Driving back to Cairo at 3 in the morning, we saw the pyramids by moonlight, and had some trouble making the curves because of the desert which was attempting to straighten those curves in the road by covering half of the curve with sand! . . . If we ever thought midnight on a country road was lonely, we had never experienced two o'clock in the morning on a desert road! Gail and I laughed and sang all the way back [behavior assured to avoid any possible trouble.] Arrived at the hotel in Cairo (which by that time we were calling home) at 3 AM, to bed at 3:15AM, up at 4 AM. Dashed to the UAR office at 4:15 AM, in time for the airport bus. That accomplished, we had to wait at the airport until 7 AM. (That camel the Libyans had gifted me on our first day in Egypt was a big success!) [See blog for Saturday, February 5, 2011 - Libyans & Alexandria, Egypt, August 16, 1964].
( Images below courtesy of Numismondo.com)
And we discovered that the international gift shop of the Cairo Airport would NOT accept Egyptian currency. What blatant admission that Egyptian money was without value!
An hour later, at 7 AM, we arrived in Beirut to the happy surprise of my cousin Garbis at the sight of Miss Gail . . .
I have forgotten to write about perhaps the most important feeling of that day -- freedom. On arriving in Beirut, Gail and I felt we had truly reached the freedom land, the freedom land we had been so hopefully (and prayerfully) singing about for the last week.
We're on our way to the freedom land
We're on our way to the freedom land
We're on our way to the freedom land
We're on our way, praise God
We're on our way.
The burden of the police state was lifted as we walked onto the landing strip in Beirut, Lebanon.
America, we love you, and praise God for you. It may sound exaggerated and soap opera-ish but the feeling is more real to me than any I can remember.
Here ends my journal entries on our trip to Egypt, 1964.
It is interesting to note that the trip to Egypt I describe in my journal from 1964 was in sharp contradistinction to the joyous days, Summer 1964, I had spent (without Gail) in Paris & Istanbul, and (with Gail) in Amman, Damascus, Beirut and Teheran. We loved the Middle East. But Egypt -- that was different.
After our trip, Gail and I made a pact: we promised each other that since we could never return the kindness and generosity, the selfless hospitality that we had received during our trip throughout the Middle East, we committed to 'passing it on'. In fact, to this day, my husband and I welcome friends and relatives, friends of friends, and even strangers, to our home, treating them like family, just as we had been treated. (Yes, my husband has done his share of traveling, but not only to the Middle East. When he was just out of college, -- he actually traveled as a merchant seaman to the Far East to Armenia and throughout the Middle East . . . AND he had the advantage of being able to speak Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, Russian, English and French! I wish he would dig up the journals he kept during that trip!)
And just an aside. The pact I made with Gail was nothing more than reinforcing the code that I had been taught by my mother and father growing up . . . Being Armenian, (and, of course Marashtzi), I could do nothing less than open my home and my heart to others, just as my father and mother had, and their fathers and mothers before them.
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