Mrs. Vosler & Rachel came in to talk about Egypt on Nov. 22, 2000. They left two books to let us read about Egypt for a week.
They went to Cairo, then flew to Aswan and rode down the Nile River. They said Egypt is a lot different than America. Cars look old and rickity. The drivers aren’t polite to each other on the roads. They don’t have nice roads. Sidewalks are made of hand-cut rock.
They don’t have the technology we do. The Nile water is the only water, but it is very dirty.
If you went to Egypt on a tour, the government has to okay your coming. They don’t car if you don’t understand them. The police are called normal police and tourist’s police. You often see them with M-16 semi-automatic machine guns, standing guard, supposedly to protect the tourists and regular folk.
They all spoke Arabic. They are a poor country, so they don’t have to learn English. In fact, mostly upper-class children are educated, while the lower-class goes without much education.
We saw a rug made out of camel hair; kids 6 to 12 years of age made the rugs. The rug took about 1 week to make. The rug has King Tutankhamen’s picture on it. They also saw a big rug being made. It looked like strings, they said. The pharaohs had a lot of names. Like King Tut had a boyhood name, then a pharaoh name, and others added on as he grew up.
The highest tempature it got was in Upper Egypt; in the morning it got to 104 degrees in July.
We were shown some papyrus. The tour guide gave them each a piece of papyrus with their names on it for a “thank you, come back again” present. The way they made papyrus, we were told, is that they cut the papyrus plant in thin slices, then soak it in water for several days, then weave it together, and finally press it for a couple of days. One of the papyrus prints that we saw was of King Tutankhamen giving his wife a present of perfume. Another print had a picture of a cat and Rachel’s Egyptian name inside a cartouche.
They also showed us a small scarab beetle made out of blue rock; it was used for good luck. Some of the kids in the class mentioned that we had heard a story about a beetle-god named Khepri.
They got to go on a camel ride. They also told us that they had to pay to get off.
We found out that it’s easier to buy a postcard then to take a picture. It costs money to take a picture. You have to buy a ticket to take a picture, but if you lose it your camera would get taken away and you wouldn’t get it back.
The pyramids were empty, stinky rooms because they were enclosed and had hardly any ventilation. All those sweaty tourists! You had to climb through a narrow incline to get to the rooms inside the pyramids.
The obelisks (which resembled the Washington Monument) were made out of granite. They put heiroglyphs all over them.
Every pharaoh had a temple and a tomb. Some tombs took about 30 years to build, and they usually started building a pyramid (tomb) when the pharaoh started his reign. In the tombs the pharaoh got to pick what book (or passage from The Book of the Dead) they wanted to be carved all over the tomb.
The Valley of the Kings is one of the hottest places in Egypt. They told us about how they had to move the gigantic statues to higher ground because of the Aswan dam that was built in the area. We read about that in our Social Studies book.
They even saw the Sphinx! They said it was not as big as most pictures or videos show it. But it is still very impressive!
There is a Valley of the Queens that they also saw. Queen Hatshepsut had the biggest tomb. They told us about how she became a ruler and the rivalry in the family.
They also went to the Egyptian museum. They could be in one of the special rooms (dedicated to King Tut) in the museum for only ten minutes, then you had to go to the next room. That’s because of the many visitors. You had to be quiet in their. The best thing about the museum was that it had air-conditioning. In King Tut’s room they saw his sarcophagus. They also saw a lot of mummies.
The surprising thing about modern Egypt is that there is a MacDonald’s there!
They told us about the problem of getting sick in Egypt. Only 2 out of the 5 people in their group didn’t get sick. They said it’s important to take anti-biotics with you.
Some people were so poor that they made their houses out of cornstalks. Some people also made houses out of bricks. The people in Egypt prefer American money to Egyptian pounds because American is worth more. It costs money to exchange American money into Egyptian pounds.
At customs they found out that if they wanted to take something away from the tourist, they could.
They learned one word in Arabic; it was “thank-you” (shoo-run).
They didn’t see any gas stations or stop signs. They did go to a mall. They even saw a casino; you have to be 21 to go into the casino.
That concludes the discussion about Egypt.
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