Milly

We woke up early and my eyes looked swollen like a frog...i was extremely tired, i couldn't be bothered to eat breakfast when I was so tired, so i went back to sleep while my friends went downstairs in the hotel to get their money’s worth! I woke up again at 10.30 and i was still knackard but i forced myself to get out of bed because i had to make use of Cairo time. By the time i got ready, my friends had come back from breakfast and we all left for the City of the Dead...

The Egyptians were obsessed with resurrecting the dead...so there is an entire city built identically to any other city, with mosques, post offices, shops, public toilets etc...and it's all empty. The tombs are in houses with dining tables and kitchens and stuff...really weird...its like they believed the ghosts of the dead were living their ghostly lives in the same way as living people...but now, there is a lot of poverty in Egypt, that 2 million people have become squatters in the city of the dead and they live in the tombs...So anyway, we wanted to go to the northern city of the dead but the taxi driver wouldn't take us there, i think it's dangerous to go there, the squatters are bit aggressive, in the rough guide to Egypt, it says ‘if you disturb them too much they stone you out of their city’...So he took us to the southern city of the dead which isn't quite as strange, its more touristy...but i really wanted to see the northern side to get a real picture of what its like. So we ended up seeing the tombs of Mohammed Ali, the Egyptian Revolutionist's tomb and the tombs of his family and friends. They're buried three meters under the ground but they have three blocks of decorated stone stacked on top like a pyramid shape and there are about 10 tombs in one room...even a baby one...

Then we left there and went into the southern city of the dead, and we strolled through looking at the life of the squatters, and all these little kids came running up to me and they were all little boys..they weren't paying any attention to m friends, just me...i realised it was because of the camera in my hand...so i thought i'd take a pic of them so they'd leave me alone..and it worked!