GXT-EP12 Ed in Eqypt

[00:00:00] Good day GenXers. Welcome to another exciting episode of GenXTalkin where we try to help you respond well and recover quicker. Along with me today is my good friend, Matt Marshall. 

Woo!. Hey, woo. Thanks. Thanks for having me, ed . 

Thanks for letting me have you! 

All right guys, today in this episode, I'm gonna go over real quick, a overall synopsis or summary of some of the key points of our recent trip to Egypt and in a high level overview. First, I'm gonna go over the bottom line up front and with some additional information or details, 

and then go into further details or key takeaways.

And some possible improves or sustains like an after action review of sorts, 

and then some major things to consider such as [00:01:00] safety and travel during COVID and safety and airport security 

and some cultural issues to consider 

and then the final they I'm gonna go over is consideration of your overall price and time and money for an international trip.

Cause let's face it. If you had the travel bug before COVID hit, I don't know how much you've traveled during COVID, but international travel with the pandemic going on has got some significant challenges to it now. So what do you think about Travel during COVID.

Had you been able to travel during COVID 

well, I gotta, I gotta tell you I don't wanna travel. But I have done a little bit for, for work. Very, very little. I went down to Charlotte, North Carolina, a bit I've I've done, trip back to New Mexico, so only, only domestic travel. And that was, that was hard enough for me. Yeah. and painful [00:02:00] enough. I talked with a coworker of mine, his family is from Scotland. And in the middle of Covid, like I think end of 2020, something like that he had to go back to Scotland, something related to his mom back there. And he told me during that period of time, you must wear your mask the entire time you're in the airport, the entire time that you're on the plane, getting through the airport where you land at your destination. And then in most taxi cabs, trains, anything to get you around in the, British area.

And he said that was easily 14 hours with a mask on. That's interesting. Not, not a chance. I'm not, I'm not even gonna try it. You know?

I guess different people have different reactions to it. it's interesting to me because every time we've been in any kind of situation where I've had to wear my mask for[00:03:00] over an hour straight. That's when I get cough, like symptoms later. Yeah. For like a day or two. I don't know, just seemed like I'm not discounting safety precautions during the pandemic. I'm just saying, I don't know if it should be mandated. I have some skepticism towards the whole thing. I think some little part of me actually applies a little bit of possibility to a conspiracy theory that all these mandates were partially to greatly inhibit everybody's travel. I mean, let's face it. Travel was literally restricted for a period of time. Yeah, absolutely. You just weren't even authorized to travel anywhere. Some countries weren't even letting you in. So now we're two years into two weeks to flatten the curve and they still have all these mandates in place. You can debate about the safety efficacy of it all you want to, but the reality of it is that in order for you to [00:04:00] travel internationally number one, you're gonna have to make sure you've got your, your passport updated.

Number two, you're gonna have to have your vaccination cards preferably with these QR codes. Mm-hmm the scan codes. There's applications on your phone you can use to get a QR code that they can see. It just seems like everybody at the airport's looking for a QR code.

If you don't have your VAX cards, you can still travel in some cases, and they're gonna want at least a rapid test. In most cases they're gonna want a PCR test, but it can't be a self test or a like a home test you did on your self you're gonna have to go to someplace and actually get tested. And you're gonna have to show 'em that you've got negative test results. Yeah. 

So this is so all of these, all of these millions and millions of COVID tests that they're sending out to people's homes or to the pharmacies or whatever, they're gonna be [00:05:00] completely useless for travel. 

Yeah. As far as I know, you can't do a, a self test or a home test. Most places they're actually requiring a PCR test. So whether or not that's required for you to depart the US. Most countries on the other side, they're interpreting that TSA requirement for you to come back to the US is a PCR test. Yeah. Now Chris Klein said he reviewed it and reviewed it and reviewed it. And he said the actual requirement, you can't have a, a rapid test. It just can't be home or self administered. That's not the way anybody on the ground in most other countries are how they're interpreting it. It has to be at least a PCR test. 

So when you go to the lab overseas, they're gonna want to do antigens and all other kind of things. And most countries, the PCR test is $30. There's an extra $30 per family member. When you go overseas for just a PCR test. [00:06:00] They're gonna wanna upsell all that with the antigen tests and everything else, they're gonna want, try to sell you at least $60 worth of stuff. You only need that PCR test. Okay. 

So anyway the bottom line upfront for Nicia and I is that it was a mission success. Nicia and I were able to safely travel to Cairo Egypt and back mm-hmm we had this opportunity fall upon us, and we had the money time and space we had to lift basically.

And what happened was we had a friend oversee. He is over there. He was already in, Hurghada, which is a red sea beach resort town several hours from Cairo. And he said, look, guys, I've been traveling and I've got all these points racked up with Marriot and Hilton honors. And he said, I've got these rooms and they're basically gonna be dirt cheap if not free.

