Doing the tourist route of Cairo

Due to a week’s holiday followed by a day’s sickness and then a severe case of writer’s block, I confess to missing my blog entry last week! Apologies to all if you were waiting!

I find that being ill in Cairo is one of the most arduous things that can happen.  If it wasn’t already a drag to be laid up in bed with whatever horrid ailment you have, you then take into account that you are in a foreign county and everything is different and, for me at least, everything seems much harder to cope with. It feels like all symptoms are heightened when living in such a mad environment. An illness that may not have seemed too bad back in my quiet little life in England totally floors me in Cairo. A headache feels like a migraine, a tummy ache feels like appendicitis. My conclusion is that this is probably partly psychological but partly due to the environment. The traffic, the noise and the general onslaught of activity that greets me as soon as I am out of the door is often simply overwhelming when I am also feeling under the weather. Generally living here is exhausting on a good day; there are constant battles with dust thrown in your face by traffic, roads that are deathtraps, hot, stuffy weather in the summer and to top it off, as a woman, constant unwanted male attention to fend off.

Although I am not really painting a great picture of Cairo, all the above becomes  the norm of daily routine and so, to be honest, after a length of time is just something one gets used to. However, take this routine and then add to it a sore tummy or a runny nose and it is easy to see how one can be excused for needing a sick day every now and then!

Reaching a doctor here is in some way much easier than it is back home in England and in some ways trickier. I will explain.

In England a person can go to their General Practitioner or family doctor for almost anything, from general illness to a worry of something more serious. Their GP can then refer them to a specialist or prescribe drugs as need be, so one is never at a loss as to where to go for medical advice. Here in Egypt I have not as yet found an equivalent to the English GP. From my experience a diagnosis involves the patient having to pay a specific specialist in a private clinic or hospital. I have been informed by my Egyptian colleague that there are public hospitals that you can go to but of these we will not vouch for the quality and I do not know much about the systems involved. With private hospital it's as such: if your hair is falling out then you go to a hair specialist or if you have a headache you go to a head specialist and so on and so forth.

In theory this seems fine, but I do not really know where you go if you just want some peace of mind on a general non-specific illness. This spider web of different doctor networks can be rather hard for a foreigner to navigate; I mean, most ailments may seem fairly self-explanatory, but a headache could actually be because of a tooth problem and back ache could actually be something  psychological… you see the dilemma with self diagnosis! However, when you have found the right specialist I am informed that most doctors in Egypt, unless you are unlucky, are very competent. Certainly I would argue that because paying for healthcare seems to be standard rule and not choice, doctors have a vested interest in a good success rate and hence a good reputation. 

As for appointment times and the length you have to sit and wait for a doctor I can’t comment as they seem to be different with every single practice. Again, I would say that there is actually a better system in place in most of the clinics here because most practices are open in the evening after working hours. In England you either have to make sure you are sick on a day when there are enough appointments free for you to guarantee one, or you have to book annual leave from work and then sit in the doctors waiting room for hours while old people with all the time in the world take up your valuable holiday talking to the doctor about their ingrowing toe nails. Neither are particularly efficient or effective methods!

All medical training in Egypt is done in English, so there is no worry about not being understood once you reach your chosen doctor. However, the sheer scale of Cairo can make the prospect of trying to find the right place and person a touch difficult. Here at IH Cairo ILI we try very hard to help students as much as possible, but I do feel very grateful, on the occasions where I have needed a doctor, to have had my boyfriend around to help me find my way through the labyrinth of different names and specialists.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, for a lot of minor medical problems I have found very competent, professional and highly trained pharmacists in abundance in the city. A pharmacy can be recognised by the universally recognisable sign of a sign of a snake wrapped around a wine glass. I have dragged myself to these mystical apothecaries on many occasions with bad colds, chesty coughs, inflated eyelids, inflamed mosquito bites and more, and I can safely say that every pharmacy I have been to has prescribed exactly what I am looking for and at a reasonable price.

I continue to tell myself at least I was not ill the week before, when my friend was here staying. I have enough material from her visit to cover at least two blogs as we did some hardcore tourism whilst she was here, filling the short 6 days of her stay to the full trying to cover as much of Cairo as possible. So I will write about a few of the experiences we had in this blog and then save some for later.

