Walk Like An...

It's been a whole entire week!!! And what a week! I'm going to do my best to give you the best possible readers digest version of our week in Egypt. The theme of this trip was ZERO downtime, so try to imagine that. Also, a secondary theme to keep in mind: terribly corny movie quotes. Anyhoo, enjoy...

Thursday morning we left bright and early, visiting several sites throughout southern Israel on the way, including the Negev wilderness, where Abraham separated from Hagar. We also visited a beautiful overlook of the Wilderness of Zin, which is also where Ben Gurion (the first prime minister of Israel) is buried. At the overlook, they had a short video about the formation of the canyon there. Remember what I said about movie quotes? "This valley took 45 billion years to form. If thats hard to comprehend, imagine a regular year, with all 12 months. Now imagine that one year, took 45 billion years." Oh yeah... they're that good. COMPLETELY put it into perspective for me. That night we slept at a Kibbutz, although it was much different than I'd imagined when listening to Nancy. We stayed in a full service hotel, played cards at night in the reception room, and noticed a fantastic looking olympic sized swimming pool! Now, a short explanation of exactly what a Kibbutz is: basically it's a little socialist commune, and they're scattered all over Israel. As we were playing cards that night, we received some bad news. You may have heard that a pretty powerful storm hit the Middle East a few days before we left, bringing as much rain to the area in a few days as is normally received in a year. So, we received word that some of the roads right within the Egyptian border had been washed out, and we might not be able to cross into the country. So, that night we all prayed for a miracle.

Friday, the miracle happened. The roads cleared up, the ridiculous back-log at the border cleared up, and we were able to cross the border almost without incident. I say almost, because someone took a picture from the bus of the no-man's land between Israel and Egypt, and so an agent boarded the bus and asked to see all of our cameras to see us delete those pictures. Right outside of the border is where we picked up our tour guide, Islam, who was AWESOME, as well as an armed escort! After a long drive across the Sinai peninsula and driving thru a tunnel underneath the Suez canal, we finally reached our hotel in Cairo. Remember our theme today? Zero downtime. We put our bags in our hotel room, got back on the bus and headed to... drumroll please... THE PYRAMIDS!!! Amazing! We watched a sound and light show that was pretty cool, and also quite humorous, although I'm pretty sure they didn't plan it that way. Favorite quotes include: "He was as handsome as a barbarian", "Now that you've beat me master, I've learned my lesson", "The world fears time, but time fears the pyramids", and "A room with a woman is room filled with evil things". But really, it was a good history lesson/story of how the pyramids were built.

Saturday morning we got up bright and early, packed up our stuff, and checked out of the hotel. Then we took a bus back to the pyramids for the more complete experience. Now, before I go any further I want you all to go back in time with me to the day I saw "The Mummy" for the first time. David was there, and might remember how I swore I would never go inside a pyramid. Well, Saturday I broke that oath!!! Also, anyone who knows how I feel about caves (claustrophobic to the max) will be SO proud of me. Why? Lemme tell you... (I'm gonna try and milk this for as much as possible and so make it sound ridiculously dramatic, which isn't too much of a stretch 'cuz it's the freaking pyramids!) So we started down a flight of stairs, and then got to the point where we were under the pyramid (we were under the middle sized one, Khafra). That's when we entered a tunnel about 4 feet high. As we got further in, the tunnel tightened a bit, with a few tunnels going off into the darkness of different directions. We finally emptied out into the main chamber, which was suprisingly not big... maybe 10 by 20 feet. It was empty except for the big stone box where the sarcophagus laid. Random fact: the acoustics inside pyramids are amazing! We sang as a group "High on a Mountain Top", then most people started filing out. However, a few us were addicted to the acoustics and kept singing. We were singing "All Creatures of Our God and King" when the next group (old people) walked in. To our surprise, they started singing! Guess what? They're LDS, from Orange County! ???!!! Small world, to be inside of an ancient Egyptian temple with all mormons! Once we left the pyramid, we were able to take lots of sweet pictures, including one of the Sphinx (which, btw, is a lot smaller than I imagined) kissing me on the cheek. When we got back on the bus, it was only 10 or 11, with the whole day ahead of us! We went to the papyrus factory, which was cool, went to Saqqara where the first kind-of pyramid was built (the step one), and also Memphis, where we went to a museum with a humongo statue of Ramses II. Then we drove to the Cairo airport for a quick flight to Luxor, which was my FAVORITE city in Egypt.