So Nicia and I thought the only thing we have to do is get the plane tickets out there.[00:07:00] So Nicia and I thought about how much time can we take off? It's a long flight mm-hmm and seeing the pyramids and riding on a camel were on Nicia's bucket list. So for me, part of my life and mission and role is, I delight in seeing Nicia happy. Nicia's happiness is one of my missions in life now, so that's good. I was like, so when Nisha told me, she's like, yeah, okay. And I was like, okay, let's see if we can make it happen. And we talked about it and we looked at finances and stuff. We were able to find a reasonable ticket. We were able to take a reasonable amount of time off and talked with our friend over there. Chris he's been on our, we went live with him as you saw. 

So we looked at it and we gamed it and we said, okay, we can do these two days in Cairo. These two days in Luxor see everything in Luxor and these two days in Hurghada boom, boom. We're in and out. Boom, mission success. We did it. We got there and back safety. 

 You were there with this [00:08:00] part of the way, Matt, what'd you think when we were out there in Hurghada we were gonna have Chris back on for another episode, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Just getting to talk to him the short amount that we did seems like a really, just an excellent guy. Would love to hear more experience from him, with the international travel. It takes a certain person to want to put up with that type of travel and oh yeah. And it's definitely a strange person. So it's a different type of person. That's all I can say. And so to glean, something from him in a conversation would be great.

Well, I am gonna talk to him more too, because we're still kind of interested because he's traveled to a lot of countries through a, a lot of it's been during COVID. And what we saw on the ground out there was like if you're arriving in Cairo, it's not as bad, but when you're departing from Cairo, you go through four security checkpoints. I'm talking like four times you put your luggage through[00:09:00] a scanner. Yeah. You go through a scanner two or three of those times you're taking your shoes off. Whether you go through the scanner and you have anything that they want to check or not, they still do a very intrusive, full hands on pat search of you. I mean , they don't just go, like they don't tell you either. Okay. The scanner detected something here I'm gonna pat here. 

Right? Like they do a TSA.

Yeah. TSA does it. These guys are like, And then down your leg and all up your body. And you're like, dude, I don't have anything on me. You, I went through a scanner, didn't I? Yeah. What do you think I have on me? It's a little bit hard to understand, but the reality of it is, but we found out is that they actually seem to consider Americans terrorists. To be honest with you we felt like we were considered a terroristic threat to them. They were constantly watching it on one hand. I think they want and love our tourists dollars. Yeah. And [00:10:00] they want to try to be friendly with us. On the other hand, we did see that there are literally police and military security codes for American tourists. So if you're in a taxi or a tourist vehicle, they have a special license plate, color code for tourist taxis or whatever. Hmm. So if you come there's police and other security checkpoints all over the place. So if this vehicle comes to one of those checkpoints, your driver looked, you stop. Your driver looks at military and or police personnel there. And he says in Egyptian dialect, I have two Americans with me.

They have actually a code word for Americans. So if he says that you can, in most cases basically know that you're gonna be stuck there for up to 10 to 15 minutes, because once they find out they've got an American in the taxi [00:11:00] or the tourist vehicle, some unless it's a tourist vehicle visit taxi is one thing, tourist vehicle you might get away with just passing through.

Number one, the tourist company or the taxi company is gonna pay the military or law enforcement, basically a bribe. Yeah. Part of your, part of your fair or tourist fee that you bought is going to please checkpoint to let you through sooner. 

Number two they could pull you off the side of the road and wait if you're on a remote road where the traffic is very light, like in the middle of the desert, they could have you wait for five other vehicles to come that way. They're allowing only like six vehicles at a time to pass while you're there. They're gonna check under the hood and in the trunk and everything else to, they're gonna check all your driver's paperwork. And they may even ask you questions. They did that for Chris several times. They didn't do it to us because we had a driver that was telling them I have two people from Spain with me.

Ah, [00:12:00] cause you're wearing your I was 

wearing a Real Madrid soccer Jersey. Nice. And we just passed through. When you're driving through the desert, we passed through, I think three or four checkpoints. We went through Dandera, which is it's north of blocker. And it's a site where they have green and Roman ruins in there as well as some of the Egyptian stuff. And after we got through Dendera they knew that, that this guy had an Americans with him and they actually have a portion of the, I think we drew drove like five or 10 miles with an actual police escort vehicle. And I'm talking like military police, like these guys, there were people in the back of this unit with rifles in front of us looking back at us. So they were kinda only guy giving us a police escort five or 10 miles past Dendera before we got back on the desert road. 

It's interesting you use the being from Spain example, there's two observations I have there when when Kristin [00:13:00] was seeing Nicia's posts, she always was complimenting her. And just saying the way she's dressing is very, very non US. Right. And wearing a Real Madrid. And that's I think one of the secrets to any type of international travel is don't look like an American because you then become a target. Whether it's in this strange situation where you're considered a terrorist. I'm sure it's that way in other places as well. but whether it's that or whether it's you're a target because you have money, they know you have money and they're gonna go after you. Right. If you just don't look like you're American, then you can usually, it's kind of like what we talked about in the last episode, you become a harder target for them.

