Day Six-Cairo

Tuesday morning begain with us getting checked into our hotel in Cairo and freshening up from our sleeper-car-train-ride-from-heck adventure. Let me tell you a shower has never felt so good, haha even if I did have to be careful not to get any water in my mouth. After everyone had detoxed we visited the church where Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus stayed when they fled to Egypt to escape Herod. Brother Brown taught us inside the church about the early childhood of Christ and had some amazing insights. The church was beautiful and all the handmade ornamentation was incredible. All the wood detailing in the church was created without using a single nail, pretty impressive!

After the church we visited the Egyptian National Museum, which was definitely a highlight! Sadly, they did not alow any The only word to describe the museum is incredible! The museum is massive and holds over 150,000 pieces. Just to give you the idea of how many items that is, our tour guide Islam told us that if you spent just ten seconds at each piece for 8 hours a day, it would take over a year to see everything. So obviously the few hours we spent there did not do the museum justice, but it was still amazingly cool. We saw the sarcophagus, burial mask, and all the treasures of King Tut, tons of ancient statues, coffins, jewelry, and the Merneptah Stele which is the only Egyptian record of the Israelites. We also got to see all of the royal mummies which were absolutely fascinating and completely disgusting! They were so well preserved, that the mummy of Ramses II still had hair, toenails, and teeth....so gross haha.

After touring the museum they took us to Hard Rock Cafe for a good old fashioned American meal. Even though we had to take all the vegetables off of our burgers, it was still great to get a little taste of home! After we ate we all ran up to the stage and in typical BYU J-Ru style had a spur-of-the-moment dance party, no big deal.

Before heading back back to the hotel, we stopped and said goodbye to the Nile River, which in case you were not aware is the longest river in the entire world! Its actually really pretty, despite how dirty it is, and I will definitely miss seeing it outside of the windows of our bus.

Oh ya know, just another day in Egypt!