Prague - Day 7

The last day finally arrived and we were dreading our return to real life in Cairo. We decided to see the National Museum before we left. It was filled with natural history kinds of stuff like many different species of stuffed animals, a wide-variety of minerals, and ancient history artifacts. They had a football (a.k.a. soccer, to us) exhibit, but Joe and I walked in and then turned around and walked out. We just can't get into the rest of the world's fascination with soccer.

We did a little more shopping to find a shirt to match the skirt I bought the day before. We also looked for a couple more souvenirs. We went to a Mexican restaurant for dinner. On the way there, we noticed they were blocking the streets off. There were a bunch of people marching in the streets and carrying a huge banner. It was Nov. 17, their revolution day. They celebrate their independence from communism. On Nov. 17, 1989 they had their "Velvet Revolution." It was interesting seeing how they celebrated. We saw on T.V. that they all congregated at Winceslas Square where we had just been a few hours earlier.

After our not-so-Mexican dinner, we headed to meet our ride back to the airport. We really felt sad because our vacation was so great, and we didn't want to go back to Cairo. If only vacations never had to end.

Our flight was a crazy one. Before getting on the flight, we stopped to have a beer to use up our last Czech crowns. There was a really loud group of drunk people sitting nearby. Wouldn't you know it, they were on our flight to Cairo. We have never been on a flight like this before. Joe and I agreed that nothing like this would have been allowed in the U.S. The group of 20-30 people were really drunk. They were up and out of their seats almost the whole entire flight. It was like social/happy hour. The flight attendants could barely pass through the aisles. By the end of the flight, they were even throwing pillows at each other. Needless to say, we didn't get much sleep. We agreed that it was the safest we ever felt on a flight. We'd like to see a terrorist try to get past 20 drunk Czechs to get to the cockpit.

We got back to Cairo, where someone was supposed to meet us to help us with our work visa processing. Big surprise, no one was there. We asked around, but they all acted like we were crazy. We were really stupid and forgot to bring the exact U.S. $15 per person for our new entry visas. We went from counter to counter being ignored and denied. We thought we might have to camp out in the airport. Finally, we bribed a guy to sneak us the stamps. We found it amazing that the Egyptian pounds we had were no good in Egypt. Thank God bribery is rampant. After a long night, we headed home to get about an hour's sleep before going to school the next day.