A Bowling Family Guide to Cairo and Luxor
My Sunday is busier than usual.
The Seattle Sounders played their season opener this morning (local time), a frustrating two to two draw with Charlotte. We coughed up a result with an own goal from our best defender, after dominating the entire match. I’m also currently working on a paid writing gig and going back and forth with my editor.
This week in Washington DC, the former White House chief strategist and presidential advisor Steven Bannon whipped out a Nazi salute, to roaring applause at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC is arguably the most important conference among conservative activists. Later in the week, the administration purged the leadership of the Department of Defense. Among the Chiefs of Staff, Vice Chiefs of Staff, and Judge Advocates General across the three branches, the President fired every woman and Black official.
Those are not the focus of this week’s newsletter but they and the silence about them from people who know better are telling about the mainstreaming of neo-nazi and segregationist sentiments on the US right.
Also this week, the first new tomb was discovered in the Valley of the Kings in over a century. King Thutmose II's tomb is the first discovered since Tutankhamen’s grave was found by archaeologists in 1922. That kinda is what this week’s newsletter is about.
While I previously shared a bit about this trip, Hope and I have been working on a longer 2000-ish word guide to Cairo and Luxor that we finished this weekend, so given what I said at the top, I am going to share the first part of that with you today. If you like it, you should click through to the rest of the travelogue over at Bowlings Abroad.
A Bowling Family Guide to Cairo and Luxor
Introduction
Egypt has always been on our list but we consistently found reasons or excuses not to go.
Cairo is crowded. It’s too hot. We need to get better at Arabic. Did you see that video of the tourists getting harassed in Giza? All of these are ridiculous and after visiting I’m frankly mad at us for not making the trip much sooner.
Egypt is an absolute gem of a country and Cairo is a tidy three hour and fifteen minute flight from here in Abu Dhabi, the equivalent of a flight from Seattle to Omaha. In December, at the start of our school’s winter break we took off for five nights in Egypt, starting and ending our adventure in Cairo, with a trip down to Luxor and all its history in between.
Because we’ve seen people have some difficulty we used a guide, Ramy. But Ramy is more than a guide—he coordinated our stay, booking our lodging, ground transport, and flights between Cairo and Luxor. He also hired an Egyptologist to guide us through the valley of the Kings, Karnak, and the Luxor Temple. He allowed us to navigate and access places we never would have if we were traveling alone. Thanks to his expertise this trip was nearly perfect and we had an authentic cultural experience that we could never have arranged ourselves.
Day 1: Arrival in Cairo
As you approach Cairo from the air, all you can see is city. Once you’re over it, you see the brown sand blasted and sun drenched metropolis sprawling in every direction. Dense, beige, and loud. Considered a “city of a thousand minarets”, Cairo-Giza metroplex is home to 22 million people. It feels like every single one of them has a horn, every single one is always on the road at the same time, and every single one loves to honk. In real estate they talk about “curb appeal,” how good a place looks when you roll up to it. Cairo has zero curb appeal, but its charm lies once you enter the city.
We met our Cairo Guide, Mohamed Zayan, outside of customs and zipped off to our first stop, the Muhammad Ali Mosque. Construction began on the mosque in 1832 and took over twenty years. It sits on a hill in an area called Citadel of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi.
It was from that Citadel that we got our first glimpse of the Pyramids seemingly hovering about the edge of the city. The Citadel is opposite the pyramids, the entire city resting in between and the Nile off in the distance, roughly equidistant from the two points.
When Ramy was arranging our trip, he asked us what kind of travelers we were. We said we keep things simple and aren’t especially bougie. So he arranged a furnished short term rental near Tahrir Square, walking distance to mouth watering shawarma, bustling cafes, and plenty of shops to wander.
We caught the sunset aboard a sailboat, manned by the oldest, happiest sailor/fisherman. With at least three generations of sailing in his family, our captain navigated down the Nile, pausing so we could take in the river air and enjoy the red, yellow, and orange hues at twilight.
Continue reading at BowlingsAbroad.com.
This week on the podcast, we have an episode with Chase Hutchinson, a Tacoma based film critic, and Andrew Hammond previewing the upcoming Oscars. This year's 97th Academy Awards include an odd grab bag of films but among my favorites are Sing Sing and Conclave.
In the episode we also talked a lot about Anora, which seems to be the front runner for Best Picture but it's a film that I did not particularly enjoy. I would argue it's a mix of Pretty Woman (1990) and Uncut Gems (2019) but is inferior to both.
Also in the episode I discussed having not watched The Brutalist. I watched it yesterday. I think it's very good, definitely film bro bait. But for my money Conclave and Sing Sing are superior films.
Give our conversation a listen and I would love to hear your thoughts.
See you next week.
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.