A holiday trip

As it is difficult to make an interview to an egyptologist, here is a link to an interesting interview that I have found in the Internet. Instead of doing one by myself I am going to publish a post talking about an interview that I made to a friend who went on holidays last summer to Egypt. She went there for a week with her family. They stayed in a hotel in El Cairo, which is not very expensive but really comfortable and nice.

In their turistic route, they visited Cairo which is the capital of the country and the biggest city in the Arabic world. As her father is a history professor in Zaragoza´s university, he was really interested in visiting the Museum of Egyptian Antiquiteis. My friend Maria , who does not like museums told me that she found it a bit boring, but of course, her father was absolutelly impressed by it.
This museum was opened in 1902. It has got many different halls with expositions about the different periods of the Ancient Egypt, all of them in a chronologycal order.



After visiting the museum, the Ventura family went for a walk around the streets of El Cairo. Maria told me she was impressed by the different kind of people that she could find in the city. It´s a very cosmopolita country, specially in the big cities, which offer a huge extent of things to do. Maria had always wanted to see a real bellydancer, not like the ones that she had seen in Zaragoza, who have taken a few lessons and still call this dance Bellydance instead of Oriental Dance, which is its real name, so she suggested her family going to a restaurant to have dinner where they could all see a bellydancer. She was astonished by the capacity of that girl of moving her stomach and hips following the rythm of the music as if it was sounding inside herself.
She fell in love with the clothing, the arabic music and the moves of that girl. So in love that as soon as she arrived back to Zaragoza, she started taking dancing lesson and has not stopped since that moment.

Another day, the Ventura family went with a rented car to Giza, to see the pyramids. There are three important pyramids in Giza, whose names are Khufu, Kafhre and Mencaura. Each of them is dedicated to a different pharaon. These three pytamids were built during the third an fourth dinasty. The sides of the pyramids are oriented to the four cardinal points and each of them has got a huge complex of temples and smaller pyramids.


Maria , while seeing the pyramids could not stop taking photos, which I am not going to publish because they are private. She was trying to imagine the hundreds of slaves or workers that were needed to build such an amazing structure. Although she tried hard, she could not really imagine how hard and impressive was his work.
It is thought that the construction of the biggest pyramid, whose name´s Khufu in 2560 BC, lasted twenty years. Its weigh is aproximately 6 million tones if all these opinions are true, the workers hav to put around 800 tonnes of stone everyday in the pyramid.

Another day, the family went to Luxor, a city built over the ruins of Thebes. Its population is about 450.000 inhabitants. It´s situated in the Nile Valley next to the river and a few miles away from Luxor there´s just desert. The city is famous because it was one of the religious centres in the Ancient Egypt. Here we can find the Luxor temple and the Karnak temple, the second place most visited after the Giza pyramids. Maria also visited the Karnak temple, where egyptians used to worship God Amon basicly, although it was posible to pray to other gods too.

















This three places that I have described by the notes that I took from Maria´s interview are the most impressive ones in Egypt. After this trip, my friend told me that she wanted to visit Greece. I told her that if she really wanted to visit it, she could already start saving money. I also told her that I hope I am not publishing a blog about Greece in that moment because you can not imagine how much Maria talks...