January 19

Greetings!

I haven't written for a week because I have been in... dun dun dun... Egypt!

Every day was crammed full of sites. We saw the pyramids, and even went inside one. We got into the second biggest pyramid by crawling through this tiny tunnel that sloped up and down and finally opened up into a big burial chamber. It was warm and stuffy inside, and I'm really glad I came in Winter. We kept saying to each other, "I'm taking a drink from my water bottle in a pyramid." "I'm putting my hair in a ponytail in a pyramid." Someone suggested we sing, and so we sang "High on the Mountaintop" since pyramids were designed to be like mountains, a bridge between earth and heaven. Our voices echoed off the walls, which made the harmony resonate, and we sounded really good.

We also saw the Sphinx and so many statues and temples that they all run together in my head. There were hieroglyphs everwhere, and in the Valley of the Kings a lot of them still had the original, three-thousand-year-old paint, all blue and yellow and red. My favorite temple was Karnak temple. It has a colonnade of massive pillars. Walking in felt like walking into a California redwood forest. I was kinda really sick that day, but I'm glad I was well enough to appreciate Karnak. For the next temple I was utterly out of it, and our medical missionary couple took me back to the hotel early in one of the horse-drawn cabs that are everywhere in Luxor.

The entire time we stayed in really nice hotels. Our hotel in Luxor was right on the Nile, so we could go out and sit on the rocks along the shore. Even at the nice hotels the food was pretty repetitive, though. We were told not to drink tap water or eat fresh fruit and vegetables for fear of Ramses' Revenge (I got sick anyway). For every meal we had rice and bread, bland pasta, greasy meat and boring desert. American desert kicks Middle Eastern desert's trash. All they served was dry cakes and sticky pastries and flan. I could have killed for a brownie.

They also seem to have arranged for us to take as many forms of transportation as possible. Within Cairo we rode in a tour bus. We took a plane from Cairo to Luxor. One day in Luxor we took a felucca--a sailboat--down the river to a place where we rode camels around the town. The next day we took a water taxi up to Karnak Temple--someone played music and we danced and the guy at the rudder rocked the boat for us. And then there were horse-drawn carriages throughout Luxor. That night we took an overnight train up to Cairo. The train was pretty sketch: generally dingy, and we were told to put our towels over the pillows because they might have fleas. I still thought it was really cool to sleep in a tiny train cabin with pull down bunk beds. I loved the way lights moved across the cabin as we zoomed past.

By law, tour groups in Egypt have to have a security guard and an Egyptian tour guide. Our tour guide was really intensely knowledgeable, and he laughed at his own cheesy jokes, which was endearing. I'm really glad the people we toured with were cool, or I might have come out of this experience kinda racist against Egyptians. The only other Egyptians we met were souvenir hawkers. They were really, really pushy and annoying... and kinda touchy, too. Yeah, that was gross. There were all these Bedouins hanging around the pyramids who would shove headdresses onto your heads and keep saying "Picture, picture." Basically they pushed you into taking a picture with them and then charged you a ridiculous amount for them. One girl they even forcibly picked up and put on a donkey. Also, every grody restroom we stopped at charged us an Egyptian pound each--about a fifth of a dollar. And every restroom had a little girl or a woman in a headscarf inside, eager to shove some toilet paper into your hands or turn on the water in the sink for you and then charge for it.

It was a beautiful time. The last night we slept at a somewhat sketch hotel near the base of Mt. Sinai. We were woken up at 2:30 that morning to go on our hike. The hike was grueling. I spent the entire time looking down at my feet trying not to stumble on the rocks, except every now and then I would stop to rest and then I could look up. There were so many stars, and they were so bright. Near the top the trail give ways to stairs--seven hundred steps carved my monks as penance. It reminded me of the part in the Lord of the Rings where Frodo and Sam find the stairs into Mordor. The little group of girls I hiked with got to the top just in time for the sunset. It was biting cold, far below freezing with a cutting wind. We all huddled together on a slope of rock above a ledge. On the other side the mountain fell away to clouds and valleys and smaller mountains. The sunset was burnt orange and the sun when it came up over the far mountain ridge seemed really close and really golden.

Egypt!

-Stella