MISS AMERICAN AND ARAB MAN...

Andrew and I have been in Egypt for officially one week and it has been crazy. We arrived in Cairo last Sunday after twenty-four hours of traveling to turn around and board a night train to Luxor. We spent a couple days in Luxor where we saw a few ancient temples, tombs and rode on a sailboat down the Nile. After Luxor we headed on another night train to Cairo where our first encounter with our hotel bellboy was him saying to me (Chana) "Hello Miss American." From that point on I became the "Miss American" (it was never Miss America but ALWAYS Miss American) of the Pyrimisa hotel in Cairo. Our first day in the city we went on a tour of Islamic Cairo and saw the progression of the Islamic mosques in Egypt as technology and culture changed. The way the tour worked was we started at one mosque then rode the bus a ways to another mosque and then we all got out and went on a death march as we walked through the slums of Cairo looking at many of the smaller less known working mosques. It was hot, dirty and we walked for miles... The mosques were amazing but the part that really hit Andrew and I was the poverty level. While in Cairo Andrew and I also went to the Pyramids at Giza, the Egyptian Museum, went to church at the Cairo branch and did some souvenir shopping. Yesterday we went to Sinai and hiked Mt. Sinai (or so the people claim it is Mt. Sinai). This again was another death march... hot, dirty (there was camel poop everywhere), and long (it took two and a half hours to hike up and an hour and a half to hike down), but the view and experience was amazing. Today we came to Nuweiba (a little town on the Gulf of Aqaba) and it is amazing. After a long week of traveling we finally got a break. We laid on the beach, swam in the Red Sea and played in the pool all day long. The adventures will continue tomorrow with a ferry to Aqaba and then a bus to Amman on Tuesday. We'll post again when we can but for now, here are some pictures to aid in the description of the adventures we have been having...

A peasant man sitting in a window of the Karnak Temples in Luxor

Andrew helping the native row our sail boat because there wasn't enough wind to get us down the Nile River

Sunset on the Nile

The second mosque of the day... it is a working mosque so the girls had to cover their hair with scarfs

At the Pyramids Andrew and I rode a CAMEL

Mt. Sinai... we hiked from way lower than where this picture was taken all the way to the top

 On top of Mt. Sinai