Egyptian Museum and into Sinai

November 5 – Egyptian Museum and into Sinai

Since I don’t have a whole lot to say about today, I’ll start with last night.  I don’t post regularly because I gave up on the Zosser Hotel and their internet scam.  They say they’ll sell you time to use the internet, but if you were to buy it, I imagine the time would start at the moment of purchase and you’d later discover the internet “isn’t working.” I say this because I read it in a review of the hotel, and it matches my experience there.

 You say you want the internet (which is $10.00 US per HOUR), and they tell you you have to buy a card.  I asked them how I would activate the card, since I didn’t plan to use it at that moment.  This seemed to confuse them a little, after which time they told me the internet “wasn’t working,” but that I could use it in the office manager’s office.  The first night he  let me use it for free; the second night they wanted me to pay so I didn’t use it, and the third night they offered to let me use it for free and I paid them the hour’s fee (any problems you may have attempting to use their computers, which are roughly of the same quality as one I’d give away in the States, are, of course, charged to your time).

Afterwards, my leg was hurting and I really wanted to try to get something to help me sleep so I wouldn’t be up writing at 1 am when I need to get up at 6.  So I asked the guy at the desk where there was a pharmacy within walking distance.  He told me he would call someone.  He got the guy on the phone, and I told him what ailed me.  I have the Voltaren ointment; he told me I should try it in the tablets AND ointment.  I asked if he had any Ambien, and and he said he had something for sleep.  It was, he said, like Xanax, just to help me drift to sleep.  After getting his assurance that it wouldn’t kill me, I asked for the price, which he said was 20LE.  AND THEN HE ASKED ME FOR MY ROOM NUMBER AND SAID HE WOULD BRING IT TO ME!!!!  Sure enough, in about 20-30 minutes, the phone rang, I went downstairs, and got my meds.  Instead of 20LE, of course, it was 32LE – a little over $5.00.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have 32LE, and he wouldn’t take dollars.  The front desk claimed not to have any money to change for me, SO THE FRONT DESK PAID THE TAB. Then they added it to my bill, with no surcharges or anything.  I asked him about a tip.  He didn’t, he said, tip the guy because he didn’t have enough change.

So I went to bed.  I took two of the Voltaren and one of the Xanax.  I think I went to sleep fairly quickly. What I know is that this morning when my alarm rang at 5:45, I fell back asleep before the 6:30 wakeup call.  Usually I wake up about 3, toss and turn for a while, then wake up about 5:30, wait for the alarm to go off, then piddle until the 6:30 wakeup call.  Today, I slept!

We went to the Egyptian Museum.  Walid told us every detail about every dynasty.  I guess if I’m really interested, I’ll look it up.  What interests me most is the archaeological evidence placing some sort of Hebraic or Canaanite people in Egypt.  It’s interesting that some of the historical evidence can be traced back to Abraham, and to Jacob, including finding their final resting places.  Somehow, it doesn’t much matter to me if the timeline is off from what the Jewish oral narratives or our western-constructed narratives have determined.  It just doesn’t matter to me.  I understand that in the telling and telling and re-telling of a story, there will be biases, so that we arrive at a state where Jewish people think they’re God’s Chosen people because of God’s promise to Abraham, where Muslims consider Jewish people to be haughty cousins who’ve co-opted the promise made to their mutual ancestor Abraham, and where Christians feel fully grafted on to the tree of Abraham. I think those are personal (as in people-based) issues and do not affect nor impact the truth of the Holy Scriptures.  The fact that, despite Peter’s negation thereof, there does appear to be archaeological evidence supporting the Biblical narrative, if not the precise (re)construction of the Biblical timeline – well, that’s nothing less than confirmation of the truth of God’s presence as revealed in God’s loveletter to us, God’s Holy Scriptures.

Perhaps because he lives in Jerusalem for so much time each year, my friend Peter sometimes appears to have a distaste for all things Jewish.  I sincerely doubt that’s the issue.  I believe that his passion to disprove commonly accepted thoughts about Jewish genesis presents a sort of unbalanced picture. Or maybe it’s just the fact that he lives in an apartheid state, is aware of it, and is frustrated by it.  As anyone whose read my blog on a regular knows, I have no love for the modern-day nation of Israel.  It’s a bully who uses lies and coercion to capitalize upon and redirect the world’s sympathy towards atrocities committed against Jewish people – it uses lies and coercion to commit similar atrocities  against people who are not Jewish.  That’s wrong, and indignation against those actions is justified, as is indignation against Israel’s thumbing its nose at the rest of the world and continuing to occupy territories that do not properly belong to it.  Israel does a lot of vile stuff.  That doesn’t negate the history of the Jewish people. 

And yes, Israel is using its right to define who is Jewish in order to populate a land it’s co-opting and fill it with people of European descent, all in the guise of being “Jewish,” when they’re so markedly different from the other Semitic people in the region.  It’s wrong, it’s ironic, and it needs to be spoken upon, but that doesn’t mean we need to re-write history to invalidate everything referring to Jewish people.  It means we need to examine what’s in front of us, and acknowledge the biases we bring to the table, so we can be aware of them when we’re examining new evidence.

