Car vs. Jessica - Cairo, Round 1- December 25 - 28

Word of the Day: Evidence

Definition: The available body of facts or observations that indicate whether a belief is true.

We arrived in Cairo, Egypt, and the relaxed pace we had been living immediately vanished.

Cairo is… busy feels like an understatement. There are lanes, technically, but they don’t seem to matter. I’ve never heard so many horns. It is a true cacophony of sound. Motorbikes whizzed through spaces that did not seem physically possible, sometimes with three people on board. Cars, buses, and trucks shared the road with horses, tuk tuks, and other animals, sometimes traveling in the opposite direction of what the signs indicated. We saw no cars without dents, scrapes, or scratches. We held our breath the entire drive and felt genuine relief when our hotel gates finally came into view.

Every hotel we encountered was gated and guarded. There were metal detectors at the entrances, though more often than not we were simply waved through. As an American, this felt strange. At home, security exists, but it is largely invisible, another example of the value we place on feeling open and free to move as we want.

I learned later, from Youseff, one of the hotel employees who made me a delightful latte and who has been to the U.S. many times, that the visible security isn’t meant to signal danger. Instead, it shows the system up front. That completely changed my perspective. Visibility is the safety strategy. It reflects how much effort goes into keeping tourists safe and shows that tourism is a protected national asset. Such a different worldview. 

Inside, the atmosphere shifted completely. The hotels can only be described as old Hollywood opulence, with heavy curtains, polished marble, and people assigned to open doors, carry bags, call elevators, and handle laundry. Everything is done for you, and everyone expects a tip.

It may seem silly, but having someone try to take my tiny backpack and small rolling carry-on felt oddly uncomfortable, not because they were unkind, quite the opposite, but because independence, again, shows itself in the smallest ways. I realized how much I value doing things myself: carrying my own bag, doing my own laundry, opening my own door. It made me more aware of how much Americans pride themselves on being self-sufficient.

After searching unsuccessfully for a washer and dryer (so common in hotels back home), I asked the concierge where I could find one. He laughed and explained that I could simply send my laundry out. When I looked at the price list, suit, tie, trousers, I couldn’t find anything resembling “t-shirt” or “cargo pants.” My laundry stayed dirty.

One thing I genuinely loved, though it sits in contradiction to other realities here, was that the electricity in the hotel only worked if you placed your room key into a slot by the door. It took a minute to figure out, as we fumbled in the dark trying to make the lights turn on, but once we did, I couldn’t stop wondering why America doesn’t do this. What an easy, built-in way to conserve energy.

And yet, just outside the hotel walls, garbage is everywhere. Systems here are thoughtful in some ways, neglected in others. 

The next day, we hired a driver and a licensed guide named Ahmed, certified through the tourism department. He was deeply knowledgeable and patient with our questions. The car, however, had no seatbelts, or if they existed, they didn’t work. You should have seen the circus act as the three of us maneuvered over each other trying to get Oliver into the safest possible seat. And everyone smokes. Everywhere. Including in the car. With no seatbelts.

Ahmed explained that before COVID, Egypt invested billions into new infrastructure in anticipation of tourism growth. Similar to what we heard in Jordan, tourism stopped almost overnight. Recovery has been extremely slow. Many people we met shared how often Giza, the site of the Great Pyramid, and Gaza, the site of war, are confused abroad.

The economy is struggling. Inflation is high. The U.S. dollar goes a long way here. And as a tourist, that reality is felt constantly. There is a near constant request for money, tips, purchases, favors. Even kind gestures can feel transactional, as though they are leading toward a sale or a scam. With fewer visitors and higher prices, it seems people reach wherever they can. It’s exhausting. And it’s sad. Because behind it is survival.

I’ll apologize now, if this next part sounds a bit textbookish, but the history here is truly fascinating. We began at Saqqara, at the Step Pyramid, the very first pyramid the ancient Egyptians ever built. That’s 4,600 years ago, people! King Djoser was experimenting, trying something new, and it is still standing. The pharaohs who came after built on his ideas and perfected them… with a few missteps along the way.

From Saqqara, we traveled to Dahshur, where King Sneferu attempted Egypt’s first true smooth-sided pyramid, called the Bent Pyramid. Midway through construction, the angle proved a bit too steep and unstable. The builders adjusted it, creating its distinctive bent shape. Rather than abandoning the effort, Sneferu’s architects learned from it and built the Red Pyramid nearby, the first successful smooth-sided pyramid. 

Failure. Make some changes. Success. Good advice for all of us to remember. Thank you Ancient Egypt! 

Ahmed showed us just how precise these structures were by pulling up a level app on his phone and placing it against the stone. Even now, thousands of years later, the alignment is astonishing.

We went down, moving backward, into the Red Pyramid. The descent was steep, long, humid, and stifling. The air grew heavy with every step. Patrick made it about halfway before turning around. Oliver and I kept going, amazed by the physical reality of the space. This one was all about the journey down, as there was nothing to see on the walls. 