When I was doing a lot of personal international travel I did a European kind of backpacking trip. I realized the difference between how a Canadian or an [00:14:00] Australian who speak the same basic language, right? How they can get by in certain scenarios and an American can't. I actually got to a point where I got rid of the USA backpack patch and I put a Canadian patch on instead because they look at that and they go, oh, he is Canadian. Okay. Nevermind. 

Well, Chris dresses and carries himself this way. And while we were in Cairo, as we left, he had another traveling friend come in there and she's a part travel agent and part world traveler, herself. And there is a certain way that European backpackers, they just all look the same. So they got the loose walking pants and the little backpack and a very modest, long sleeve shirt or whatever. And they just look like they're the types that's probably gonna stay at a five to $10 a night hostile. Yeah, exactly. so you're, you're kind of like dressing and dumbing yourself down.

So to speak mm-hmm people like, oh, [00:15:00] I don't know where they're from. Are they from Czechoslovakia? Are they from Sweden? From Germany or something like that. So, yeah, it was interesting and I intentionally brought those soccer jerseys for that reason, I had a couple of other very non-US looking clothes with me, but Chris dresses like that all the time and he looks very inconspicuous, but it was a weird situation out there.

But we had a nice rabbit meal, especially prepared for us by a new friend in Luxor. A city known for having the world's largest open air museum, the whole city. It took us almost two days to see it all. So, wow. One whole day of seven straight hours. We were going on both sides of the Nile.

So it was you have the Valley of the Kings and HatShepsut temple and other statues and sites on one side of the river. And then you have Karnack and Luxor temple on the other side. And at the end of that day and all that we were smoked. So yeah, he had all that. And before we were in Cairo and we basically got to [00:16:00] the pyramids, dumped our cab driver there because he was supposed to drive us there and help us tour guide. And we ended up doing it all on our own. We were fed up with this guy. Long story short we walked all the way around the whole site of the Sphynx and the pyramids. We road on camels. There's a very nice restaurant out there called the nine pyramids. I think it is very reasonably priced food.

Very good, good meal that we had up there. Very relaxing. So we had one good, really good experience in Cairo. Most of the experience in Luxor was really nice. And then we were able to drive from Luxor see Dendera and drive through the desert and go all the way to Hurghada. Now Hurghada is again, the red sea resort town.

How long did it take you to get from Luxor to Hurghada? 

That's about three and a half hours. Okay. And that for three and a half hour taxi ride, that was like hundred 30 us dollars. [00:17:00] Okay. Imagine that in the states, imagine being in a taxi for three and a half hours in the states, 

I I'd rent a car.

Absolutely. You'd rent a car for maybe a couple hundred dollars and you'd still be cheaper than a taxi. Yep, absolutely. I think if you take a taxi from an airport in the US and you end up driving like 45 minutes, it's like $200. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna go into some further details. 

We've talked about the safety and the COVID situation, as far as what you're required to have for travel documents. Yeah. What I will say is that if we're flying American airlines, domestic, you have airline stewardist Nazis in there saying, get your mask over your nose. You can be asleep in, in, at they've got the lights turned off or whatever for a night flight or red eye or whatever. And they will find you and they will tell you, get that mask over your [00:18:00] nose. Like, geez, you get on, you get on Emirates air or Lufthanza. And it's an international flight, and nobody cares. Nobody's enforcing that mask mandate.

You get into the airport. Some of the employees may be wearing a mask. Most of 'em aren't nobody in Egypt really cares nobody anywhere in Egypt really cared about the masks at all. It's a different story out there. So as far as we could tell internationally, globally, this mask mandate thing and especially vaccinations, there's nobody talking about getting Vaxxed in Egypt. I don't know what kind of access to it that they have, but it seems like America got Alibaba'd into the mask and vaccine mandate. What I mean by Alibaba is when you get on the ground in, in Egypt as an American tourist, I'll give you a couple of examples. We're at the airport. Chris is calling us. The hotel we're staying at is literally right across the street. But we [00:19:00] didn't know that taxi drivers are swarming. You saying, oh no, it's a half hour walk. You can't walk there. And Chris is telling us, no, stay there. I'm trying to get to you. However, security at the hotel will not let film leave because you can't go to the airport without travel documents.

