Into Egypt

We have arrived in Egypt and we're so excited to be here! What a shock though, travelling out of Mauritania and arriving in Cairo. We have gone from a city with roads of sand and only a handful of restaurants to a city bustling with people, cars, highways and restaurants on every corner. American food is quite readily available here. There are clothing, and shoe shops lining the streets. All in all our first impressions are that we are back in "civilization" and this is a HUGE city! Cairo has between 17 and 20 million people. It's the biggest in Africa.

Our trip here was uneventful (for once), just very long. We fly out of Mauritania at 3:30am and arrived in Morocco at 6:30 for our 9 hr stop over. With not much food, and no places to sleep, we had quite the boring time (at least I did, Brian actually had a book). We arrived in Cairo at 11:30 last night and went to bed right away.

Today we spent some time just experiencing the "sights and sounds" of Egypt and oriented ourselves to our small area of the city. This morning we went to the Egyptian Museum. It was really cool. It was incredible to see the mummy coffins, the incredible artwork and millions of old Egyptian artifacts from the tombs of kings and queens. Not one artifact lacks intricate detail. Even arrows are carved or painted with little details. Unfortunately we were not able to bring a camera into the museum. We saw all of the articles from King Tut's tomb. The amount of gold used was amazing. You would not be able to put a value to it. One of the things that I was most interested in were the animal mummies. Egyptians mumified animals for a few reasons.
1 - as food for the afterlife
2 - as offerings to the gods
3 - because they were family pets.
4 - and because they were considered sacred

We saw huge crocodiles that they kept as pets, almost in perfect condition, as well as a many babboons. They were considered to be sacred and to have created the sun god Ra.

Words really can't describe all the things we saw today.

We also were able to try some Egyptian food today. Kushari seems to be a very popular dish here. It was really good. It's a mix of noodles, lentils, onions and a spicy sauce. Here's Brian enjoying his dish. Both of our dishes, and our pop cost less than $3. And I was stuffed! Everything here is very cheap. Our hotel is only $5 and we're in a cool rooftop garden setting.

We also walked down to the Nile River. It feels so wierd to see all of these things. They all seem so normal here, yet the history behind it all makes it fascinating. We were walking over the Nile and thinking that it was once all blood.

Tomorrow we plan to head over to the pyramids and see the sphynx. What a great place to be! For now the plan is to track down some cheap Italian food.

(we tried to put on more pics, including one of the nile, but we are still on African internet and we ran into trouble!)