Egypt Day 3-- Karnak and Luxor Temples

We had to be up early this morning for our flight to Luxor. When we arrived, we transferred to our Dahabiya sail boat and we had a really nice lunch onboard. In the afternoon we visited the Temple of Karnak where we learned the importance of the scarab bug-- considered good luck and good fortune. There was a statue of one and if you walked around it a certain amount of times, it meant good luck for different things. There was one on the wall in the holy of holies where you can see everyone has touched for good luck as well. (Of course, Bill had to touch it! Hahaha!) You can see as you enter the temple of Karnak, it is lined with Sphinx's on both sides-- that road of sphinx's connects to the Temple of Luxor in a straight line. It's amazing to me, how many are still standing when we drove past them in town! They don't take very good care of these ruins in my opinion, but our tour guide also told us that Egypt just doesn't have the money to keep things up-- mainly because the sheer amount of ruins. They don't even have the money to excavate all the things they know are there, but don't have the funds to uncover and then keep up! Crazy!! Those ancient Egyptians just knew how to build and built a ton of stuff!!! Before heading to Egypt, I just didn't realize how poor the country is! The infrastructure here is pretty bad and everyone is just surviving!! After we left the Temple of Karnak, we headed to a place where we learned about how the ancients made papyrus. They gave us a demonstration and then, like the last demonstration with the carpets, wanted us to buy buy buy!!! If I acted interested in anything, they were right on me!! So, I had to tell them several times that I was just looking. It's not really my thing at all and the art wasn't my design style for my home!! Robin ended up buying some bookmarks for her grandkids, but she got frustrated with them, because they kept trying to upsell her to something bigger and better! She finally got through to them, but they weren't too happy that she just wanted bookmarks! It was a pretty cool demonstration though! When we left the store, we were hit with a barrage of children trying to sell us bookmarks! I thought that was pretty funny since Robin had just bought some. But those kids were tenacious and WOULD NOT leave us alone!! I don't like that at all. I was glad to get inside the bus! We then took Mr. Toads wild ride in some horse carriages that took us through downtown Luxor and through the local markets. That was seriously crazy! All the kids were trying to talk to us and many just waved. We saw their culture up close and personal!! Another thing I did not realize about Egypt before I came here is that it is predominantly Muslim... so many women here wearing the full dress of the hijab AND the burka! And the men also wear the full robe and head wraps, as well. The carriage ride was pretty long-- probably almost 45 minutes or so! We tipped our driver, of course... Later on we went to the Temple of Luxor. It was fun to visit it at night, because it was all lit up! We were tired and ready to go back to the Dahabiya and have dinner and get to bed!! We have managed in our free time to play cards-- we even taught Carol how to play Shanghai Rummy!