Day 2

Thursday, June 3, 2010 (Cairo, Egypt) – SPOILER ALERT: I didn’t get my face bit off by a monkey. I just wanted to clear that up, because I know a lot of people were worried about it.

I slept great, falling into a deep slumber at 11 p.m. and waking up around 9:30 a.m. Hopefully that means little or no jetlag. As I told my sister-in-law Elisabeth, there are advantages to being an idiot. When I travel, I have little concept of time anyway, and when I travel internationally I lose all sense of it. In other words, my feeble mind easily tricks my body. Really, it’s a win-win.

After breakfast, my brother, nephews and I headed for the Giza Zoo. Cairo’s zoo is pretty big, and they have all the major animal attractions you could ever hope for, including but not limited to a German Sheppard, 362 ostrich cages and several others that had doors open and no animals inside, making me wonder just how many might have escaped without warning.

Darren had the inside track on the zoo, so through a few genius techniques (bribery) we turned the Cairo zoo into our own petting zoo. With the warning of the vicious monkeys ringing in my mind, we wanted to start smaller. So we did the obvious: We headed to the lion’s den and asked to hold Simba. Darren kept his distance with the camera and sent me with his two young children in tow to hold the baby lion, which was roughly the size of a fully grown dog. Unfortunately, his mouth wasn’t big enough, so I couldn’t try to stick my head inside, like they used to do in the circus.

With that adding to our courage, we headed over to the monkey house. I’ve always thought the best way to overcome fears is to face them head on. That, and I’ve never been very good about following my mother’s advice. With the help of a zookeeper (actually, the 25 Egyptian pounds probably helped more - yes, that translates to a little less than $5, and Darren complained about it), we held a baby chimpanzee that only made a few minor attempts at biting my face off between reaching out and giving hugs to me, Sammy and Calvin (my nephews).

Feeling like we fully conquered the zoo, we headed toward the Nile for a true Egyptian feast. There are restaurants on several boats moored along the coast, and we chose one that looked promising. I won’t even begin to try the Arabic spelling or pronunciation. But roughly translated to English, it means “Chili’s.” According to the manager, it’s quickly becoming the “next golf course” for business men in Cairo.