12/6-12/23

Hello again!

Life in Egypt has been filled with sunshine and excitement. We have made a lot of coffee runs and had a lot of jam sessions in the Gap Year van.

Egypt Culture

Cairo looks more like America than I thought it would. Familiar chains are all over the place- Starbucks, Circle K, McDonald's, KFC, and Pizza Hut just to name a few. (Yes, we do get coffee everyday. The place we are staying at sometimes has instant coffee but not always. Do not worry Dad, I am maintaining my caffeine addiction.)

For me it was weird to see so many people wearing long sleeves in 70° weather but after a few weeks, I've put my long sleeves on too. Central Asia was snowing when we left so I welcomed the warm sunny days with a big smile.

Before coming to Egypt, my assumption was that everyone was Muslim. That is not the case! There are quite a few people who are Christian and we've even found an American church to attend here.

One day we visited a church called Cave Church which is a Christian church that is inside a cave (given the name). In the walls of the cave and outside the cave there are beautiful rock carvings depicting different parts of the Bible. They have verses carved in Arabic and English. My favorite one was inside the cave and it showed the woman outside Jesus's empty tomb.

Tourist time

Since we've been here, we've done so many tourist things.

We visited the Great Pyramids of Giza. They were beautiful. I loved hearing the history about them. Giza is pretty close to Cairo so sometimes we pass them when we are traveling and it is awesome. It is difficult for me to comprehend how long the Pyramids have been there and how casually I pass by them.

The Sphinx is right next to Pyramids so we saw that too! I think the Sphinx was not as big as I expected. They were doing some restoration work on it so there was a lot of scaffolding on the bottom.

After that we rode on some camels! My camel was the sassiest, always talking back to the camel owner. My camel tried to crash my foot between his side and Kathryn's camel's side. To make it even better, he even tried to kiss Kathryn. It was so funny. Riding camels doesn't feel like riding horses, it is much more scary. The camel standing up and getting down (so I could get on and off him) was the scariest part because I thought he was gonna launch me off. Other than those scary moments, I had a lot of fun.

We also visited an oasis one day. It was beautiful! We saw a waterfall and even went in a rowboat. Later that day we went sandboarding, like snowboarding but with sand. I did fall off and got sand everywhere. It's been over a week since we went to the desert and I'm still dumping sand out of my sneakers.

Next time I'll share more about the work we're doing here in Egypt! For now, enjoy some photos.