The Red Sea

I have to begin by saying that one of the things I love about being here in Egypt is the opportunity to travel. I look back over this blog and over our scrapbooks and marvel at the places we've been in the last ten months. We've seen the Pyramids and the Sphinx, churches where Jesus and his family may have stayed while escaping Herod, the site of the Lighthouse at Alexandria, the temples in Luxor, the Mediterranean Sea from both Egypt and Greece, the Parthenon, and now the Red Sea. I feel so small...and next to those things, so young! :) It makes me think of the verse James 4:14, which says "Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."

We have a friend who has access to two condos on the Red Sea about two hours from Cairo. They're right on the beach, and you can stand on the edge of the sea and look across to the Sinai. It's not that far across the sea--but it is a lot of water to have to part and walk through! I hope God's got home video of all the amazing Old Testament stories so we can watch what it actually looked like once we get to Heaven. I have a hard time imagining sometimes...

Anyway, the Red Sea is beautiful. It isn't wavy like the ocean, but it is a beautiful color. I've been helping my friend decorate these condos, which has been a lot of fun and has really helped the last month go by pretty fast. Each time I've been out there with her, the weather has been great. The condo has REAL grass in back of it, and Luke and I took bubbles out there one time and blew bubbles and rolled around in the clean grass. Our family may get to have one weekend out there at the condos before Luke and I leave for Texas at the end of the month.

This past weekend we went to another place on the Red Sea called Hurghada. We went really cheaply-rented a car for about $25 a day and had a super-cheap hotel room for $7 a night. The car was great and driving was not as scary as I'd anticipated. We went through several checkpoints on the way where they looked at our registration and drivers' license, but waved us on through with no trouble. The roads were good and marked in both English and Arabic.

Hurghada itself was not as pretty or as touristy as I had anticipated. There were tourist shops everywhere and restaurants lined the main street, but the city itself was a little dumpy and not clean. Really, I guess all of Egypt is dirt, so I should quit expecting anything to be clean. However, having grown up with "Give a hoot, don't pollute" I have a real problem with people throwing trash all over the ground and the shortage of trash cans along the streets with heavy pedestrian traffic. It is perfectly acceptable to people here to just toss litter everywhere. Sort of makes it hard to teach your three year old to put trash where it goes!

Anyway, our hotel itself was also dirty. I was sure they hadn't swept the floors in a year; they were that dirty. We brought our own sheets and towels just in case, and used them instead of the sheets that were on the beds already. Lucky I brought towels--the hotel did not supply them. It was more a hostel than a hotel. However, we did pay $7 a night, and it was better than camping, so I'm not really complaining. Also, there were no bugs.

There was a really nice resort near our hotel that allowed us to pay $8 each a day to use their pool, playground, and beach, so we did that on two of the days in Hurghada. The pictures are all from there. Luke had fun playing in the sand, jumping in the pool, and playing on the playground. The playground was awesome! Everything was BIG--there was an enormous teeter-totter swing that I could ride on with Luke and not fear breaking, and the seats on the swings were so deep that I could sit on the swing, put Luke in front of me, and swing together comfortably. They had such neat toys. We really had a good time there.

We also got these awesome beach towels for souvenirs. I'm lovin' it.