Next stop, we headed to the Great Pyramid of Khufu on the Giza Plateau. Oliver has the LEGO model of this on display in our basement, so this was especially fun for him. If this pyramid is not evidence of human learning, I don’t know what is. Trial and error by previous kings helped Khufu succeed, and his pyramid would remain the tallest structure in the world for nearly 4,000 years.

His son Khafre built the second pyramid and commissioned the Great Sphinx, carved directly from the bedrock, depicting the king as a lion.

We stood before the Sphinx and saw the Dream Stela between its paws. Centuries after the Sphinx was carved, and after desert sands had slowly buried it, sometimes up to its neck, Thutmose IV recorded a dream in which the god promised him kingship if he cleared the sand from its body. He did, and he became king. Just days later, we would stand in Thutmose IV’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, hundreds of miles south. It was astonishing to trace these connections across the landscape.

Ahmed also took us to a carpet weaving school. Children learned the craft young, fingers flying with astonishing speed. Oliver even got to weave a few strands himself. It was fascinating… until it became a sales pitch.

The same happened at the papyrus-making museum: skin the plant, slice it, soak it, weave it, press it. Ancient techniques brought to life, followed immediately by a request to buy.

We ate at a restaurant our guide described as “safe to eat,” which made me wonder how much of that label is about hygiene and how much is about what tourists are used to. In the U.S., we tend to assume safety is standardized and largely invisible; here, it was something that was named out loud. 

We also learned that in Cairo, you don’t wait for servers, they wait for you. You seek them out when you’re ready to order, pay, or leave. At home, eating is often about efficiency, order quickly, food arrives quickly, check drops quickly. Good service means anticipation and speed. Here, good service seemed to mean patience. You are not hurried. You are not interrupted. You are trusted to take the time you need. Once we figured that out, the experience made much more sense.

The following day, we visited the Grand Egyptian Museum. And wow. It is just as grand as the pyramids themselves. A colossal statue of Ramses II greets you upon entry. You can’t not marvel at it.

The contents of King Tutankhamun’s tomb are displayed almost entirely intact, objects untouched for over 3,000 years. Tut is famous not because he was a great ruler, but because his tomb was never looted. Flood debris and rockfalls hid the entrance, and later tomb construction buried it further. It made me wonder what was lost or stolen from the tombs of kings who ruled for decades. 

That thought stayed with me as we stood before the solar boats of King Khufu. These full-sized wooden vessels, carefully dismantled and buried beside the Great Pyramid, were meant to carry the king across the heavens with the sun god Ra in the afterlife. Such precision, and the scale of the boat is immense. 

Later, wanting a break from the traffic and noise, we decided to take a small felucca out on the Nile. There was no wind. The boat driver warned us we wouldn’t get very far. We didn’t care, we just wanted to be away. Unsurprisingly, we drifted very little. Eventually, we had to be towed back in. We laughed the entire time. It was a small, human moment on a grand Nile River. 

On our final Cairo day, we headed to Khan el-Khalili, the sprawling souk selling everything from underwear to incense to gold. Our seatbelt-less car somehow maneuvered through gridlock, to drop us at an underground tunnel that emerged into narrow streets just beginning to wake.

The sensory overload was immediate and constant: live chickens stacked in crates, fish laid out on ice, butchered meat hanging in the open air beside a jewelry stand. A man pedaled past on a bicycle carrying stacks of bread, layered high, somehow perfectly balanced. Evidence of real daily life everywhere you looked.

I spent over an hour in a bookbinding shop where they engraved Noland, in English and Arabic, onto a leather journal painted with the Tree of Life.

We wandered, watched shops open, and made our way to Bab al-Ghouri, a famous arch tucked deep inside the winding maze of roads. We ate basbousa and kanafa, sipping coffee at Om Kalthoum Café. Our waiter explained that Om Kalthoum was one of Egypt’s most famous singers, and he kindly played her music through the restaurant speakers for us. 

On our last night in Cairo, we took a river cruise down the Nile. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and part of me was simply tired, tired of the noise, the asking, the constant alertness the city demands. But the evening surprised me.

There was a variety of entertainment, dancers and singers, including an Elvis Presley song that completely delighted Oliver, as well as a belly dancer that completely shocked him. Then came a whirling dervish performer, spinning endlessly in brightly adorned clothing. 

After his performance, he stepped forward and began greeting the audience. He asked where people were from, and as countries were called out, he counted from one to ten in each language. Not just English, Arabic, Spanish, or French, but more obscure languages, spoken with ease. Faces lit up hearing their own language, a small reminder of how good it feels to be understood. When someone said they were from America, he lassoed an imaginary rope, grinned wide, and said, “Howdy… one, two, three.” The entire boat laughed. In a city that had felt overwhelming and transactional, this moment felt playful.

Cairo is loud. It is chaotic. It is exhausting. But it is also layered with evidence, evidence of both ancient and modern humans building, failing, adjusting, learning, surviving. And standing among their work, their mistakes, and their brilliance, it is hard not to realize that progress is rarely clean or quiet. It is iterative. Just like Cairo itself, always moving. 

I used to think evidence proved success. Now I think evidence also proves struggle adjustment and survival. I still wonder why we’re so quick to dismiss the evidence that feels messy and uncomfortable.