Tuesday, May 10th, 8pm
Finally I've gotten the tablet to work properly, it had converted to instructions in Arabic which I can't read, so I was frustrated last nite, then today the tablet made an alarm sound which together we shut off, but the the picture functions were radically changed, so tonight we got it straightened out.  And the Arabic text is gone too, woopie!  Well I got to Cairo Saturday morning, thru the airport, taxied to the hotel--which I thought the cabbie had delivered me to the wrong one after I got in into my room and compared my paperwork from home to the documents here.  Later, I found out the hotel had changed part of its name about twenty years ago or so from Delta Pyramids Hotel to the Pyramids Plaza Hotel.  Anyway the let me in and out no questions asked.  Walked the neighborhood of the hotel, met a local who showed me a market Streetof small shops where I purchased a wide belt to put around my suitcase because the two halves are held together the cloth zipper, and when it is carried it bulges out three to five inches, I was worried it would break, I saw the same suitcase in the airport which the owner had put a wide belt around it, so I wanted to follow suit.  Met a young guy from Equidor who works in Chile, he checked in to the same hotel some hours later.  At breakfast we talked about our plans, and he joined my tour.  We went on an abbreviated city tour and visited the pyramids, rode camels, went to the Egyptian museum saw King Tut, next day went to a famous mosque built by the Ottoman Turks after they took over Egypt six hundred years ago, and ancient Coptic Orthodox Catholic Churches ( tradition tells that the Holy Family hid there after they fled to Egypt from Harrod after Jesus was born), visited Memphis the first capital of pharoic Egypt 5000 years ago, it's mostly long gone except for a beautiful intact statue of Ramses, one of the ancient pharaohs. The statue is about twenty feet tall, from the calfs of his legs up, the ankles and feet are missing.  Other than that the statue is in like new condition, after five thousand years.  There is a smaller version of the Sphinx, but it is the largest one other than the one by the pyramids, and it is undamaged.  Next we visited the Squanrah (spelt wrong), where the first pyramid was built by the sons-in-law of a revered Pharaoh to honor him prominently.  But it is those sons-in-law tomb which was beautifully preserved with relief carvings, many with the paint still on many parts of the carvings.  Today we went to Alexanderia, went down to ancient catacomes, the Citadel a 1400s fort built by Alexander the Gr