Story#169
Bargaining badly
I accepted the second price and the seller looked genuinely disappointed. He explained that the negotiation was the point, poured tea, and gave me a better price than I would have got.
Egypt
Cleopatra lived closer to the iPhone than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
9 entries · 5 stories, 4 fun facts
Egypt at a glance
The practical numbers, before the stories.
- Capital
- Cairo
- Currency
- Egyptian pound (EGP)
- Official language
- Arabic
- Climate
- Hot desert almost everywhere, with a narrow Mediterranean strip on the north coast. Rain is close to nonexistent.
- Best time to go
- October–April
- Time zone
- UTC+2 (UTC+3 in summer)
- Driving side
- Right
- Plugs and voltage
- Type C / F, 220 V
Worth knowing: Summer temperatures in Upper Egypt regularly exceed 40 °C. Sightseeing happens before ten in the morning.
Planning a trip to Egypt
The decisions that determine whether the trip works, whichever country you are going to.
The chronology of Egypt breaks most people's intuition. The Great Pyramid was already ancient when the last woolly mammoths died out on Wrangel Island, and Cleopatra's lifetime sits nearer to the invention of the smartphone than to the pyramid's construction.
The entries here cover the temple at Abu Simbel that was cut into more than a thousand blocks and moved 65 metres uphill to escape a rising reservoir, the library at Alexandria that declined over centuries rather than burning in one dramatic night, the twenty balloons that rise together over the Valley of the Kings, and the felucca captain who sleeps until the wind decides to come back.
Entries from Egypt
Story#172
The felucca captain's nap
The wind died and our captain tied off the sail, lay down on the deck, and slept for forty minutes. We drifted backwards. When he woke, the wind came back within five minutes as though he had ordered it.
Story#176
Sunrise on the Nile
Twenty balloons went up at once over the Valley of the Kings. From the ground it looked like the sky had been decorated. From the basket it was completely silent except for the burner.
Story#275
Fishing with cormorants
An old technique, mostly gone now, demonstrated for us by a man who clearly enjoyed the audience. He said his grandfather had six birds and knew all their names.
Story#277
The oasis at dusk
Salt lakes, date palms and a mud fortress melting slowly in the rain that comes once a decade. We swam in a spring at sunset with four boys who had cycled from the village to show off.
Fun fact#405
Egypt's pyramids predate mammoth extinction
The Great Pyramid was already old when the last woolly mammoths died out on Wrangel Island around 1650 BC.
Fun fact#406
Cleopatra lived closer to us than to the pyramids
Cleopatra's lifetime is nearer to the invention of the iPhone than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
Fun fact#409
Egypt moved a temple
Abu Simbel was cut into more than 1,000 blocks and reassembled 65 metres higher to escape the rising Aswan reservoir.
Fun fact#411
Alexandria's library burned more than once
The famous library declined over centuries through several fires, funding cuts and political upheaval rather than one dramatic blaze.
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Egypt is one of 36 countries in the library. Read straight through a continent, or start from the map of everywhere we have written about.