Oh, they, they need to see that you have a reason to go to the airport because otherwise oh, who knows? Maybe you'll, you're a terrorist, right? Yeah. It's all this pretended and postured security positioning, I don't know whether the threat is real or not. I just can't remember the last time Egyptian authorities captured an American trying to blow something up in Egypt. Right. But apparently it's a real threat to them. Sort of like other threats are to us. At any rate, Chris couldn't get to us. He told us to stay in and we could see buildings on the outside, but we didn't know which were, which yeah, we did have a couple of people inside the airport tell us that the hotel you're going to, you can walk to, it's only like four minutes away.[00:20:00] 

Since we couldn't verify that I told this one taxi driver, he said it's $10. And I finally said, okay, fine. I gave this guy $10. We got in his cab as we're driving down the cab, we drove down about 50 yards and he made a U-turn to the other side of the road where he let us off. And he is like, here you go. And they do this with us, with this shit eating smile on their face. Like they just did you a huge favor. I'm like, dude, you just charged me $10 to get us across the street. Yeah. and they smile at you and they say, yep, it's nice to meet you. Yeah. They were constantly saying things like that to us.

We paid a concierge at the hotel, a good amount of money, but for Egypt prices a good amount of money, for this cab driver to take us to the pyramids and be our tour guide. And it covered all entry fees [00:21:00] and everything else like that get to the pyramids. The guy says, oh no, it doesn't cover entry fees and tour guide or anything else like that. It only covered the ride to over here from the airport to here. Yeah. And we're like, no, dude, we paid you this much. And he's going back and forth on the phone with this concierge. And this is a LA Meridian mayor area, employee concierge. Mm-hmm, so finally we put the pressure on him or he was like, oh yeah, I'm sorry.

Yes, it did cover all this, but it was too late. We already kicked our cab driver out. We was like, we're done with you. Everywhere you go in Egypt, people are trying to Ali Babi you. Yeah. And they know that you're stuck there with them. And this is a societal and cultural issue in Egypt. It it's good that they strongly frown upon actual fever. This is something that if you're an actual fee for Robert, they'll cut your hand off for mm-hmm however, to scam somebody is totally [00:22:00] acceptable to them and to do it just brazenly and openly, not a problem at all. That the problem I have with it is they're constantly trying to befriend you and act like, or your friend, and they're doing you a favor.

Yeah. While they're basically ripping you off. And they know it. And this is where I get to say overall society wise we didn't find anybody in Egypt that was just. There's some that were genuinely friendly and genuinely trying to help us. But by and large, just like over 90% of the people just have this way about them. And you'll never see anybody from anywhere in the world travel to America as a tourist and have the whole of an American society try to just be bad people. 

One of the things I've always thought about though, is if a person flies into JFK or into LaGuardia and they're in New York, you expect that kind of behavior. Right. you expect the [00:23:00] kind of rough and combative in your face kind of behavior. Whereas if you go into let's say you go into Missouri or Utah or something like that. They have a reason. And I know Utah and Missouri are the two Mormon capitals so there's a reason why I would name those two because they want something from you? They want you to come and be part of their church. I'm I'm guessing that's the reason, the way they act the way they do. So there's, there's other reasons for that kindness, but there's places you go when you land in the US where it's kindness. It's good.

There's people there that help you get from one side of the airport to the other like. When we were coming back from Hurghada to Cairo. And we had to get from terminal three to terminal two. And again, there were taxi drivers that wanted to drive us there. It's literally around the corner and they're trying to tell us no, it's like three quarters of mile. It's gonna be a 15 minute walk. No, it's like [00:24:00] less than a hundred yards around the corner. You jerk, you're lying intentionally and I get trying to get a little bit of money off of somebody, but you have a whole culture there that this is their mentality. 

But I mean, to be honest with you we had fun. We saw a lot of great sites, typically, we would've wanted to stay at least two or three weeks that we didn't this time, because we were able to just get back in at different time. And we thought the amount of time that we spent in Egypt was plenty of time. Trust me, but safety wise, you're gonna have to look at those department of state and other websites to see what kind of risk is out there. Bottom line up front Egypt is a high risk country. State department says high risk red for terrorism. Cairo is in astoundingly, shocking squalor and decay there are whole enormous sections of this city that looked like there was an airstrike on it. Like [00:25:00] the buildings are leveled, it's just rubble.

However, there's those areas. Plus the city of the dead, which is their huge Cemetery where over a million people live in the cemetery. That's how poor they are. Oh my goodness. And nobody cares about these poor people at all. And you have to drive through this area. And another section that's very similar to it, up to the point you get to the pyramids and then they treat you differently there at as well. That there's no kindness at the entrance area of the pyramids at all. They let a group of other Arabs of five in front of us and they're like, come on in. And when they saw us, they were like, hurry up. It's $30 each. Hurry up, give me the money. And then we got through and the immediate it's like, put your masks on and really, okay.

We put our mask on and they have airport security type screening devices there that put your stuff through here. Come on. And those five [00:26:00] Arabs that they had in front of us, they were like, come on brother. No masks, no security check, no rush.

So that's just what you have to deal with when you're out there. Seriously, the whole regions of Cairo, it looked like you were almost in like Syria or Yemen, like war zone of destruction and decay. 

Do you know anything about the history because at one point in time, Cairo used to be a destination location for people. Didn't it? I mean like the Europeans saw thought of chiro as this like very exotic, beautiful place that lots of people love to go to, it just doesn't sound like it's that case anymore. 

