Getting Out of Egypt

Our bus experience was certainly that...an experience. First, when we got to the bus stop we discovered that the tickets we'd bought weren't exactly the correct ones. We'd only bought the service to some town en route to Cairo, so we had to pay the bus driver an extra 30 Egyptian pounds to get the full service to Cairo. We were crammed into the second-to-last row by all these native Egyptian people. Lauren's hopes of sitting with one of us were dashed when she had to sit by a Muslim woman who wasn't allowed to sit next to a man not her husband.

The bus would stop every few hours and let people off to stretch their legs. Often times we'd get off and be at a random truck-stop-esque place with dirt roads and nothing else. We slept off and on, and when we woke up we were unexpectedly in Suez. Since Suez is a good three hours East of Cairo and not directly on the way, we had to double-make-sure that we were on the right bus. Luckily I knew the Arabic word for Cairo (Al Cahira) and the bus driver was able to nod enough to give us some confidence. However, about three hours later we started seeing the familiar traffic and pollution, and before we knew it we were pulling into Ramses station. Ourselves and a guy from Australia we'd met - the token four white people - were the last and only people on the bus at this point.

We had a 7 hour layover in the Cairo airport before getting back to Athens. We had a brief scare when we realized (with about 30 minutes to take off) that we had neglected to pack the 9 bottles of perfume that we'd bought into our checked luggage. Thus we had 9 unlabeled bottles of 500ml liquid wrapped in packaging tape and stuffed into a velvet suitcase that we couldn't exactly explain. We tried playing dumb at first and just going...'oh God, how did we forget to repack the perfumes?' but then we ended up having to adopt a different solution. The security guys waved Lauren and I threw, but made Cameron exit security and come back through the line. This time, when he checked Cam's passport, he quickly pocketed the 300 Egyptian pounds stuffed inside. We were officially clear to leave Egypt. We got back to Athens late afternoon and headed straight back into our town to our old hostel in the ghetto neighborhood. One would think that we'd go straight to bed, but Cameron and I ended up spending a considerable amount of time in the hostel bar getting our free ouzo shots before retiring for the night.