E McNeill enjoyed his trip to see the pyramids and Great Sphinx today – immensely.
“Everything was impressive,” said the American who is competing in the Game Development finals. “It's incredible to think that they've literally been around for several millennia. We had to wade through the tourist traps, but that's just a different type of fun. I felt like a stereotypical American tourist with my desert hat and my big camera. I joked to some friends that I was really just there for the Facebook pictures.”
McNeill finds out tomorrow if he’s finished first, second or third.
The Imagine Cup blog team is following McNeill as he traverses through all things Imagine Cup. His fun day today followed one last presentation on Sunday, his last chance to woo the judges.
“The actual presentation was fairly easy,” he said. “I had only prepared a 30-minute version before the competition, so I had to cut it down to 20 last night for the new format. I pretty much just cut out anything that wasn't critical to the explanation, so it was still familiar territory for me.”
When it was done, he was happy to start enjoying Egypt a little more.
That night (Sunday for those of you having a hard time keeping track) he skipped the scheduled dinner to go do a felucca cruise on the Nile River. “It was cool to see the city at sundown from the river, and I got to hang out with all my new friends from the US team,” McNeill said.
They then went to Khan el-Khalili where they stopped at a restaurant and had a nice Egyptian meal of veal and lamb along with lentil soup, flatbread of some sort, and other stuff that I can't remember.
Then they went into a bazaar. “I'm not very good at saying no, so I was completely out of my element in all the aggressive salesmanship,” he said. “Those guys are good at what they do. Still, I managed not to spend too much money. I bought, among other things, a cane, so that I could look upper-class when I wore a suit and fedora back home. Unfortunately, it doesn't fit in my suitcase, so I might have to carry it all the way back home and feel silly all the while.”
-Lukas Velush