No, I don't think it was ever that way. I think that the we're talking about slightly richer Europeans that would go to places like the Marriot resort right next to the pyramids. Ah, there it's like the castle on the hill. There's resorts that you're gonna be at. And to be honest with you, like in no other country, and I've been [00:27:00] Jamaica where I felt like I better stay on the resort. I've been to Dominican Republic where I felt like I better stay on the resort. Yeah. Other areas that are a little bit more passive like Thailand or the Philippines I felt like I could venture out in town a little bit, Costa Rica other places like that. Yeah. Cairo, especially Cairo. Anyway. You're gonna wanna stay on the resort and while the resort is fine and it's like that resort destination and you got the pyramids there and that's epic.

All the rest of the town. They're not gonna be friendly at all. It probably made a drastic turn, right about 1948, shortly after world war II and the powers that be manifested the state of Israel. I'm not saying anything, anti Zionist, I'm just saying from a Muslim perspective, that was what they called the great nukfa or the, catastrophe. And from my understanding Saudi Arabian Egyptians and others, Egyptians don't even consider themselves Arabs. Anyway, they consider [00:28:00] themselves Egyptian or heroic. They say Arabs are from Saudi Arabia, those areas. So ethnically I don't know exactly how they're identifying with the Palestinian struggle except to say, well, the state of Israel is Jewish and we don't like Jews.

To me that was another cultural indicator. You wanna talk about racism. These guys are racist amongst themselves a little bit. There's people from lower Egypt. That's the actually Northern part by Cairo and there's people from Southern Egypt from Luxor around that area. And they consider these guys down here siidis which was almost like calling 'em Pollocks and they're actually all Egyptians. Yeah. Right. These guys don't they may not necessarily like Lybians they certainly don't like Sudanese. They don't necessarily like Saudi Arabians as much. So a lot of the common people there in Egypt are actually quite ethnocentric if you ask me 

It's [00:29:00] amazing that there's so many people in the United States who are so uninformed, they have no idea that these other countries are racist. they're making it sound like it's the US, that's so racist. But if you look at like Canada, racist, Australia, racist, every European country, racist in India, racist within its own borders.

Yep. In Egypt, apparently racist within its own borders. You're just like, holy cow, everyone. We talked about this off camera a bit about the US being the greatest country in the world. What other country is even close to having a melting pot of people where people coexist, where else.

It just seems to like, sort of melt away. And you have opportunities. It's kind of subtly understood that it's getting more and more of a culture of diversity and inclusion, which I think we should have a limit to that [00:30:00] because diversity and inclusion in some circles doesn't seem to include being a straight caucasion Protestant anymore these days. But other than that, it's kind of understood in America, you don't ask or care about gender or sex orientation or race or ethnicity or anything else like that. And growing up as a kid, we didn't even have that much racial diversity in our area. However, we just never grew up to where it, like, I'm almost like colorblind.

I see people of different places and I can tell after a great deal of world travel and experience, oh, this person is probably Punjab. Whereas this person and over here is probably Hindi. This person over here is Vietnamese. And this person over here is probably from Thailand or Cambodia. you start to develop that. I can tell this person is probably Egyptian and this person is probably Lybian and this person is probably [00:31:00] Saudi, but it's not like I place some sort of stigma on them. I just recognize in that's where they're from. Yeah. First and foremost, as an, if they're in America as an American, they're American. Right.

and if they're at the airport, Even if they speaking with an accent, oh, I can speak a little bit of Arabic. I can speak a little bit of Spanish and if they need help, I can direct them around the corner without trying to rip them off of $15 or something like that yeah. 

Go up here, take a left, take a left.

You're there done. Yeah. I just not. Going back. Yeah. With all of my travel, I've seen Scottish people that were racist, Irish Italians, Greeks, Germans spans the people in Spain are insanely. And let's talk about borders and border security on the Egyptian Sudanese border. The Egyptian military has supplied vehicles with 50 calibers. And they're trained on [00:32:00] you. They're pointing their weapon at you at tourists. Just in case some tourists decides because you're near the Ashwan dam. You never can't tell when somebody wants to blow up the Ashwan dam to flood the whole Egyptian river valley. Yeah. This is how they're guarding the border. And when I was in Spain, I learned that Spain has an enclave in Morocco where they have the area fenced off. There's a rabbit run, there's concertina wires. And not only is that if you're a Moroccan Arab, and you want to try to migrate or travel tourist wise into Spain, that's fine.

