Only four months behind Mike, Heather can check off her seventh continent. We had to track down a cold beer to celebrate the occasion. Being in a predominantly Muslim country, we didn’t have a lot of choices. We found an “Irish Pub” located inside the Hilton. Heather actually had wine and Mike tried a Luxor beer.

Our first day out we took it slow and meandered around the Egyptian Museum. The place is huge, more like a warehouse than a museum. The impression we got was that the first archaeologists to find the items cataloged them and put some brief captions on note cards and started putting all of the objects in one building. Of course certain parts were better, like King Tut’s treasure. Heather was mostly impressed by the massiveness of the stone sarcophagi and that there are preserved seeds, leaves, ropes and wood from so long ago. The amount of wood used was surprising given the lack of trees in the area.

Day two was spent visiting the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx. Mike was surprised that the sky was actually blue this time. The size, symmetry, and engineering really make you think, if humans thousands of years ago could figure this out, what are we doing now with all of our high tech gadgets?

Coptic Cairo is an old part of the city that is right on the metro line and apparently frequented by Spanish speaking tourists. Shopkeepers spoke it, signs were written in it and our lunch menu was in both Spanish and English. We walked around the now subterranean streets, through multiple churches, a cemetery and a synagogue. The oldest mosque in Cairo (and Egypt and Africa) was only a block or two north. We stopped in there after lunch to have a look. After many reconstructions, it doesn’t look very old, but it is much larger than the ones we had been seeing in India. We spent a good 20 to 30 minutes talking with a Muslim man who wanted to know what we thought of Islam and terrorists and answer any questions we had. He was very interesting and we got an Islam 101 crash course.

We spent the remainder of the afternoon hanging out in a cafe waiting for our train to Luxor.