Sunday was another busy day. We went to the valley of the kings, where there are 62 tombs of Egyptian kings (which I found are not all called pharaoh's). Only 13 have been excavated, and we went inside 3. They are barren of the treasures that once were there, thanks to the STOOPID tomb robbers. Many of the hieroglyphics have been defaced by Crusaders and enemy kings wishing to erase part of history. But still, it was amazing to visit and see what I've only imagined before. We also visited the place where the scrolls containing the book of Abraham was found. Then we went back to the hotel (which just happened to be right on the Nile!!!) to catch a Felucca ride to the spot where we met for a camel safari!!! My camel's name was William Shakespeare, although the guide told me that when a girl is riding it's name is Cleopatra. It was fun, but mostly just relaxing, to ride alongside the Nile and see all of the green fields. We even passed some old houses that reminded me of southern plantation houses. When we were finished, we got back on the boats to head back to the hotel for sacrament meeting. However, there was no wind at all, so we had to wait for a motor boat to come tow us. Sacrament meeting was wonderful. We talked about keeping the commandments and the blessings that come from that. Then four of us guys sang "Our Prayer to Thee". The Spirit was way strong. That night we had free time and so took a taxi to the main market in the city. Yikes! And I thought Jerusalem had aggressive merchants! People were literally stepping in front of us to hassle us about their stuff, we had to completely avoid eye contact... and even shove a few people who wouldn't leave us alone. The girls got whistled at and cat-called every 20 to 30 seconds. I finally started pretending I was deaf. Still... it was way fun... part of the experience, I suppose!

Monday was a glorious day because it was a day without busses. We took a boat (a motor boat this time) from the hotel to the Karnak Temple, which is a huge temple plaza. Then we rode carriages across town to the Luxor Temple. Both were stunning, and it's amazing how many similarities there were between those and our modern temples today. The architectural highlight was the 65 ton red granite obelisk, all from one piece of stone. I would be blown away if someone did that today, let alone thousands of years ago! Then we had some free time, which we used to chillax. :) Then we loaded onto the bus (which I guess voids my opening statement... oh well) and headed to the train station where we boarded the night train back Cairo. They served us dinner, and for some reason I ate it! (it looked terrible) Thus began all my problems... pharaoh's revenge you might call it, or perhaps the cairo quickstep. In fact, my insides still haven't recovered, but we'll come back to that.

So we slept on the train and got to Cairo at around 5:30 in the morning on Tuesday. We headed to our hotel (which is technically across the Nile in Giza), put our stuff away, had a quick breakfast, and then headed to the Egyptian Museum, which was HUGE!!! The highlight was definitely the mummy room, filled with dozens of mummified pharaoh's. Honorable mentions include the mask of King Tut and the animal mummy room. From there we went to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch. Because of the aforementioned train incident I ate barely anything, but it was still way fun. They started blasting Queen's "We Will Rock You" and we all got up and started dancing. Then they played "YMCA" and some people got up on the bar and danced with the waiters while me and some other people did a conga line around the restaurant. SO FUN!!! We probably cemented their views of loud obnoxious American's, but oh well. ;)

Wednesday morning we checked out of the hotel and headed to the Mosque of Muhammad Ali for a tour (it's not a functioning mosque, so I was able to get some pictures to show y'all later). There our guide, Islam, talked for a few minutes about the Islamic faith, including the 5 pillars of their belief. It was very eye-opening. My perception of these people had been severely scarred by radicals within their own religion, as well as the American media. What I found instead are a people with a strong faith in God and a desire to serve Him by serving their fellow men. Afterwards, we boarded the bus for the long drive towards Mt. Sinai. So now we are all able to boast that we have driven thru the Sinai desert... without A/C. Fortunately (?!?) I had a fever (stoopid train!!!), so rather than being hot, I was chilly! Luckily Carrie had a baggie hoodie with her that she let me borrow, so that helped a bit. We got back to the hotel around 7, and I skipped dinner to go straight to sleep.

Thursday we woke up at 2:30am to prepare to hike Mt. Sinai. We ate breakfast (2 slices of cheese for me, which was the first food I was able to hold down in 24 hours). Then we boarded the bus and headed for the Mountain. We started our ascent at roughly 3:30, and at first I felt fine. Men kept on walking by offering camel rides up the mountain. The worse I felt, the more appealing they seemed, until I finally succumbed and rode a camel up the rest of the way. We made it just in time to watch the sunrise. It was gorgeous. Then we just sat there and sang hymns for 15-20 minutes. We descended just a bit to get out of the strong/freezing wind, and there had a testimony meeting. The Spirit was very present as together we bore testimony of God, of His Son Jesus Christ, and of the Gospel taught through them. That was more of a moving experience than any of the other holy sites. We had some personal reflection time atop that sacred mountain, and then we began our hike down. We took a different way down, which was pretty much all stairs (which are really just strategically placed bouldors). My guesstimate was about 2100 steps. We then boarded the bus, and started heading back to Jerusalem. We ate lunch just an hour before we left Egypt, at a place right on the Red Sea. It was beautiful... I'll show you the pictures and you'll be convinced it's Hawaii, rather than Egypt with the mountains of Saudi Arabia in the distance. Alas, back on the bus it was, and at around 11 last night we got back to Jerusalem... home sweet home.

To finish up, a short list of things I learned in Egypt:
-no matter how hungry you are, never eat questionable train food
-baby wipes can be your best friend
-Wilderness can be beautiful
-King Tut is only famous to us because he was unimportant and practically unknown to Egypt, and thus the tomb raiders
-Egyptians may pray in lanes, but they don't drive in them
-Nothing is free in Egypt. Not even the bathrooms
-The ancient Egyptians had a lot of gospel truths

Well... that's it. Thanks for bearing with me thru what I know was a long post, but I hope it was interesting as well.