However, if you're from some other African country and your skin is black, the Spanish authorities actually cross over the fence sometimes. To beat these people in their camps with sticks and burn their camp sites down. And nobody says anything about that kind of border security for those, those type of countries. Whereas conservatives [00:33:00] wanted to enhance border security on the Southwest border and you had Trump saying, build the wall. Nicia and I recently drove by El Paso and she's like, well, where's Juarez. I said, Juarez is right there. She's like, where's the wall. There is no wall. Okay. There's people she's like, where's the river. I said that little trickle there you can, you can walk over without getting knee deep. That's the Rio Grande. Yeah. And they're crossing that river by the thousands. We have politicians posturing about border security or lack thereof here. And, and fronting on the issue that they say is racism. And in other countries we have serious racism and nobody knows about it. Yeah. Yeah. 

Because it's not American politics, it's all political here.

Part of our talking about being prepared is hopefully we're presenting information to people that's unbiased. It's moderate and, and [00:34:00] neutral. It's not left. It's not right. Trying to say, look here's the facts on the ground? The facts are on the ground or ABC and 1 23 and all this other banner bluster is on Fox in CNN in a lot of cases it's dribble and they're not reporting news and information. They're trying to create this narrative to influence your mind of thinking that there's some sort of. Steps or measures we must take as Americans to enhance border security or embrace critical race theory or whatever, all these kind things. I would say that critical race theory might be a, a good topic to talk about. If we want to take it to its logical extreme and say, look, there's people that in Egypt, believe those pharaohs that enslaved those people for quite a while were, were actually black Africans.

Now we talked about that with some people in Egypt and they were like, no, no, no, you look at these statues [00:35:00] and you look at their facial features and their lips, and those are not black Africans because they have a bias and I'm like, dude, look at that picture of king Tut and look at these other pictures.

Yeah. That's dark. They don't look like they were tan. They look actually darker than that. And if you wanna say all these slaves, they're like, oh, all these slaves were from all over the place, blah, blah, blah. They were showing us some parts of looks or where the Kings throne at that time was on a pedestal. And on the pedestal, he had heiroglyphs of all his slaves and his slaves were Indian Saudi Arabian, black Asian. They were pointing this out to us and saying, look, our king, all his slaves were from all of these other races. So you know that none of these Pharohs could have been black I'm like, dude honestly, if we're having an open [00:36:00] minded, honest discussion and we wanna get into dialogue about critical race theory. Let's let's really get into it. Let's not half step this and say try to shame people for being born a certain color. Yeah. There's only one race. That's the human race. Doesn't matter where you're born to me.

Doesn't matter what your skin color, your ethnicity, your race, creed, religion, anything else like that? And if you're an American, I don't care about that either. I considered you an American. Yeah. And I think we here in America that we have some challenges. We can do better. We can make enhancements, we can make enhancements to, we can grow. We have that spiritual and emotional growth and development, but don't tell me America's the worst country cuz I've been to other countries and there is just blatant in your face. Ignorant. Racism everywhere else I've been. 

Yeah. It's interesting because Martin Luther king, he really did have something when he said content of your character. [00:37:00] because, an evil person is an evil person. Exactly. Whether they're black, white, yellow, red doesn't matter, evil person is evil. And that's just the way they are. Unfortunately, I think we're in this position in the United States where color has become more important than content of their character. And I think it's just wrong. When you talk about critical race theory, And having that discussion, it might be actually an interesting topic of discussion yeah.

To, to have here on the show. I think it would be interesting to have that I'm not gonna say pander to the, the left or anything like that, but it would be interesting to have that discussion with people of different ethnicities in the discussion.

During all the riots that were occurring a year or so ago I got so tired of hearing about all of that stuff, because it was on the news constantly. And it was you're white, so you're bad. That's all that was going through my mind. I'm a white male [00:38:00] straight male, and I must be a horrible person. That was the messaging that kept being conveyed to me over and over and over by the media and whatever else. So whenever I heard, oh, there's diversity training. You wanna be part of the diversity training in our corporation or don't you wanna join the diversity group so that gays and, and black people are lifted up.

And I'm like, no, no, because all they're doing is stomping on me to get up. that's what it feels like to me. So it was a frustrating period of time. The time that it got really difficult is when initially was when our church started coming in and doing a similar type of diversity. And it was from the pulpit, somebody talking and, and trying to apply some sort of narrative to us, but it was interesting the way it was happening. The pastor was trying to explain, look, I, myself, himself, the pastor [00:39:00] being a white person didn't understand what all these protests and things were until he had a discussion with a black pastor.

Yeah. And he had a discussion and they were brothers, and they had this eternal connection with each other because of their observance of Christianity. They knew they could get through all of the ethnic differences and the racism differences and try to come at it from the perspective of their religion. Right. Yeah. And so he had the black pastor come up and give a presentation to us and discuss with us. My immediate reaction was here we go. Here we go. I'm gonna be inundated with the negative again, because that's what it always was during that period of time. But it didn't turn into that a bit more positive. It allowed me to see things from a different perspective. So it was, it was pretty important and and helpful to me. I still have pretty quick negative responses when, [00:40:00] when people start talking about critical race theory and other aspects of that. 