So.  What was really cool about the Egyptian museum was the fact that I took about 20 pictures inside.  You should just never take my camera when I’m being a tourist and tell me I can’t take pictures.  I’m like a cop.  I always have a spare squirreled away somewhere.  I got some pictures of the gold crypts King Tutankhamen was in, and I got some pics of the Fayyoum funeral masks (which portrays the great diversity of hair texture and skin color among first century people from the middle east).

Half the group went to see the mummies in the Egyptian museum.  I’d had my fill of dead people’s remains, preferring instead to take the short walk over to Tahrir Square.  Again with the vendors.  Guys actually stopped cabs in the street to try to get fares.  Of course, it is the beginning of the Eid, and Cairo was effectively empty.  That was probably the most notable thing of the day.  We took pics of Tahrir Square, came back, and were on our way.

As we headed to Sinai, we went through the tunnel under the Suez canal.  When we cross from Cairo into Sinai, we move from Africa into Western Asia.  We went in through  the Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel, and made our way down the red sea.  We were going to stop at the Springs of Moses, but instead we went to a deserted little spot along the shore of the Red Sea.  It was just north of Abu Zenima.  We could put our toes in the water, we saw some caves, and we saw the Pharoah’s Springs – some natural warm water springs. In my pics, I tried to capture the steam rising off the water as it ran into the Red Sea, but it doesn’t look like I was successful.  We saw a group of guys coming out of one of the caverns from which the water came out – they came out fully clothed, though all wet.  We went to the entrance, but didn’t dare go all the way inside to where the water was.  Just going to the entrance and sitting on the rocks was good, though – it felt like a sauna.

From the shore of the Red Sea, we climbed about 5,000 feet to St. Katherine’s village.  We made excellent time, getting from Cairo to here, with 3 stops, including about half an hour at the hot springs.  We made the whole trip, which normally should have been 8 hours, in about 7 and a half hours.  And that was at night, which I wasn’t really crazy about.  It’s bad enough climbing these hills and being on these highways in the daytime.  Night time is not an option I ever would have chosen, but it was interesting.  I noticed that when two trucks are about to meet each other, they’ll flash their high beams from a distance (like we used to do on US highways, back when driving was civil).  Then, as they approach each other (there’s always curves, so when they’ve both cleared the curves and are coming straight at each other), they go down to their parking lights.  I’m assuming this is to not blind each other, as sometimes you have trucks that sit high and cars that are low, but I saw it with trucks, cars, and vans.  And then I saw a couple of people be really obnoxious and not dim their high beams at all.  It looked to me, though, that the cutting off of the lights was an interesting combination of courtesy and safety.

The effect of the sleeping pill was that I slept through much of the day today.   I missed a lot of the discussion, as people are having their eyes opened to things they may not have thought about or may have taken literally in the Bible.  That’s not news for me, since I’ve been studying the Bible from non-traditional viewpoints for the past 10 or so years.  But the takeaway for today was about pilgrimage.  This trip we’re on, these trips I’ve been taking for the third year now, are not sight-seeing or shopping tours.  One of the places where I often hesitate is in encouraging my Christian friends to go on these trips.  After all,  I know many of my friends because we’ve spent time staying in fancy hotels and doing all the stuff that comes with that.  But that’s not what these trips are.  We don’t stay in real fancy hotels on these trips; we stay in sparse, functional places.  While we do shop, it’s not the focus of our trips.  We don’t just go to shop.  There’s a reason for that, which is not completely economic.  These trips are Christian Pilgrimages.  Pilgrimage, we are told is an investigation of what went on in Scripture.  Its purpose is to make ones faith more concrete, and less abstract. It always includes worship and interaction with the local, indigenous people, but it doesn’t stop there. Pilgrimage, it seems to me, is not only about the external journey, but about the internal journey. As much as it is about destinations, Pilgrimage is also about relationships.  Pilgrimage includes journeying in both the vertical and the horizontal relationships.  Smarter people than me have said that God sits at the intersection of the vertical relationship (humans’ relationship with the Divine) and the horizontal relationship (humans’ relationships with each other).  Pilrimage, it seems, highlights that intersection in IMAX-3D.  What have I discovered on this journey about my relationship with God?  What have I discovered about my relationship with others?  What have I discovered about my own Christian maturity?  What have I discovered that will empower me to share the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? 

I’m going to bed now.  We will rise whenever we rise, and have breakfast between 7 and 8:30, then we’ll take off up Mt. Sinai at 9.  I am not at all convinced that I’ll even start the journey, let alone complete it.  And I’m ok with that.  My ego doesn’t have to climb Mt. Sinai.  It’s not about the destination.  It’s about the journey. 

Some people will start out climbing tonight, anywhere between 10 pm and 1 or 2 am.  They like to climb at night, so they can see the sun rise from the top of Mt. Sinai.  I had reservations about coming 5,000 feet in a car in the dark.  There’s no way I’d attempt to climb an additional 3,000 feet on foot in the dark.  But I pray God will bless and keep them, and that they will meet God in an IMAX, 3D, Surround Sound intersection!