Another Day in Cairo

So I'm posting from my iPhone because the internet connection in my room is slow and I'm trying to upload pics on the lobby computer (which will take an hour), and when I try to blog, everything's in Arabic.

We started the day with a trip to the Egyptian museum. All Egyptian tours are required to have an armed guard. Ours sat beside me. His name was Eid.

We started the day discussing the infancy narrative in gospels of Matthew and Luke. Through them, we began to look at Egypt as a place of liberation, not oppression. Basically, we just took a look at the story from an Egyptian point of view.

We went on to the Egyptian museum, with our very knowledgeable guide, Walid.

Sorry, museums aren't my thing -- they're ok, but not when there are THOUSANDS of people waiting to get in, there are tour guides in a dozen different languages, the floors are hard, and there are people constantly pushing up against you. I think Cairo is one of the most densely populated cities in the world; something like 82 million Egyptians, with 20+ million living in Cairo? Too many folk for me.

So in the Egyptian museum, we looked at the various gods and the possible influence of Israelite or Canaanite culture on them. We saw evidence of when Abraham could have been in Egypt. Ahkenatun was the only king who lived in a stone palace (the others had focused not on their surroundings in this world, but in the world to come. Ahkenatun also normalized the concept of one God instead of many; he is known as he father of one God and one people: has multi ethnic characteristics. Had Marfan's syndrome.

In the afternoon, we visited the Pyramids and the Sphinx. AWESOME!! The link to my photos is below. One of our group got lost so we spent half the afternoon looking for her and didn't get to go to the bazaar. When we got back to the hotel, she was there. She had taken a cab back. We met tonite before dinner, which was the salad, some fried fish, some green soup, some pureed something, either butternut squash or sweet potatoes, and grilled veggies and a fruit salad. Tomorrow we're gonna brown bag our lunches as we head down to Saqqua amd the Step Pyramids.

I have to do devotion tomorrow morning. That should be interesting. Way more to write, but it's tough from the iphone. will edit this to include a link to the photos.

Tired, but lovin it!!

Here's the link to today's photos:

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]