Egypt Day 6 (9-22-09)

Hello all! I am on a roll this week on posts, yes?

Okay, there aren't a lot of pictures from this day. The stuff that I could take pictures of wasn't that amazing, and not memorable, and then the things that I wanted to, I couldn't....so sorry everyone! I hope you still like it!

I thought that I should post another Egypt, seeming that I want to be all done with it so you can all enjoy it during the time that I'm in Jordan. I guess you guys have a lot of homework if you want to keep up, so I fully understand if you can't keep up, just look through the pictures or something :).

Okay so on Egypt Day 6 we woke up on the train from Luxor to Cairo. It was a slightly tedious start, because I woke up from the train movement as soon as I was remotely rested, and lay in bed wondering what time we were supposed to arrive. I also had almost missed my stop in Paris when I took an overnight trip from Germany, so I was paranoid that we'd miss our stop in Cairo and not be dressed yet and what not. Anyway, so I lay there looking out the window and freaking out at every stop, and finally our butler knocked on the door and brought us breakfast. Then shortly after he came and told us we had 15 minutes, which was nice. I didn't know he was going to do that, so there you go! First class all the way. :)

After we got off the train, we took a bus to the hotel we had previously stayed in, in Cairo. We couldn't check into our rooms yet, so all 82 of us had to use the two rooms they had kept to store luggage in to change (which involved finding our bags and uncovering them enough to get stuff out and then change where nobody was (impossible...) and then put stuff back in your bag), freshen up, and then get back on the bus after breakfast.

So something tricky....I found a place in the spa where there were two showers in the ladies locker room, and I brought my stuff there and showered :). Not many people got to shower, and those who did held up the bathrooms in the rooms for a while, which was not very nice and I didn't want to do. Anyway, this way I got to shower! I did break my watch in the process though, cause I had to throw my watch over the shower door so it wouldn't get wet in the shower...because of that the back broke off, and then the battery wouldn't stay in very well...

Anyway, now off to our day! This day we went to a Coptic Church in Egypt. That's code for Christian Church in Egypt, by the way. This church was the oldest one in Egypt, and also where President Brown worked for a number of years, categorizing different ancient texts they had there. It was pretty interesting. They just taught us about the history, and everything like that.

After the coptic church, we went to another church that had some ancient torture devices that used to be used on Christians...they were pretty nasty. All of them were metal and had spikes and stuff....it was gruesome. After that church we went to a synagogue in the area. That was also very cool, but at that point it was just kind of another church. Well, I guess this synagogue was interesting because it had been the site of a discovery of ancient scrolls that...proved something, or had a record of something.... Oh it was that it had scrolls that nobody knew what they were, until the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered, and then they realized that they were fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls text. So there you go. History, and stuff. :)
This is the entry to one of the Coptic Churches..

This is the foundation of the Coptic Church...you can't really see but it's set on a big extra story, which was the orginal and what not.
Sorry...but these are literally the only two pictues I have from this day. I hadn't realized that before...Sorry all!

After that we went to one of my favorite places on the trip: The Cairo Museum! Oh my word, the number of "(gasp) no way!" moments that I had in that building were numerous. First we went and saw some random sarcophaguses, and statues that I'd studied in Art History that you wouldn't really recognize....and we couldn't take cameras, but to name some, there were: The Seated Scribe (which has glass eyes that have lasted this long, and also is still well painted. It demonstrates that only upper-class people could afford to be scribes, because of the expense of education), a Sphinx made with Hatshepsut's image, that her name was erased from by her son...; A statue of the Pharoah with the god Ra in the form of an eagle protecting him from behind his neck, and some others as well. One of the coolest things was King Tut's treasures! I saw King Tut's famous sarcophagus and headdress, as well as all the other treasures. They filled one whole wing of the museum. To think that he wasn't even that great of king! He only ruled for 9 or 10 years, and probably was a puppet king, and his treasures were so great! And solid gold even! I saw the coffin boxes that covered the sarcophagus. There were three that they made and then assembled inside the tomb, because they were too big to make it in the chamber. They were all plated with gold, and they were all increasingly bigger than the last. They were insane!

