The Pharaonic Village

I really enjoy learning about and comparing different cultures. While visiting Egypt, Prof. Nelson gave to me and my wife the opportunity to learn more about Brazil, Canada and even Egypt! We only had a single day to spend with him in Cairo, so we had to be very selective regarding what to visit. Since he already visited Giza Pyramids, Egyptian Museum and The Citadel, we picked more three places to visit: The Pharaonic Village in Giza, Khan El-Khalili, and our home!

It was my first time to visit The Pharaonic Village. It's a touristic village on the banks of the Nile river, exhibiting the long history of Egypt. The tour starts with a small boat on the Nile, equipped with a cassette playing a loud recorded voice (available in different languages) through low-quality speakers. The old man driving the boat stops/slows down in front of statues representing important symbols in ancient Egypt, in sync with the recorded voice which tells the story behind each of the symbols. Then, the voice starts to explain some of the activities, industries and arts that were popular in ancient Egypt, while visitors observe actors/actresses dressed like ancient Egyptians while working on these activities. For example, we got to see how they used to water the fields, make papers from the papyrus plant ...etc. I enjoyed this part of the tour the most.

Then we left the boat and the guide walked us through a scaled down version of the Temple of Abu Simble, an ancient rich man's house, an ancient poor man's house, and the tomb of King Tut. This part of the tour was exciting, but would have been much better if we had a better human guide!

Then, another guide took us in a tour to see the several museums exhibiting clothes, objects, portraits, photos, statues, models and pieces of old news paper. Each museum focuses on a particular age or leader in the Egyptian history. This part was the most informative in the tour.

Mentioning the good things about the Pharaonic Village, their official presence on the web is decent. Also, the staff is really helpful and cheerful. On the other hand, I have to say that I found the tickets to be overpriced, found "some" human guides to be unpresentable and not fluent, and found boat speakers to be of low-quality.

We spent around three hours in the Pharaonic Village, so we decided to get back to home and have some lunch. Amany made such a good job cooking molokheyya, mesakka'a, rice with shereyya, babaghannoog, chicken panet, pasta, fries, in addition to the ennab and sahlab drinks! Prof. Nelson also surprised us with a royal Belgium chocolate as a gift. That was very nice from him.

At night, we went to Khan El-Khalili. If interested, please read my earlier post about this exciting bazars area.