garbage

the egyptian museum was quite incredible filled with jewelry, statues, mummies, coffins, more more and more but not super well organized or labeled. we had a lot of fun browsing through the contents of tut's tomb, the amount of stuff he was buried with is just crazy and took up an entire hallway and several surrounding rooms. i was glad to have visited the valley of the kings and the valley of the queens in upper egypt where we saw the tombs of pharaohs prior to the museum where we were able to then see the contents of the tombs. i am still constantly amazed by the historical significance of everything i have seen, just how much stuff there is and by the wonderful preservation. following our trip to the egyptian museum sarah and adam met us the auc (the american university in cairo) to give us a tour of the campus. sarah pursuing a graduate degree here and is greatly enjoying the classes and the campus. auc feels like a little oasis right in the center of downtown cairo where the surrounding area is chaos. yesterday, with robert and merle back from their cruise, we all set out for an area of cairo called garbage city. garbage city is where all of the trash is taken to be sorted and 80 percent of it is recycled. because pigs are used in the sorting process the city is staffed and inhabited solely by coptic christians. an organization called the association for the protection of the environment is working within garbage city to educated and train young women how to weave and make paper from the garbage. there is a small showroom at the organization that captured our attention and well, at least spending money here didn't bother me because it's for a good cause, right? within garbage city is a large church carved into the mountain that must seat around 4-5 thousand people, it was insane! we wrapped up the evening indulging in several games of settlers and a huge juicy watermelon. today we are going to explore coptic cairo and tomorrow we are heading out to the sinai penninsula to hike mt. sinai. the pictures are of annika and i at the church in garbage city and two of the girls weaving at the a.p.e