Monday on the Nile

We are at an internet cafe in Luxor and there is a group of little boys yelling in at us and trying out their limited English. We started out the day sailing at 5AM and the Nile is a beautiful river to sail on. We are amazed at how beautiful it is. It has palm trees and dessert and lots of shore birds and we don't want to do anything but look out for fear we will miss something. About the time we think it is getting to be the same, the scenery changes and mountains of dessert or something new appears. People use donkeys and there are little fishing boats all along. We went to the temple of Edfu today and it was really huge and the hieroglyphs were unbelievable and to realize they were 2000 years old and these are the "new" ones! We are now approaching the old ones! Christians lived in this temple for 300 or so years at one time too before the Romans would let them practice openly. We have been surprised at how many coptic Christian churches there are here. Tonight we had the black and white night where we all dressed in black and white. I'm not sure why, but we did. Last night was our big Egyptian night where we wore galebayas and the men wore Egyptian outfits as well. It was a big to-do and it was amazing how many different dresses and attires were there. We all had group photos made and individual photos made and we will include one when we can. It was fun and hopefully Jim's outfit can make a good shepherds outfit for a Christmas pagent at church and maybe mine can be used at the Girl Scout world day sometime or else it will make a good Halloween costume! Ha. Yesterday we also went to Philae to see the Temple there. We rode a boat over there to the island that was fun too. This was one that had to be moved when they build the high dam. It is in a beautiful location on an island all by itself. We had to go through the usual hoard of vendors to get to the boats which we are getting very tired of-they are unlike any we have ever experienced. We haggle pretty well in China and in South America but here, these do not haggle fair!! It is absolutely unreal. We'd pay three times the price just not to have to haggle! More on that the next time! Write and let us know how things are back in the good old USA!