Traveling

While I've been here, I've gotten to sight see quite a bit. I've been to Cairo several times, and am currently staying here. I, of course, went to the Pyramids. I got to go in one of them. I almost turned back because you had to crawl in the first part! It was a little too tight for comfort for me. I'm glad I stuck it out though - there's nothing like standing in the middle of one of the Great Pyramids! Actually, there wasn't a lot to see inside... We could only access one chamber in the one we went in, and it had been looted long ago... The Egyptian Museum was interesting as well. There are so many treasures there, important artifacts, etc. But, in it's typical Egyptian way, the museum appeared disorganized to us westerners... Oh well. I got to see the treasures from King Tut's tomb (that man was loved! He was basically buried in gold, inside of gold, inside of gold, with a gold mask on, in a gold room, which was next to another gold room full of all of his gold belongings for his afterlife!) I also got to see the mummies of Ramses and Ramses II among other royalty. They were so creepy! You can still see hair and nails on some of them! Other sites worth seeing in Cairo include many mosques (especially the old ones - and by old, I mean 1,000 years or more!), the Citadel, the City of the Dead, and the huge market Khan el Khalili.

As part of my tuition for my course, I got to go to Sharm El Sheikh at the Red Sea. The devastation to business since the bombing there is very apparently. The resort town was basically empty. Ironically, this is probably the safest time to travel there. We went through about half a dozen passport checks on the way there. Egyptians cannot go to Sharm or other Red Sea resorts without their ID card showing they live or work there. (Though there must be some travel permission, but I don't know how they get that.) Restrictions for other people of Middle Eastern decent are also very high. Unfortunately, there is a lot of racial profiling that seems to occur at these check points. As a westerner, my bag is barely searched, and my passport just gets a glance... My friends and I really enjoyed our time staying at a five star Marriott, and eating lots and lots of the free buffet breakfast! And of course, laying on the almost abandon beach, getting tan, going dancing at night... A few of us even made a mad dash up Mount Sinai on the last night we were there. (It's best to hike at night, since it's so hot during the day. We started our hike around three am! Saw the sunrise, and headed back down. Then we had to take a cab, bus and a minibus back to our hotel (about three hours away.) We arrived back exactly one minute before check out! (And then we found out we had an extra hour since our bus was late!) Anyway, I'm still sore from that hike and it's three days later!