Mmmmm. Salty-rific.

Monday morning we left Cairo bright and early to make our way to Marsah Matruh and Siwa. I was pretty sad to leave Cairo and Flamenco and to leave everyone behind because, as I've said before, I feel as though I had put down roots there, and was very used to the routine that I fell into in Cairo. It's a place I could see myself living in the future. April and I woke up early to finish some last-minute packing and get breakfast before the bus was leaving around 8am. We got down to breakfast to find Ruthie, alone, and none of the rest of our group to be found. After a little bit, Molly came down, but even still, it was just the four of us. We were all a little skeptical about what was going on and why no one else was around, but didn't really do much about it. We put our suitcases in the storage room and headed for the bus. Abduh was outside, but no one else was around, so we just got on the bus. I'm pretty sure we were supposed to leave at 8am, and we were on the bus at 7:50, and people started showing up after a few minutes. We could've waited a little longer though, since people were still showing up until after 8:15am. I wouldn't have done that, though. Lateness is a huge pet peeve with me.

Everything was peachy keen and everyone was sound asleep until we stopped for gas a little more than halfway there. We woke up to a super strong smell of gasoline, and it turns out that the gas filter was bad and needed to be changed before we could go any further. It just so happened that we were in El Alamein and there was a war museum right there, so we made a "pre-planned" pit stop at the biggest joke of a museum I've ever been to for a good hour and a half. We all got a pretty nice kick out of the mannequins in there. Most of them had these ridiculous looks on their faces and it looked like some of their legs were on backwards, and one's face was the same color as his shoes. They're what nightmares are made of, really. The place was deserted aside from the people who worked there, of which there were maybe 3. It was just strange all around. After we left the museum, we stopped at a Commonwealth cemetery for English soldiers who fought in World War I. There were only two things that we saw, through the entire trip, that made me cry. The first was the sheikh at the Mosque of Sultan Hassan, and the second was the cemetery. It was so quiet, and set apart from everything else, and the serenity got to me, along with one of the inscriptions that I read. I don't remember the exact wording, but it was to the effect of a father and son being reunited in heaven, and it was so sad and hopeful at the same time that it made me cry. Being there was humbling, to say the least. Many of the soldiers were my age, if not younger, when killed. With things like this, I don't understand how war can continue as and be as proliferative as it still is. We all left in a pretty somber mood, skipping the Italian and German cemeteries because, apparently, they aren't as important or worth our time because they weren't fighting with the Allied powers. Screw that. I wish we could've gone to see either one or both of them and I'm not the only one who felt that way, but it wasn't really our decision, unfortunately.

We finally got to the hotel and it was this tiny little town which seemed like it was a constant carnival. There were bright colored lights strung around all the lampposts, there were rides lining the streets and colors everywhere, and everything smelled like cotton candy. It was beautiful. We got to our hotel, Beau Site, and the first thing on all of our minds was getting onto the beach. And that's exactly what we all did. Joyce and I are roommates for this leg of the trip. It's nice to switch it up, and we have a lot of fun. We got to our room and it had a gorgeous view of the water and the shore and the tip of the beach across the water. I've never seen water as blue as it was there in my life. I'm so used to Jones Beach and water that you can't see though past 4 inches of depth. We checked out our room a little bit, discovered a sweet internet connection and then headed down to the beach. It was way after prime beach time, but it was so nice nonetheless. I haven't really been to the beach since August and I missed it so much. We ran right into the water and swam out to this sort of floaty island thing where a lot of the rest of our group was and enjoyed the sun. The first thing we noticed, aside from how clear the water is, is just how salty the Mediterranean is. It's so that when you lay in the sun and start to dry, theres a flaky layer of salt that forms. We compared the feeling to that of a Pringle. Swimming was glorious, and so relaxing, and just what we all needed, I think, to close out the hectic, stressful week of finals and leaving Cairo and splitting up the group.

A little later, we walked down the street our hotel is on to find a good shisha place, and ended up finding a few people on their way back from one, so they turned around and came with us. We stopped at an ATM and ended up at a small, outdoor cafe about a five-minute walk from the hotel. There were about 15 of us and we had four tables pushed together and we all had our little conversations going around the shisha pipes and it was really nice. We talked about things like, if we could do one more thing in Egypt, what it would be, and what the most culturally shocking thing we saw was and what we were going to miss the most. It was really nice just to sit and talk about serious things. We got onto the topic of the war in Iraq and what needs to be done about it, and our frustration about not being able to do much about it. We hung out there for a while before heading back to Beau Site to leave early for Siwa tomorrow morning.