Egypt Day 1-- Cairo City Tour

We got to the hotel early this morning after a rough time getting to Egypt, which caused us to get in at 6am this morning v. last night at 8pm... so instead of a good night's rest last night, we had time to drop our bags in our room, shower, have breakfast and meet up with the rest of the group for a meeting. We are staying in a gorgeous hotel, though, a Marriott and the breakfast spread was absolutely fabulous! (Especially after eating horrible airplane/airport food for the last 2 days!!) We are a group of only 15 people, which will be so nice for moving around. We met Carol-- Jim Gee's wife, and Ayman, who will be our tour guide for the entire duration of our trip. Everyone seems so nice. A little more than half the people in the group are members of the church and the other half is not, but everyone is very nice! We started off our tour at the Grand Egyptian Museum where all kinds of artifacts are now stored. It's a brand new museum, so the King Tut exhibit we were supposed to see, isn't here yet. We saw all kinds of statues and artifacts-- to the point of exhaustion-- especially jet lagged exhaustion! We artifacts from of all the ancient dynasties. We even got a peek at the pyramids while there!! After we finished there, we traveled to the Coptic area of Old Cairo where we saw a lot of ancient Christian churches and we also visited Africa's first Mosque-- we had to take off our shoes and the women had to cover their heads with a green hood they gave us. Only men are allowed inside, but in this particular mosque, because it is so large, they've built a partition where women are allowed to come pray. We enjoyed a lunch with typical Egyptian food. It was a very heavy meal and they eat a lot of meat! We walked the narrow alleys and streets of the Khan El Khalili market where all the Christian churches are located. After that we headed to an area of Cairo where the people collect trash and sell it for a living... we headed up this hill and at the very top were Christian carvings of bible scenes and a couple of churches that were carved out of the side of the mountain! It was incredible to see that these people had made something beautiful out of a trash heap!! Mostly Muslims (I think 90%) live in Egypt, but most of the areas we visited today were Christian, or what they call Coptic, which I think is their version of Catholic? Later, we enjoyed a beautiful sunset dinner cruise on the Nile complete with loud music for the entertainment! Hahaha!! It was SO COLD! It was really windy and it was cutting to the bone! None of us were dressed properly and we were also still so full from lunch that we barely ate anything they served us! I left so much food on my plate-- I felt really bad because they were trying so hard to entertain us!! (It was more of the same type of food they served us for lunch and LOTS of meat!!!) We got back in to our hotel room and thawed out and sunk into our soft and cozy beds and FELL ASLEEP SO FAST!!!