Monday, February 16, 2015

Egypt

Two weekends ago we were fortunate enough to take a trip for Mike's birthday to go to the pyramids. We took off with a group on Saturday morning, with Ryan meeting us later since he had a soccer tournament. We stayed at the Marriott Casino hotel, on part of the island in Cairo, right next to the Nile river. We took a cruise on a Faluka on the Nile the first night, that we had to negotiate to get since there were no cruises leaving when we were there. We negotiated a nice price, and when the cruise was almost over, another boat brought us some snacks to enjoy.

The next day we all went to the pyramids. It was different than I imagined, and breathtaking. The pyramids are right near the city, so people have houses right there that they can always look out their window and be staring at the Great Pyramid. The Sphinx was a lot smaller than I thought it was going to be, even though Ryan warned me about this fact. We climbed into all three pyramids, which was a little scary since it is a tight space, and pretty steep. Ryan had to be basically on his hands and knees going through. We did take some more pictures on camel rides. I felt bad since tourism is down in Egypt, clearly the people aren't making as much as they usually did selling to people. They were desperate to sell us something.

That night we enjoyed a great feast right on the Nile with our group of friends from all over the world. We left Egypt right as Putin was flying in, so that was probably good timing.

This last week we had our fundraising dinner for our Bali trip at Cru, a restaurant in Hamra. Gretchen and I wanted to contribute since the girls are doing so much to raise the $10,000 we need. We managed to raise over $600 at the dinner, which was really nice. Cru is an incredible restaurant and wine bar, and the owner, Karen, is from Indiana and is a wonderful person.

Ryan was gone from Wednesday to late Saturday in Cyprus running a soccer tournament for boys and girls, JV and Varsity. It was a huge undertaking, but overall went smoothly. The Varsity girls won first place, JV boys and girls  took fourth and JV girls also received the sportsmanship award. Ryan put the tournament together since last year no teams wanted to travel here, so he hosted it in Cyprus.

Sunday we had a nice brunch at Jesse's apartment in Monot. She has a great place, that she has decorated incredibly since she is a very talented artist. I should have taken pictures!

I leave Thursday this week to go to an IB conference in Dubai. There are some new changes to the History curriculum, so Else and I are heading to there to learn all about the changes.

Track has started, so we have practice Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Last week was a little rough with the big storm that came through. There was some pretty big damage. It is funny, last year it only rained 2 times all year, and this year we have had some impressive storms. Ryan and I saw a lot of the damage yesterday when we were out on our run. The track team looks to be pretty good this year, a lot of solid athletes. We will travel to Dubai for our international meet in March.

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