April 8, 2007, Cairo.
The today we drove to the ancient necropolis of Memphis. There we entered the Sakkara, the famous earliest
step pyramid of Zoser. Brightly colored wall paintings still exist to display the daily life, hunting, wars, and the preparation of the dead. In Memphis the colossus of Ramses II lies in a long Museum. It originally stood about 50 feet in its erect stature. Back on the Nile in Cairo we boarded “the Pharoh”, a dinner boat that cruised the central area of Cairo. We sumptuously dined again on Egyptian delights that Barb and I fully enjoyed with liberal samplings. For Jim, that meant at least six types of the sweets, in moderation of course. As we left Cairo, we saw the spill of 17 million inhabitants into unfinished apartments with acres of green crops between the sets of buildings. There were mountains of debris, however, in the streets between all these apartments. The farmers who moved to Cairo live in this matter. We then bused to Alexandria where we boarded the Seven Seas Voyager lying in this Mediterranean port. The ship had cruised through the sand storm along the Suez Canal. (We were glad that we chose antiquity and gastronomical delight over passage along “the ditch”, as the sophisticated travelers amongst us call it.) Alexandria, however, is where most of a modern industry such as pharmaceuticals, electronics and fabrication has moved. This is a major seaport that once housed predominantly cosmopolitan Europeans, but now has mostly Muslims
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