Our first pleasant surprise on our little tour of Cairo was The Pharonic Village in Giza (Kourea Pharony in Arabic). In good traffic (we went on a Friday so there was nothing on the road) it is just 15 minutes away from IH Cairo ILI and only cost us 11LE to get there. Obviously this will change depending on the time and day you go. The actual entry fee is pretty expensive. You can buy different packages depending on how long you want to stay there but on average it is nearly triple that of the pyramids at around 170LE! When I questioned this them Ticketer explained it was because they were privately funded so took no money from the government to run. I guess I can believe this, in fairness. They employ a lot of actors who are probably being paid a very low wage.

The whole resort is set in the middle of an Island in the Nile, shielded from the public by masses of Papyrus. It is, in essence, a Disneyfied Ancient Egypt.

The first thing you do is a platform boat trip around the island, learning about all different elements of Ancient Egyptian life from little sideshows with live actors. It is fun and informative and something I think that children will enjoy tremendously. After this you are greeted by tour guide number one who takes you around a mock Temple, a Rich man’s house, a poor man’s house and various other exhibits, all brought to life by actors. He then takes you to a recreation of Tuttenkamun’s tomb and then onto a photo booth and a shop to try and squeeze a bit more money out of you!  Next, if you have paid for the museum package you are then handed over to two more tour guides who walk you round a couple of museums where you learn how mummies are made and what the main pyramids are. They are fairly interesting and I actually quite enjoyed having the tour guide with me. I never really digest any information in museums unless it is brought to life- my mind always drifts to what I am about to eat for lunch… so to be told it does somewhat let it stick in my head a bit more.

After this there is a short wait and then you have an hour long boat ride on the Nile. It was pleasant enough, although I prefer the sail boat that I go on with Rami, it is a lot more environmentally friendly and a lot more relaxing! You do pass an awful lot of run down and impoverished residences on the boat trip –it is a somewhat awkward insight into ‘how the other half live’ , but the inhabitants we saw seemed fairly used to it, and some even waved at us, fortunately.

In conclusion, I took my friend there for a bit of fun and to give her a brief overview of Egypt’s history before we went to all the real ancient sites as well as satisfy my own curiosity about the place. Keeping in mind that a large proportion of Egypt’s main tourist attractions are appallingly badly equipped in terms of tangible information to help visitors learn (by way of guide books or on site learning aids), this place provides bitesize  and fun facts, mainly for young people with an enquiring mind. It is overpriced in many ways, but (in my opinion at least) it is not the complete disappointment that some people may try  to sell you on Tripadvisor. http://www.pharaonicvillage.com/tour.html

Reviews on trip advisor ranged from 5 stars and loving it to 1 star and saying it is all just an elaborate way of taking your money. Well, probably, but it is all subjective and I have developed my own rules about how I tip and how I also manage the incessant pestering for cash. I plan to cover this next week.

The same day we also decided to pop up Cairo Tower in Zamalek. This is a nice little diversion for an hour or so. Unfortunately for those who wish to, there are no stairs for visitors to use except in emergencies so you can’t climb up or down (we wanted to walk down). The whole experience is an elevator up and then as long as you wish to spend up at the top. My advice is don’t go up on in bad weather! It is freezing cold and the view is not good when there is fog across the city. On a clear sunny day you can see the whole of Cairo up to and beyond all the pyramids in Giza and Saqquara. Whilst up there this time we saw and heard one of the regular Friday protest marches from Tharir Square, which was quite exciting to witness.

There are various restaurants in the tower that you can take a break in and draw out your time in Cairo a bit longer. The best one is a fantastic rotating restaurant, giving you a 360 degree view of the city whilst you sit and eat. The minimum charge per head is 150LE so not too bad for a lot of tourists considering the setting.

All in all day one with my friend was pretty successful and set us up for a great few days of sightseeing after that, which I will write a bit more about in my next installment.







The cup and snake Pharmacy sign





The entrance to the mock tomb at the Pharonic Village