Cairo

I think I need to be less detailed becuase I'm running out of time (and battery power)! I have a lot of reading to do tonight and I want to watch President Hinckley's funeral. We're having it rebroadcast for an FHE activity. That's actually what happened next. Day 2 January 28th while we were eating breakfast someone had found and about president Hinckley's death through a text message I think. But Brother H told the table I was sitting at. Its hard to believe its true when you don't see it on the news and can't get on the internet and stuff like that. Anyway day two was all about crossing the border into Egypt which went very smoothly for our group. I got a cool Taba Border stamp in my passport and we got on an Egyptian bus and drove approximately 6 hours to Cairo. Cairo is a crazy place. Very populated. The first thing I noticed about the buildings is that none of the them are finished they have barbed stuff sticking out of the top of them and some of the top floor don't have ceilings. They told us this is becuase there isn't as much tax on a building if it isn't finished. Crazy. Also, the driving and traffic in Cairo is insane. There are donkey drawn carts on the side of the road with cars crazily honking and agressively squeezing wherever they can. As our tour guide told us, the white lines on the road are only for decoration. We arrived at our hotel and had dinner. We were all very careful to use hand sanitizer and not choose any of the food that was not cooked (although I did see part of our group eating the strawberries on the tops of their deserts, uh oh). Day 3 we woke up early and it was off to see the Pyramids of Giza! We went inside the second biggest pyramid. This was kind of intense. I was really chilly and windy outside but when we climbed into the pyramid shaft it was really really humid and the air was really suffocating and the narrow passages were packed with tourists. We kept climbing and climbing I was waiting for the shaft to open into a big room where we could breath easy. There was one sections of the shaft that was really dark and I was trying to see where to put my feet and hoping I wouldn't run into anyone. Finally it opened up into a bigger room that was even more humid and full of tourists it was wierd to breath. We saw the inside chamber with a hole for the sarcophogus and a big grafitti stamped on the wall with the name of the man who discovered this tomb back in the 1800s I think. It was really dark and boring looking but it was amazing to thing that the Egyptians had engineered this thing with shafts and everything and to think how long it has been standing on the earth. We tend to think things were very different way back in the past or very primitive. The same tangible stuff from way then is still here even though those people are gone. Even though the pyramids are so old they don't seem that alien again it felt to me almost like disneyland like it was all fake. We probably just don't realize how real the past is. And how it really wasn't that long ago and how short our lives really are. Following the pyramids we went on a camel ride. It was intense, those Egyptians trying to make a buck are so aggressive and us tourists are obsessed with getting a good picture its kind of funny what we are willing to do for a memory and what they are willing to do for a dollar. Next we went and saw the Sphinx mostly it was take a picture and get attacked by cute little kids selling junky stuff. It was at the sphinx that a kid from our group lost his camera bag and we all had to wait about 30 minutes while he tried to figure out their lost and found system and get it back. (He found out later he probably should have just paid them ten bucks and they would have given it to him). Next thing I remember from that day was they took us to the the Papyrus factory. (I wondered how much our tour guide got for that one). Papyrus are really beautiful. I really like egyptian art in general becuase its alot like modern art. It has really clean lines and looks almost machine tooled. The piece I picked out to buy was from king tuts tomb. It's an engagment scene of him and his wife, very beautiful I like the design. They also had the 'mormon' facimile's from the Pearl of Great Price that a bunch of people got. They didn't look as aesthetic to me though so I didn't get it. At about 7:00 pm we took our simplified luggage (just a backpack for each of us) and got on a small plane for Luxor egypt. Luxor is south of Cairo (only a 50 minute flight) but actually 'up' the Nile (the nile runs south to north). It was in the terminal waiting for our flight that I felt myself getting sick. Luckily not "Ramsie's revenge" food poisoning that is so famous of a trip to Egypt but the cold/flu virus bug thing that has been going around our group.... to be continued