The Last Traveling I'll Be Doing for a While

The next morning we were up and out early to catch a 7AM bus from Jerusalem to Eilat. The bus was crowded this time, but we managed to get all of us and all of our luggage onto it (thankfully, we had bought roundtrip tickets when we left from Eilat three days earlier). We also managed to meet up with another guy from AUC who we adopted as our eighth traveling companion. The bus ride went well (we even stopped at a convenience store and for the last in a while time bought food that was not pita and hummas) and was just under five hours, allowing us to quickly cross the border in Eilat and arrive at the border to cross into Taba, Egypt around 12:30PM.

As we should have expected by now, there were of course problems crossing into Egypt. Not serious problems, but “This is Egypt” type problems. We were traveling on a Friday and Friday at noon (Friday noontime prayer) is the holiest time for a Muslim. All the employees at the border were praying when we arrived, effectively shutting down the border for approximately thirty minutes. The religiousness of Egypt as a nation and the Middle East as a region in general is a phenomenon. In some ways it is refreshing to see a culture so dedicated to religious values. In other ways, it can be frightening (it shut a border down). I think it is just foreign to us because we are so used to a separation of Church and state in America. Honestly, I am a little surprised when I hear announcements in the Chicago airport around the holidays about non-denominational services.

After prayer ended, we were ushered through the border without a problem and were successfully back in Egypt. As luck would have it (and yes you do learn to celebrate the small victories, especially at the end of twelve days of traveling), there was a mini-bus waiting to take the eight of us back to Cairo. The driver of the mini-bus was holding a sign that said ‘Victoria Braga’ in a graphic, word-art font (because I had given him my name by e-mail). This was a little embarrassing, and I think the drivers found it a little funny that an American female’s name had been used as the group name, but it was helpful in getting us back to Cairo, and at that point that is all the eight of us really cared about.

The drive from Taba to Cairo is about five hours long. It took us about five and a half because our drivers stopped for dinner. They didn’t tell us we were stopping for dinner. They simply stopped, went into a restaurant, and left us to ‘talk among ourselves’ for about a half hour. This had happened to us before on our trip to Dahab. It’s definitely an interesting customer service feature here. In any event, we arrived back in Cairo just before 7PM. Upon entering the city, we were greeted by the traffic and the pollution, which looks the worst just when the sun is setting. Possibly because we had only entered Cairo one other time and because this was when we first arrived in Egypt after a 12 hour flight, there were things we had not noticed about it. For example, I now know what everyone who has been here meant when they say the entire city is dirty. I was shocked by the layer of dirt on all the buildings. Pollution here is really awful, and coming from Israel, the level of pollution is Cairo was painfully obvious. When we got back to the dorm, we had dinner before unpacking and, for the first time in almost two weeks, taking real showers and sleeping in our own, real beds. We needed a good night’s sleep because the next day, Saturday, October 3^rd, was the final day of what all AUC students, particularly Americans, have taken to calling ‘Swine Break ’09 (or if we’re feeling particularly ambitions, Aid Al-Swine, which literally means Holiday of Swine in Arabic). It had been a long trip, but each moment had been incredible and looking back, I would not have changed a thing about it. It is something I am so glad that I did. It will definitely be a trip I remember for the rest of my life.