Traveling in Egypt

In May of 2022, my family and I took a trip to Egypt. This post is about my experiences in Egypt outside of the places we visited. To read more about the sites we visited click here.

Fun facts about Egypt

• Friday and for some people Saturday are the days off from work, as opposed to Saturday & Sunday in the U.S.A.
• The train station in Cairo was the first built in Africa and the Middle East. 
• The word “desert” in Arabic is Sahara, so when you say “Sahara desert” you are really saying desert desert

Tickets

In order to be able to see all the neat monuments we visited, tickets were required. Since our entire stay in Egypt was planned and booked by the travel company, we did not purchase the tickets ourselves. Our guide purchased them as we went from place to place. The ticket prices ranged from 440 EGP ($24), the ticket to enter The Great Pyramid; to 80 EGP ($4.40), the ticket to see the Unfinished Obelisk.

Shopping for souvenirs & money

There are a great many interesting things to look at and to purchase in Egypt.

At most places in Egypt, sellers will accept Egyptian Pounds or USD. The exchange rate as of right now is about $1 to 19 EGP.

A few other things my family and I bought included:

-a t-shirt with a map of Egypt ($10)

-a black dress with hieroglyphics ($8)

-a camel carpet wall hanging ($10)

-postcards ($3)

-50 grams of Egyptian Yellow Saffron ($25)

-20 embroidered coin purses ($2)

-4 mini Basalt coffins with mummies ($26)

-a chess set ($35)

Unfortunately, most of the items that can be bought up north in cities like Cairo & Giza are made cheaply in China or Taiwan and then sold to sellers in Egypt. So keep in mind that most things are not handmade. Farther south were the Nubian people who made and sold more handmade goods such as jewelry and statues made of camel bone.

Beware, the sellers in Egypt are insanely pushy. If they see you glance at something that intrigues you they will crowd around you asking if you want to buy it or if you like it. They will try to start off a conversation by asking “Where are you from?” Our guide told us pretty much any place you tell them, their response will be “Oh, I have a brother who lives there”. 😉

A common thing you will hear when walking through markets and stores is ” Would you like to come into my shop, no hassle, no hassle”. This always made me think of a Princess Bride quote “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Simply because they WOULD NOT STOP hassling you.

They would make so much more money if they just let you look without coming up and aggressively asking you if you want to buy something. It was the worst we’d seen in any country, to the point of being obnoxious. As someone who doesn’t like it when people crowd around me, I had a hard time trying to look at things I was interested in purchasing. One thing that helped was when our guide would bring items onto the bus to see if anyone would want to buy it as opposed to being swarmed outside.

That being said, never take the initial price when you are trying to buy something, always try to reduce the price. I mentioned earlier that I bought a black dress, originally the seller was trying to sell it to me for around $68; I ended up paying $8.

Sanitation & Restrooms

While the population of Cairo is over 10 million, it is a fairly clean city (compared to Kathmandu). Even still, I would not recommend drinking tap water while there. We drank bottled water the entire time we were in the country. Our tour company provided us with about 2 bottles of water a day, which in 110 degree weather was definitely not enough. Again, just like my trek in Nepal, they conveniently didn’t to tell us we would need to purchase our own water while traveling in the country. However water wasn’t expensive at all.

There were always plenty of restrooms wherever we went. I would recommend bringing extra $1 bills to pay to use the restrooms. The facilities were very similar to places in Europe.

Language

The main language as you can probably guess is Arabic, but unlike other countries, many people speak several languages. For example, while waiting to get on our boat, my dad struck up a conversation with a Nubian man selling handcrafted goods who was speaking very good Spanish to some tourists. My dad asked him how many languages he spoke and the man told him that his first language was Nubian, followed by Arabic, English, Italian, Spanish, French, and good enough German to be able to make a sale. Unlike when I visited Kathmandu, if you respond to the sellers in a different language, there is a good chance they will switch languages to speak to you. It was pretty neat to see.

Transportation

Outside of our Nile cruise boat and flights, all of our transportation throughout the trip was via tour bus, except in Edfu where we took small horse driven buggies to get to the Temple of Horus. It was definitely an interesting experience. When getting off, I saw a horse leg just laying in the ground in and amongst the nearby stalls. Not many animal rights activists in Egypt.

Religion & dresscode

The main religion in Egypt is Islam, followed by Coptic Christians and Jews.

While in Egypt you should dress conservatively. Generally for women, you should cover your shoulders and knees. Men don’t have to cover their knees or their shoulders. When walking around, you aren’t likely to get reprimanded for showing too much skin, you are just more likely to get more stares if you do.

For visiting mosques, it is better for women to cover from ankles to wrists, and heads. While not required, you are less likely to be turned away due to improper coverings.

When we visited Saint Virgin Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church church in Old Cairo, one of the girls in our tour group got “dress-coded”. She was wearing pretty short shorts and an elderly gentleman came up to our tour guide, spoke to him in Arabic, and gave him a white sheet to give to the girl in our group to wrap around her legs until we left the church.

Safety

While we were traveling in Egypt there was never a time when I truly felt unsafe. (Execpt for the time my sister and I were on a horse drawn buggy, with a driver that didn’t speak much English who was annoyed with us that we weren’t giving him an extra tip.) Whenever we went into Cairo/Giza and whenever we got off the boat (on the Nile cruise portion) we had a police escort from the Egyptian Tourism Police. These men were dressed in a suit and tie, were respectful and professional, and carried submachine guns under their jacket. They were very astute and took notice of where everyone in our group was when we had chances to freely roam around sites. They were like secret service agents. Our tour guides repetitively assured us that Egypt was a safe country and that the guards were just there as a routine rule. Muslim extremists had targeted tourist groups in the past and this was the government’s deterrent system. There were other uniformed and plain clothed police everywhere. The most we had seen in any country previously. Tourist safety is very important for them.

Over the years Egypt has had its issues. Most recently the revolutions in 2011 & 2013. A majority of the terrorism threats in Egypt stem from groups from outside of the country and not Egyptian citizens.

Food we ate in Egypt

Most of our meals were arranged by the company, and they provided us with plenty of opportunities to try local food. While we were in Cairo, we ate breakfast at the hotel and while on the boat we ate most of our meals on the boat. For all other meals, we were left to fend for ourselves, or we ate with our tour group at a local restaurant. The following are some of the local dishes we tried.

-Chicken Shorba soup (a white chicken soup)

-Aish Baladi (pita bread) with hummus & baba ganoush (eggplant dip)

-Egyptian rice with cinnamon & nutmeg

-Shawarma (lamb, beef, & chicken kebabs

-Rice pudding

-Roz Bil Shariya (rice with vermicelli noddles mixed in)

-Ta’ameya/Ta’amiya (a.k.a. falafels, I really enjoyed these and they were naturally GF)

-Fiteer (also known as Egyptian pancakes, made of layers of thin pastry, can be sweet or savory)

-Koshary/Kushari….there are many different spellings (a dish that is a mix of pasta, rice, lentils, tomato sauce, garlic, chickpeas, & onions)

-Ful Medames (stewed fava beans, olive oil, & cumin)

-Mahshy (vegetables stuffed with rice, similar to the Greek version of stuffed grape leaves)

-Sugar cane juice (a man put a piece of sugar cane into a machine and then caught the liquid as it came out, it was quite delicious)

Overall, I really enjoyed my trip and I had a lot of fun!