Ancient Egypt binge

Last night was an amazing spectacle to behold. Mom and I intended to go to the pyramids to see them lit up at night and ended up on a restaurant terrace eating dinner across from the pyramids during a nightly light show. Some say cheesy, I say amazing!
Weirdly, the pyramids are situated just a half a mile from stores and other houses. I imagined them in the middle of the desert, so that really blew that theory out of the water.
After dinner we took a cab back to our hotel, and got stuck in a two-hour Ramadan traffic jam. The streets were teeming with life, and people crossed the road mindlessly in front of cars. There are no street lights, no crosswalks, and no rhyme or reason to the flow of traffic.
Earlier in the day yesterday we went to the Cairo Museum in downtown. The museum is different from "normal" museums in that there is really no fuss in displaying things well. Ancient artifacts were shoved into glass cases with no cards explaining what they were. Big monuments were displayed out in the open where anyone could reach out and touch. No alarms, no sensors, and few guards. I could have stolen something. We saw such artifacts as the Narmer Palette, the Rosetta Stone, the mask and other treasures of Tutankhamen, and a host of royal mummies (Seti I, the Tuthmosis quartet, Ramses, Hatshepsut). It was really quite remarkable.
One of the shocking things about the museum were the westerners. Having researched the proper way to dress in Cairo (modestly), I looked in horror at women with their buttcheek-exposing short shorts, and cleavage. Some of these people were dressed as if they were going to the beach, and not as if they were in the middle of a conservative Muslim country. I shudder to think what would happen to them if they stepped outside of their tourbuses for a moment in Downtown Cairo.
In other news, this morning I was met with disappointment when I found out that an apartment that I was ready to rent was actually way more expensive than I previously thought. I still have nowhere to live (sad day). Tomorrow my traveling companion, Emily, and I should be finalizing a deal with a landlord on apartments that we have yet to look at. Hopefully we will find one for a decent price that is clean and relatively pretty. Egyptian aesthetic, as I have found out, is very different from American standards of beauty. Most of the apartments I looked at were garish with clunky ornate furniture, clashing colors (imagine an entire room in navy and goldenrod yellow), and some were even dirty. The search will continue tomorrow, and I hope we can close on something by Friday. Until then, I will be an unhappy camper.