Greece and Egypt

Nate and I returned from our vacation last week. We had a great time. Greece was impressive. It was amazing to see all the ruins in Athens. We spent four days there which we felt was enough to see all the main sites in the city (ie. the Acropolis, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Agora, and The National Archaeological Museum). We were blown away by the structures and statues that the ancient greeks were able to create.

However, after we got to Egypt we both agreed that pretty much everything we saw in Athens paled in comparison. It was unbelievable to see all the temples the egyptians built thousands of years ago. You definitely cannot appreciate the size of these structures and the pyramids until you are standing there in front of them.

You can see some photos of our trip by clicking here...
Megan's Flickr Page

Also, here's some videos that we took!
In this video you can hear the calls to pray being blasted from speakers located on every mosque in Egypt. Kind of shocking when it wakes you up at 5AM!



This video is from the Valley of the Kings where they have discovered the tombs of over 60 egyptian kings including the most famous, King Tut. Our ticket let us go into three tombs. Our tour guide chose the first two for us, which were Ramses IV and Ramses IX. For the third tomb, he offered us two options...We could either go into a tomb that was not very deep into the mountain and still had very colorful hieroglyphics on the walls or we could go into the Tomb of Merneptah. This tomb, he told us, was a very steep descent into the mountain and might be pretty exhausting. Of course, Nate and I chose this one while everyone else in our tour chose the less strenuous tomb (probably a good thing since the average age of everybody else was over sixty). Amazingly, when we made it to the location of the sarcophagus, all of the other tourists seemed to simultaneously leave. It was just us and one of the workers. We took this video while down there. There is supposed to be no photography allowed inside the tombs but the workers are always after a little extra money. He motioned at us to go under the ropes that surround the sarcophagus and actually let us take pictures and video in return for some egyptian pounds.



Here's Nate at the Step Pyramid of Sakkara...



Here's a video of some of our camel ride...



-Megan