dAy 2 - Cairo

Today was unbelieveable! I'm still trying to comprehend what I saw. A lot of pictures I have seen since 6th grade world history truly came to life today, completely 3-D in front of my face! Our first stop was the Great Pyramids of Giza. They were the tombs of Khufu, Khafre, and Menchaure. We had the chance to go inside the middle pyramid (Khafre's tomb) - It was extremely hot and stuffy. To make it down in there, you had to hunch over and walk/waddle. I couldn't imagine how hard it was for Kyle, who is 6'6!! Once we got to the inside room, which was a plain square room with nothing in it, we all realized that we basically paid 15 pounds just to be able to say "I've been inside that tomb." Then we walked to the solar boat museum, which was by Khufu's pyramid. This boat was found accidentally by a supervisor who fell in a ditch and moved a stone, which uncovered all 1,242 pieces of the boat. The boat was built to carry the body of Khufu to the afterlife. The really cool thing about this boat was that the wood was held together by rope and only rope. When then went to the The Sphinx, which is guarding the pyramid of Khafre. It is a half lion (which shows the power of the pharaoh) and half man (which shows the intelligence of man) statue. The beard and nose are both missing but it was still pretty cool. Our last destination was the Museum of Cairo. It was by far the biggest museum I have ever been to - there was 2 floors filled with artifacts from the old, middle, and new kingdoms. We spent a lot of time looking at King Tut stuff, including his famous death mask...it was seriously 2 feet in front of me. I probably stared at it for 1o minutes, just in shock that I was actually looking at it. We ventured into the Mummy room, which held around 12 mummies. My favorite part of this room was that some mummies still had their EYELASHES!! I mean, I expected to see like hair on their heads but eyelashes?!? That was amazing. After that room, we got to see things like Rahotep and Nofret's statue and the Meidum Geese painting, all things that we had just learned about in the previous week.