This is harder than it looks

This blogging thing. When did I ever think this would be a good idea? Yeah, the kids will have to work and do projects and time will be set aside for them to work and that's when I can update. Yeah, that'll work out just great, Danielle, you're right. Brilliant idea. And why don't you take something like 200 to 500+ pictures each day? And don't write down the names of the places you visit - that'll take time and you'll need to pack a notebook and writing utensils. Don't worry, you'll remember.

wrong. Wrong. Wrong! I'm now behind by a solid two to three days on updating this thingy and even more behind on photos. As much as I love having the netbook (thanks, Dad!), it doesn't have any of my photo editing software, so I can't crop or straighten or otherwise make my photos look the way I want you all to see them. All I can do is rotate them (because heaven forbid the computer recognize to do that on its own) and try to narrow 500+ photos down to 200 or less so that Facebook doesn't break when I try to upload. I at least have them all saved to the computer and organized by date, rather than floating around on a handful of memory cards, but still. I could be doing so much better. Maybe our "free day" the first half of Friday will allow me to go back in time again to update you all on the past two days. Tonight I think I'm just going to tackle what happened today (which was a lot) and get today's pictures on the computer in some semblance of an order. Picture uploading to Facebook will probably also happen on that mysterious "free day". I refer to this "free day" in such a skeptical manner because it is scheduled as a free day and we don't like to stick to the schedule here. We're going on Egypt time. It's like Island Time, only instead of not worrying about the time because you're lying on a beach sipping fruity cocktails, you're not worrying about the time because you refuse to stick to any kind of schedule. Who needs an itinerary when you can be on Egypt time!

I digress. Let's talk about today, shall we? I'd love to give a detailed account of all of the mosques and monuments we visited today, because we easily stopped be a dozen or more. It was such a ridiculously long day though, that I can barely remember what we did 6 hours ago, let alone 16 hours ago when we started our day. (It's 1am as I type this, just for reference. If my math is correct, and I make no guarantees because it's one in the morning, that indicates that we started our day at 9. I think that sets up the timeline well enough. Moving on.) We took our bus into a new part of the city this morning and as we disembarked we were reminded to grab an extra water bottle because we wouldn't be back to the bus until after lunch, maybe around 1:30. No big deal, I said, I've got two bottles with me, almost a whole liter, I should be just fine. That was a little before 9:30am. Ten hours later when we're getting shuffled into the theater to watch a folk music and dance performance and we have yet to see the bus or our dinners, everyone was close to revolt. In that span of time, we had seen no less than four mosques (maybe more, I can't remember), two or three preserved homes, a variety of sabils and kutabs (free water dispersal units and schools attached to mosques), the biggest bazaar I've ever encountered and probably 50 or more feral cats.

The mosques were all beautiful and serene as before. These were all incredibly old, most around 1000 years, so they had seen some better days. That didn't stop me from feeling that same sense of peace (or from taking an excessive number of pictures) as I did in the mosques on previous days. We did stumble upon something interesting at the last mosque of the day. Mosque #6327 (as I'll call it because the name is both difficult to spell and pronounce and we've seen so many that all the names are running together) is the most prominent mosque in not just Cairo, but all of Egypt. Students come from all across Egypt to study, whether the subject is religion or any of the other universities attached to the mosque, such as engineering or medicine. Yasser instructed us to be as quiet and conservative as possible in this mosque and it was a good thing to do. Once we crossed through the courtyard, we had to stop short before we entered the main worship area. (I haven't been taking the classes with the other kids, so I don't know the technical term for this. Sorry!) A lesson was being filmed and broadcast live of the country's most important religious leader. I don't think Yasser gave us his name or title, but he is quiet to begin with and was making a point to whisper so I could have missed it, but this leader is regularly called on to consult with the president. Yasser couldn't stress enough how important this man was. I wish I knew more about him than those few vague statements, but he did make quite an impression.

I did not take quite as many pictures or find myself feeling anything near serene when it came to the restored homes. We've seen five by now, two yesterday and three today, and they all share some basic characteristics: ornate wood working, pretty courtyards, lots of stairs, and labyrinthine in design. It took a group of us about 3 minutes of lagging behind to completely get ourselves separated, turned around, and altogether lost from our group. And I swear I saw the same room about 6 times in the same house. Also, for as mathematically perfect as the pyramids are, it's amazing these homes are still standing. They apparently regressed considerably, what with all the uneven steps, crooked door frames and slanted walls. Adel may have, in fact, taken us into some kind of carnival fun house at one point or another. I don't know!

I still need to tell you about the cats and the Khan el Khalili bazaar, but that will have to wait until the kids are giving their presentations in the morning. It's 2am here! I may get to sleep in tomorrow, but that's still not a whole lot of sleep. Off to bed!