Egypt Travels Continued

I am sorry I havn't been faster at blogging about the rest of my Egypt trip, but they sure do keep us busy over here. Since Egypt, we have gone on a few day trips and went to Galilee which was way fun. I still need to get pictures of those trips though from other people, so I will try to finish up with Egypt and then catch up sometime...

After seeing all of the pyramids and everything we took an overnight train from Giza to Luxor which was way fun. I had never been in an overnight train before and it was quite the experience. This is a picture of my bed and my roommate Kayla and I with our gourmet dinner! Don't worry, that is actually me in the overrhead storage compartment area, our beds pulled out from our seats! We even had a little sink and stuff and although it was cramped, I could at least sleep on the train a lot easier than if we had been on a bus or a plane.

We got off the train around 5:30 am and got right going with our day. We went to the Valley of the Kings where a lot of tombs are. I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside them, but they were all really neat and quite spacious. Most of the tombs were raided except for King Tutankhamen's tomb, which is what made him so famous. His tomb was really awesome and later in museums I saw a lot of the stuff that they found in his tomb. I think that I might have liked seeing this stuff more than the pyramids, but they were both amazing. That afternoon we went on a faluka ride on the nile which was beautiful. A faluka is pretty much a giant gondola so I was with 15 other people and we floated down the Nile and had a lot of fun. This is me "drinking" the Nile. Our hotel had a beautiful pool so we went swimming and then went to the Luxor Museum. They had a lot of really neat things things there that were in amazing condition. They even had two mummies and you could see that one of them had curly hair!

The next day we rode around in horse drawn carriages to the Luxor and Karnak Temples. The Karnak Temple complex is the largest in the world and has 134 carved columns and amazing works of art (picture above). It was huge! The Luxor Temple was also amazing and had a ton of magnificent statues.
On our walk back to the hotel, I noticed a truck bed full of pitas. They were just sitting there in a dirty truck so I had to take this picture quick. Some guys saw us taking the picture and as we walked quickly away, I saw them taking the pitas out of the truck and I am pretty sure they went and sold them! This experience definitely helped validate the advice we were given to not eat food off of the street or even at restaurants they didn't take us to...
While I am talking about food I might as well briefly mention some of the advice they gave us while in Egypt. We were told not to drink the water or else it would make us sick, so we always had water bottles with us and used them to brush our teeth and everything. We weren't supposed to eat fresh fruit or vegetables and they pretty much said to eat things only when they were steaming hot. Everyone pretty much followed the guidelines, though a few people had watermelon one night because Brother Ludlow said it had a risk factor of 2 out of 10, but for some reason all of the watermelon eaters got sick...Anyway, I wasn't a huge fan of the food there (sorry Safwat) but I did really like these honey soaked cookies and cake that they had at a few meals! Oh, and everyone loved the meal at Hard Rock Cafe Cairo because they had a lot of chocolate for dessert (most things are more honey/sugary than chocolaty here).

That night we took an airplane back to Cairo and the next day we went to the Egyptian Museum where they had a ton of awesome stuff. I am not going to lie, the first hour we were there was probably my least favorite hour of the whole trip. The place was packed and not very many places understand the importance of air conditioning, so it was really really hot. I was just sitting there sweating while our tour guide was describing a lot of different things, and I thought I was going to have heat stroke or something until I chugged a liter of water and found one of the three air conditioned places in the entire museum. Anyway, regardless of the heat, the museum had a ton of cool things (get it?) including a lot of stuff from Tutankhaman's tomb and everything from insanely large earings to mummified animals-they had dogs and monkeys and some pretty neat stuff.

After the musuem we ate at the Hard Rock Cafe and then went to a big bazaar market type place which had a ton of stores. We kind of ran around and got lost but then slowed down to find some stuff to buy. It was funny because I wore a superman t-shirt and practically every single merchant we passed made a comment about it. I am not sure what I was thinking by wearing that shirt, but after about two minutes of being called superwoman I knew I needed to buy a new t-shirt or something. Luckily I had a chance to quickly turn it inside out while we were in a store-don't worry Mom, I had a shirt on underneath! Anyway, the market was fun and I love to haggle, but I didn't really see anything that I terribly liked so I just got a t-shirt. After dinner we went to a pyramid light show that was okay (I might have fallen asleep for some of it) but it was neat to see the pyramids at night.

The next day, Saturday we went and saw the Muhammad Ali Mosque which was really neat and then a few other churches and then we drove for awhile to Sinai. We got in around 8:00 pm and then had dinner and Sacrament Meeting at 10:00 pm. It was pretty neat because we had it in this random building that had cats running around throughout the meeting and had three different speakers which were all really good. We were planning on leaving to hike Mount Sinai at 1:15 am, so I was planning on just staying up, but then ended up getting probably 40 minutes of sleep. We got on the buses at 1:15 am somewhat resembling zombies or something and comparing amounts of sleep which ranged from none to 2 1/2 hours. Anyway, we got to climb Mount Sinai, which was amazing! We left so early so that we could get to the top to see the sunrise and I am so glad that we did! It was pretty cold up there, but after roasting everywhere in Egypt I loved it! While we were up there, Brother Draper talked about the 10 commandments and how we can apply them to our lives and we sang a few songs. It was a really neat experience and definitely one of my favorite parts of the trip.

I am glad that we hiked Sinai at the end of the trip, or else our sleep schedules would have been way off. After we hiked back down we packed up the bus and headed for the Israeli border where we spent forever at customs (and an alabaster pot I bought broke) but it was fine because we had time to see the Red Sea while we were waiting. My friend Lauren went wading and got pretty wet so she just decided to jump in! It was pretty funny, but I am glad she was on the other bus...We finally made it back to the Jerusalem Center at 9:00 pm and after racing to put my laundry in before everyone else, I ate dinner and then went to bed.

It was seriously an amazing trip and every day was incredibly fun. We got to see some really neat things and I am glad that we were all able to make it home healthy and safe. If you want more details about any of the things I saw-this is definitely the highly condensed version-feel free to ask me! Wasn't the sunrise at Mount Sinai beautiful?