Yeah. And it's, it's, what's being pushed in the news as an issue. And when you already have a distrust of the news that doesn't help. Love talking with people of different backgrounds and that, that way I help it helps me understand what their perspectives are because the truth of the matter is in America, we can do better. And we have to start trying to do a little bit better. There's a lot of minorities that do have legitimate grievances. There is a little bit of a systemic thing. There is a little bit of a history there

And we could talk about it for a long time, but if you're gonna apply that type of training or education, you need to do it from number one from a non-biased and open perspective. 

Let's talk about the Greeks and the Romans. Those guys were never flawless either. Yeah. But a lot of our, the basis or foundation of what we're considering [00:41:00] our current society and civilization comes from that. But everybody forgets that civilizations are built one on top of the other and that's what you try to be moving forward. As you're getting into your spiritual growth and development, you try to be better and you can't try to be better by just pointing out all of the problems.

Anybody can point out what the problems are. You have to also try to work towards what are the solutions that we can do, right here right now. And some of 'em aren't build a wall or some of 'em aren't come on over and flood the country. Some of the solutions aren't let's say for example defund the police or whatever, let's be for real. There's some problems we gotta work through them. Let's not be blinded by a bias. That's either left or right. If you want to get into it, let's get into it and realize that if you have this international travel, like we've had recently in Egypt,[00:42:00] you get a broader experience. You want to take the best experiences that you can from it without forgetting or being negligent of your negative of experiences. You gotta put 'em together and say, this is what I saw going on over there. And I come to understand it a little bit. They're extremely poor. They want to shark on me, but their attitude and behavior as a whole is rather ignorant. There's a lot of racism over there. There's a lot of cultural issues over there.

There's not a good society or civilization overall. And here in America, we do have some enhancements or improvements that we can make. However, we are not this demon that some people are trying to make itself to be. 

So let me ask you this speaking of Egypt do you ever wanna return there?

No, we'll we'll never be back. Okay. Of all the places that we've gone. We can, we can honestly say, oh yeah, I'll go back to Spain, France, Germany, Italy[00:43:00] Greece, probably Turkey Thailand all around the Caribbean, Mexico central and south America. We will never be back to Egypt. Yeah. 

Similar. We talked about this a little bit earlier. I have no desire to ever go to now I may be placed in a situation where I have to go for business or something. Yeah. But would never myself sign up for a ticket to go to India. I would not want to go to the Philippines. Although I think I saw a different side of the Philippines because I hear stories about beaches in the Philippines and up in the mountains or something. I don't know some places where you're out in nature. Maybe it's a bit nicer. Similar type of thing, I didn't really like the people as much as I did in other places. Maybe it was just the people that I met during that period of time. 

That could be the big cities and those general tendencies of people that are from the big cities. Yeah. And their overall attitude as well, because there's difference between [00:44:00] being in bank where they're assuming you're coming for sex tourism. Yeah. And going, three hours south into a small beach town where everybody treats you nice. Yeah. If in the Philippines, if you were in Manila, you were able to get two or three hours outside of Manila and be in a, a more hilly or beach area. I think you would've been treated differently. And it's probably the same, like Deka, Bangladesh, get outside of that area. You might run into a different experience Mumbai India That's where you run into the a little bit of the differences. Then again, you could be in Costa Rica or something like that, and be in a resort area, just go down the road a little ways and accidentally stumble upon an area that's run by some sort of John McCaffey type of cartel or something.

If you're in that area. Yeah. You never can tell where there's rich American or some other rich European or something like that. And those people have totally polluted that area as well with some kind of toxicity. 

That's why I mentioned New York. If [00:45:00] you go to New York, there's a lot, Chicago is probably the same way. There's a lot of places you can go in some of these major cities where mm-hmm even as Americans, we would not wanna go, so if you're a foreigner coming in and I'm trying to think of it from the perspective of if I'm going to another country into their biggest city and expecting that to show something relative to the culture itself. I'm probably mistaken in doing that, but it. From the opposite side. If they come into the US and see New York city, or they go to LA and they see LA as what America is, it is so far from what America is. I'm trying to be all balanced in my mind as to how I'm approaching the international travel stuff myself.

Yeah, it's a challenge. And the biggest thing you still gotta figure in is that COVID passports pieces. Mm-hmm time, money, and space. I mean, if you're gonna do it, you're gonna do it, but you [00:46:00] sure the COVID situation puts a huge constraint or restriction on anybody's desire to really get out there.

Now you guys have done other international travel during COVID, too, right? Or no, just no, not during just domestic. 

Not during COVID the last thing we had was Costa Rica, I think just before COVID hit. 

Ah, okay. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. I can't say that I have any it's sad because I did a whole bunch of international travel through my younger years. Enjoyed the heck out of it. I really did. It's, unfortunately that I rarely had a chance to take the family with me. But and now I just don't wanna go. So it's kind of a bummer that I don't want to go to international places. I'd much rather experience more in, north America, in the us, and maybe up into Canada a bit down a little bit down Mexico, maybe.

