Egypt - Day 1

At 4:00 on Wednesday, we set out from Foggia for the adventure of a lifetime. We were heading to Egypt for a long weekend of exploring pyramids and cruising the Nile. There were 3 of us on the trip: myself, Lois, and Richard. All three of us are manufacturing engineers working on-site at Alenia. Christina was back in Seattle (still waiting for me to get my Italian visa).

We left Foggia and headed north towards Rome. Lois drove us up in her big rental Mercedes C-class sedan, and we made it to the Rome airport in record time. After returning the car and making arrangements for a car upon our return, we entered the chaos of Rome Fiumicino Airport. To get from the street to the plane took a stop at check-in, security, passport control, and a train and bus ride. The most amusing part of the experience was passport control, where the agent was searching Facebook on a separate computer and didn’t want to deal with the inconvenience of stamping passports (especially U.S. passports!). We were waived through without even opening our passports.

We were a little surprised when the bus to the plane stopped at an A320 painted in “Air One” colors, since our tickets had been booked on Alitalia. It turns out that they are code-share partners and we were assured that the plane was indeed heading to Cairo. The flight was very smooth, with large reclining seats even in peasant class and a surprising meal service en-route. We all ended up dosing off during the 2.5 hour flight down to Cairo. The only worrisome moments occurred when several men got up right before landing and started walking around anxiously. It turns out that they were merely clueless and posed no threat to the flight.

We landed in Cairo at about 2:30 am local time. This actually turned out to be quite nice because the airport was deserted, making customs a breeze. To get into Egypt, you have to purchase an entry visa for $15 and stick it on a page in your passport. I can definitely say that it is the coolest stamp I have in my passport to date!

We had pre-arranged all our transportation an tours in Cairo through a company called SEEgypt, so we were glad to meet our driver outside the arrivals area at the airport to whisk us off to the hotel for some much-needed sleep. For our time in Cairo we were staying at the Fairmont Nile City, a beautiful new 5-star hotel on the banks of the Nile River. The drive to the hotel took us through abandoned streets and the run-down slums of old-town Cairo (there were times when we got concerned that we weren’t actually going to the hotel). Eventually, we did make it to the hotel and were greeted by a security checkpoint complete with armed guards and a bomb-sniffing dog. Once the van was sniffed and cleared, we proceeded to the entrance where we had to go through an airport-style security checkpoint complete with a metal detector and x-ray machine. This was the first sober indication that we were indeed in a very foreign country. We checked in with no problem and settled in for some much-needed sleep.