to the second floor of the building.

The open air museum is quite small. We walked around and saw an older version of the Sphinx, and many other statues of Ramses.

We stopped a restaurant and had a lunch, very good food by the way, and afterwards we went back to the sand dunes near Giza to see the sunset near the pyramids.

We took a horse cart this time, and moved on to the top of the sand dune. It is a pity because it is cloudy that day, and the sun is already half set. We are not able to see much, but the view of the three pyramids in the far side, and red sky on the other is still very nice. Not so far away there is a big riding school nearby, many people are riding horses. It feels like a big ski resort, but you move around on horses instead of snowboards. I can appreciate why people would ride horses in the sand dune. The feeling must remind you of your nomadic ancestry.

We were tired after the sunset tour and passed out in the car.

Czech (Prague) - June, 2013

Normally at the end of May / beginning of June each year, there is a bank holiday, and Alex and I always take the opportunity to take a short trip within Europe to celebrate my birthday. In 2013, we spent a long weekend in Prague.

I had really high expectation for Prague. I heard it is a fairy-tale like, magic city. Alex had visited it before in the winter, so we decided summer could be a good time see the city again.

We started from the Old Town square. It is a really lively area with loads of young people and tourists. From there, we visited the Old Town Hall, and watched the Town Hall Clock. Every time the clock strike the hour, the figure of Death opens the clock windows, and the 12 Apostles moves out slowly one by one. There are also figures of Vanity and Greed on the clock that reminds people don't waste time,

The city tower is in the center of the square. As you climb on top through a case of rotating iron stairs (it made me very dizzy), you will see a beautiful view of the entire city.

The square leads to several roads with beautiful architects and boutique shops along both sides. We passed by the opera house, also found a very cool Cubist cafe and had a cake there. Apparently Cubist architect was very popular in Bohemia and Austria, but never caught on in the rest of Europe. The style is based on lots of repeated geometric shapes. Very strange. :)

From there, we also visited the Jewish quarter and the old Jewish Cemetery. Because of the lack of space in the Jewish quarter, people were buried on top of each other, up to 12 layers deep. In the rather small cemetery, there are over 12,000 gravestones. The view was very impressive.

The next day, we went and visited the Prague castle. The castle is on the other side of the Vltava river sitting on a little hill. There is a long wall surrounding the area, and inside of the compound, there are many palaces, towers, churches, gardens, etc. It is unfortunate that the Royal Palace was not open that day. So we just walked around, and enjoyed our view from the top.

From the Palace, we went back to the city and walked along the Vltava river. We visited the beautiful Charles Bridge in the Old Town. The bridge was decorated by many beautiful status of Saints. At the end of the bridge, there are also two magnificent Bridge Towers. The bridge connects the Little Quarter and the Old Town. We visited the Little Quarter. It is filled with lots of boutique shops with very cool souvenirs. We also passed by a market with lots of street food. We had some sausages and grabbed a drink and sat on the road, listening to the street performers and watching people passing by. It was very nice and relaxing.

The last day of our visit, we visited a very nice restaurant on the river side and celebrated our trip.