Well, all that said we've covered our little [00:47:00] Egyptian jaunt. And I'm gonna have a blog on it. Do you wanna get into parting thoughts on this, Matt? Yeah. Yeah, let's do it. 

Okay. I think I've already shared a good portion of what would be my parting shots. And that is living vicariously through you and Nicia you guys made it look beautiful. You made with all the pictures and the cool, like seeing her walking off into the distance, you're doing that typical Instagram picture kind of stuff. So you made it look nice. You made it look like it's a beautiful place to visit and you covered up well for what is the true culture of what you guys had to experience. And I think that's a cautionary tale for most people. My daughter, she wants to experience the world. She wants to go out and see this type of stuff.

So she's gonna go into these situations with the rose colored glasses thinking everything's gonna to be beautiful and rosy. So I think the way I'm approaching this discussion is from that [00:48:00] perspective of balance and saying, okay, I don't wanna just pass judgment on another culture, just because the way they're acting. And then the report that you got has have given to us your experiences. But I also wanna try to make people when they come visit us have that feeling of hospitality. Like you can come visit us, you can come hang out with us and we'll show you some of the neat sites around the area, some of the cooler places to go for sunrises and sunsets and experience some of more local life than just, whatever you may read on trip advisor. And definitely thank you for bringing the ideas of what you had to experience for COVID during international travel, it still seems very, very confusing to me. And I avoid confusion whenever possible, so probably won't be traveling internationally much, but when you do, I will live vicariously through you. So thank you. All right. On onto you, [00:49:00] Ed. 

All right guys in my parting thoughts for this, I'm gonna say our goal and purpose here is to try to put out information for preparedness so you can respond well and recover faster. And with that mindset in my head which Matt has helped me kind of requi and strengthened

We went into this trip into Egypt and my wife and I, we discussed these things and we think and talk and walk it through. And we always say honey, it's you and me against the world. And no matter what happens, we're gonna enjoy ourselves. We're gonna have fun. Nothing's gonna get us down. we anticipate struggles out there. We had a couple of exceptional Issues, but we were able to see and experience some exceptional beauty. And that's what we take and keep with us. But we wanted to present that to everybody as this is, and was a beautiful [00:50:00] experience and it was, but we not gonna ignore the fact that there are these challenges out there.

And we want to inform everybody of what some of these challenges are for preparedness so you can respond well and you recover faster. So you're gonna get out there guys, if you're gonna travel internationally, you gotta have it in your mind that I mean, you're gonna see beautiful things you're gonna see, hopefully see what you wanna see with good weather and everything. But there are some terribly tragic pitfalls out there, some to avoid and some to be aware of, like mm-hmm we got to the pyramids. And there was all those challenges at the entry place. And there were throngs of poor people coming up on us as well.

And Nicia had a woman with a baby in her arms that was gonna try to put this baby in Nicia's arms. And Chris's friend said that it's the same thing when she was in Ashwan. She said typically I try to avoid people handing [00:51:00] me something off, but she, she came from the side and she was just like here. And her natural reaction was like, oh, I've got a, a poor baby in my arms now . So that puts you in an extremely precarious situation and she's able to put this baby back in the mother's arms. I don't know what people are expecting, but. In her case. She said that baby had scurvy and lice. So the next thing she knew, she had to basically treat herself for scurvy and lice when she got back to the hotel. Guys, there's a whole world out there to experience and enjoy and be a part of in this universal experience of man's tapestry, like walkthrough, existence. And there are unfortunately borders and barriers and challenges.

And I invite you to consider reading the chapter of Genesis and going to the section of the story where they talk about out what happened with the tower of babble. Yeah. [00:52:00] Regardless of what your take on that story is we have, I believe leaders of the world that are still doing that kind of thing today. They're trying to confuse religion, race, sex, ethnicity, color, creed all these things. They've created invisible lines, and I'm not saying, be this universal civil Mundy or whatever, and not have any kind of no, no slogan, but I'm saying there's a lot of challenges and barriers out there that that are man-made. And they're probably orchestrated and managed and controlled specifically in some cases to get people confused. And at odds would be with one of the, at odds with people you have never met and may never even meet. Especially here in America left and right. Things like this. Put all that stuff aside and let's come together and see what the legitimate grievances are. See what the [00:53:00] challenges are. See where our risks and, and threats and vulnerabilities are and work together to come up with those reasonable step by step integrated enhancements and improvements to our lives. Yeah, that's my parting thought guys. 

Excellent. Excellent. Thanks ed. 

Thank you, Matt. 

You wanna close this out?

Yeah, I'll close this out. Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Make it a great day guys, wherever you're at in the world, literally and wherever you're at in the space in your head, go out there and make it a great day.

Yeah. Respond well recover faster and be prepared and close us out Matt.

This is Matt Marshall signing off, 

and this is ed was signing off. Thanks for joining us guys.