Mimi and Kari's Egyptian Adventure - Day 5

My very favorite place in all of Egypt is at the Red Sea. I love going there, particularly to my friend's house there, because it's the one place in Egypt that is truly quiet. I feel like when I am there, I can hear my thoughts and let myself be still more than I can at home in Cairo, and I am always thankful for the time I spend there. I have spent many hours outside, staring at the sea, praying for my family to come visit Egypt. I wanted to share this place with them.







I love to go there and search for shells and sea glass, and I wanted Mom to have an opportunity to find sea glass from the Red Sea. You can't imagine how precious this time was to me! We spent a few hours walking along the beach and enjoying the quiet.




















Luke and Jason had fun throwing rocks in the sea.
And we played with the camera taking pictures of our shadows.




Jason and Kari hung out in the yard reading - Kari has her hat on sideways with a gift card stuck under her hat to protect her ear from the sun, and Jason has on his dad's old Blue Blockers. A fashionable pair if I've ever see one!
There's a little playground at the sea that Luke enjoys. His Mimi enjoyed it too! I love that my mom is so playful and fun.



My friend has a croquet set that Luke remembered playing with last year. He asked her about it as soon as we walked through the front door! She already had it out ready for him.




This is the chef and the waiter from the restaurant playing with us!

We only stayed for the day, so we left at about 5:00 to head back to Cairo. We stopped at Johnny Carino's for dinner.




The restaurant had a dance area for the little kids. Jason took Luke over to dance. Be sure to watch the video below!

Mimi and Kari's Egyptian Adventure - Day 4

After my previous post about the pyramids, this one is mercifully short on pictures! On Wednesday, I went to work while Jason and Luke took Mom and Kari to the museum.

Here's what the museum looks like from afar. This picture shows something we see a lot in Cairo--the juxtaposition of something noteworthy or beautiful with something icky, like the collection of dumpsters in this picture. I'm thinking it's nice that the garbage is actually in the dumpsters and not in a big mountain...

The museum itself has really different architecture than most of the buildings in Cairo. The garden out in front of it has a fountain and lots of sculptures, too.

A lot of pictures taken in the museum look really dark on the blog when I look at them on my school computer - they look fine on my laptop, so I'm not sure whether it's the computer or something that happens when I publish them. I've tried to brighten them, but if you can't see them very well I think it will help to open them in another window (they get bigger when you do that) and you should be able to see better.

Luke apparently loved showing Mimi and Aunt Kari the hieroglyphics. (The Little Einsteins Egypt episode helped this fascination along, I think.)




And, no, you're not supposed to be allowed to take cameras into the museum, but somehow they did... and this is one of the coolest pictures I've seen! Kari took it.


It's neat because it shows how the death mask is suspended in its glass case at eye level. You can walk all the way around it and see it from all sides.

They got lunch at the museum cafe, did some souvenir shopping, and headed home around 3.

Just in time to play pirates for a while before I got home!


We ate dinner at a really nice little restaurant in Maadi called Cellar Door. Delicious steaks! Luke was so sleepy. He asked Mimi to scratch his back right after he finished his peanut butter sandwich.

And in no time, this is what we had:
Good thing I sat on the side of the table with the couch seating!

Mimi and Kari's Egyptian Adventure - Day 3

Day 3 (Tuesday) was PYRAMID DAY!! We got there early - maybe 8:30 or so (?) so we could be sure to get tickets to go inside the Great Pyramid. We had been there maybe 2 minutes when Luke tripped and fell and bumped his head on a big ol' rock.

It took about 15 minutes to get him from this point:

To this one:

It was definitely a situation that called for ice and a bandaid, and I had neither... Oh well.

Luke, Jason, Mom, and Kari decided to go inside the pyramid. I have already done that once, and also went inside the red pyramid last fall, so I didn't go.

They got about halfway to the entrance before Luke got super-whiney about his head. Jason brought him back down to me, and the three of them went in alone.

I was worried about the lack of moving air inside the pyramid and the claustrophobic feeling I had when we went in the first time, but Mom and Kari both made it in and out just fine and were glad they did it.

Luke and I kept ourselves amused by taking self-portraits.

We had a snack and Luke played in the sand with his front loader.

Here are Jason and Kari sitting outside the entrance to the pyramid after they'd climbed out. You can see Mom on the left taking their picture just before the guard shooed them away.

And I happened to be taking this picture of Luke playing in the sand right at the time the three of them came out of the pyramid. So you can see Luke in the foreground and Jason's white shirt halfway up.
Near the pyramid is a vizier's tomb. We went inside and saw some neat heiroglyphics.

I'd never been in that one before. It was pretty cool.

Then we walked over to the next pyramid.

Luke is a big Bugs Bunny fan right now - this is him doing his Bugs Bunny "I'm the winner" pose with his hands clasped in the air.

The Great Pyramid is just so massive you sort of have to just stand there and stare awhile.

One of Mom's Egypt goals was to ride a camel with Luke. Jason found this camel man and negotiated a fair price for a 10-minute camel ride.

Most camel rides are at least an hour, and we knew we didn't want that! We had hoped to get Kari on a camel, too, but the guy didn't have 2 camels handy. He did have a horse, though, so rather than wait for a camel, Kari hopped on the horse and rode a horse around the pyramids instead.

I used to think camels were noble-looking, with their serene, smiling faces and long graceful eyelashes. After living here, that misconception has gone out the window! I have learned that most camels are very opinionated, and Mom and Luke's camel was no exception. He was quite the talker!

If you open up the picture of the camel in another window, you'll be able to see the patterns shaved into his neck. The camel man explained that this is the camel's "name." I guess they all have different patterns.

While we waited to see if there would be another camel for Kari, Luke just walked right on up to the camel, within a foot of him! Thankfully the camel remained quiet at that point, or we might have needed a change of clothes for Luke! He has come a long way from his day at the Gainesville Zoo when he adamantly said, "NO CAMELS!" after the camel there growled at him. And a long way from last fall, when he cried when our driver put him on a camel!

We had a little trouble convincing the camel man to stop after a few minutes and let them off the animals. They couldn't understand why we'd only want to go such a short way and tried to convinces us to go farther for a really cool picture. Leery of being taken too far away from where we started and wary of being ripped off for more money than we agreed on, we insisted that they let everyone off.

After they all got down, the camel man decided Luke should dress up like an Arab and sit back down on the camel. At first, Luke liked the idea.

When he got up on the camel all by himself, I think he got a little scared. He wanted down right after this picture.

The other camel man kissed the camel. Now, I used to kiss my cat, but THIS is just GROSS.

We started down the hill toward the sphinx and decided to stop in the tomb of the pharoah's doctor. First, we let Mom the Yoga Girl take a picture doing her pyramid pose in front of the pyramids.

More cool hieroglyphics inside the tomb:

And, this is the tomb where you can crawl down a little passageway to the room with the sarcophagus.

Then, on to the Sphinx!

I love how it looks like the sphinx is part of the family in this picture. Not intentional, and so funny!

Luke doing his Sphinx pose:


It's hard to believe that we spent nearly 5 hours at the pyramids and sphinx, but we did. We were EXHAUSTED by the time we were through there. We walked over to Barry's restaurant and had lunch. This was the only real Middle Eastern/Egyptian food we ate while Mom and Kari were here. I don't love the food at Barry's (mostly because I don't like most Egyptian food), but you can't beat the view, and we had a very sweet, friendly waitress from Romania.

After lunch, we were supposed to go to the museum, but we were all so wiped out that we opted for plan B - to just go home and crash! As we drove away from the pyramids, Mom snapped this cool picture of a camel caravan ready to depart.