Another interesting thing was his Canoptic jars. These provide a lot of evidence that Tut was murdered instead of dying naturally. The High Priest was involved in the embalming process, and usually they would take great care to embalm the body and the intestines and etc, very well, to preserve them for the afterlife. Well, King Tut's body wasn't as well preserved as other mummies, and to top it all of, there is visible blood remains splashed on the sides and tops of his canoptic jars, the jars where his intestines were kept. This shows that the High Priest didn't really care about the embalming process for Tut, and that instead of carefully draining, cleaning and drying the organs, then placing them in the jars, he simply removed them from the body and threw them into the jars, blood and all. Guys, I saw 3000 year-old blood! It was cool!

After that I went into a special room that you had to pay extra to go see, and saw some more mummies! "The Mummy Room" was really cool. I almost didn't pay to go in and see it, and then I thought about what my Dad would say. "It's only money" :) and I thought, "Am I not in Egypt, on the other side of the world? Am I not going to the Cairo Museum? Why am I not going to pay $12 to go see these mummies that I've studied about in my classes, that I'm studying now, and that I've read about in the Bible?" And so I paid the money. I hope you're proud of me Dad :). I'm really glad that I did! I got to see the mummies of Hatshepsut, who I have studied about, and we went to her Mortuary Temple; and Ramses II, who I have studied about, who is probably the Pharoah of the Exodus, and also whose statues and other places we visited all over Egypt; and tons of others! There were 20 of them, and it was just really interesting to see some really, really well preserved mummies. All of them still had hair, and teeth, and even ear lobes! It was really sweet. I'm no so sure Jen would've liked it... :)

We didn't get a ton of time for the museum, which was sad, cause we were on a tight schedule. But that's okay. I don't have many pictures from that day either, because the museum we couldn't take pictures of, the churches were cool but not really picture-cool, I guess, and then after the museum we went to a market place, were I didn't have my camera out for fear of getting pickpocketed while my attention was on something else.

But yeah, that's where we went next! To a marketplace area that is the second largest complex of flea markets in the world. The largest is in Istanbul. It was really cool. They said it'd be easy to get lost in, though, so we were kept to a certain area, and we followed it. The streets all wound around and zig-zagged. It was nice to go in and look for stuff. I didn't buy much from here, cause by that time we were all a little tired of being heckled and having people try to convince us to look at their stuff. Everyone said, and I agree, that we got a little more terse with the shop keepers on this day. They wouldn't bargain much with us, either. I think they were used to American tourists who wouldn't walk away if they wouldn't go down in their prices. Boy, we showed them. I just kept walking away, and therefore ended up buying less stuff than I could've. But I did get a few key Egyptian souveniers :).

After that, we went back to the hotel and had dinner.

Actually, before I had dinner, I went with our tour guide, Amanda, and a guy named Richie (so we'd have a guy with us) and he took us to this famous cotton store. It was a pretty far drive too, and Islam, our guide, took us as a favor. (We asked President Brown if it was okay before we went, too.) He didn't even want to let us pay him, but Richie ended up giving him some money to thank him. It was a really neat experience, though. We got to see Cairo in a totally different light. And the best part was that even though people could see in the windows, they wouldn't look in the windows of the car, cause they weren't thinking that an American blond would be there. In the bus they always look up and stare, so its harder to look out the window. But in the car I really got to look and observe the people and the culture. It was also sweet cause it was the end of Ramadan, so everyone was out celebrating downtown. There were boats out on the Nile with twinkle lights all over them! It was really pretty, I liked it a lot. Anyway, we got some cotton products....ahem.... and then we went back to the hotel, had dinner, and went to sleep!

This was also the night that I got on the internet and talked to a bunch of you guys on g chat! It was fun, right? :)

So, there you go! There is day 6 of Egypt! I hope you don't get sick of reading these!