Egypt, revisted (day one)

I found myself thinking about Egypt today and remember that I never really wrote about our travels outside Alexandria. By the time we got back I was exhausted; it was quite a trip. Our first day started early in the morning. We caught a train from Alexandria to Cairo which took about 3-4 hours. I enjoyed the train station and our first train was pretty nice compared to some of the other trains.

Our first stop after leaving the station was Giza. This was probably the easiest leg of our journey because we took the subway to within a short distance of the pyramids and sphinx.

The kids thought holding the handles was the fun part

Sneak peak --pun intended :)

These guys wanted us to pay them a lot of money for a ride to the pyramids. I'm glad we didn't fall for it, it was less than 1/4 mile to the entrance. But apparently these guys make a living by getting tourists to ride their mule-drawn carts without giving a price and then charge something ridiculous at the top. I guess it works because they're still doing it.

Standing on the base of the big pyramid. We thought it would be as cold as it had been in Alex so we took our winter coats and ended up carrying them around all day, not fun when you also have kids to carry around all day. BTW, most of Egypt is not stroller accessible so this was not an option.

While at the pyramids, you must take the "I'm bigger than the pyramid" picture

This is a more realistic perspective (and a very cute pic of Karim and his cousin)

I'm glad we got to make a stop in Giza, but really for me it's one of those places that you go to see, say ooh aah and then move out. There wasn't a ton of excitement other than viewing and contemplating. The rest of the time we spent saying 'no thanks' to a million people trying to sell us all kinds of services and apparently 'no' in Arabic means "maybe. ask me a few more times".

We got back on the subway and headed for the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. We weren't allowed to take our cameras in but we did get to see a lot of stuff and I'm glad we made this stop because it made the later stops more interesting. For example, seeing all the things from King Tuts tomb before going into the tomb itself and imagining all the stuff that had been in there.

On our way to dinner we did a quick stop by Al-Azhar school and masjid. We didn't have time to go in but we snapped a few pictures outside, it's an amazing building.

We had a great dinner and then headed back to the train station to catch our next train. Outside the station we spotted this rare spot of grass and a good number of dogs seem to make this their bed at night as it retains more heat than sand or concrete.

And then we spent a really long time in the station waiting for our late train. Not the most fun I've ever had. This picture was taken around midnight and our train was still a couple hours out.

We eventually got on the train and headed for Luxor...

Baseball

Over the weekend Roqaya and I went to a tea party/fundraiser in Virginia and had a great time seeing some friends and meeting new people. Meanwhile, Ahmed and Karim went to watch the DC Nationals with some friends. This was their first baseball game so I got Karim a t-ball set to teach him about baseball and I taught him 'take me out to the ball game'. We practiced t-ball for a couple days before the game and it ended up being a really fun toy, for all of us.

Once we got the t-ball part down, we switched to pitching mode

Arablish and other signs of a reader

Karim gets very excited about letters and words and is always pointing and asking "what does that say?". After passing a few stop signs and asking about the letters he has come to memorize the word. The funny part, though, is that he seems to be mixing his Arabic skills in and when spelling he says, "P-O-T-S: Stop". I also noticed that it is not just the stop sign he has memorized, but he has actually figured out the combination of letters and can recognize the word stop in forms other than the stop sign.
Then, the other day, I showed him a flier for the zoo and asked him if he knew what it was. He looked it over and pointed to the word zoo and said, "this says zoo". I'm still not sure how he figured it out, I know he can't actually read, so I'm guessing he's seen the word somewhere else and like stop, has memorized the combination of letters. Either way, these are both good signs that he is understanding and on his way to reading.
Not too far behind him is his sister. She is learning new words every day and I'm constantly surprised because Karim had maybe a handful of words when he was her age. She's even held on to a couple Arabic/Egyptian words like hati (give me) and bah (all gone). Her favorite word is Baba and she says bonk and ouch a lot, especially when playing with her brother. A few days ago she made her first combination of words with two of her favorite things, she said, "baba shoes" while showing me Baba's shoes. Another favorite word/thing  is car. I'm sure this has a lot to do with Karim since his life pretty much revolves around cars/transportation.

Nap Time

It is not very often that I can get the kids to nap at the same time, but when I do, it is fantastic. The problem comes when it's time to prioritize what I'm going to do during this precious time, but I have to be quick about my decision because the clock is ticking and wake-up time is coming. If there are chores-made-difficult-by-toddlers to be done, I do those first--for example, doing the dishes. Roqaya is more into unloading what I put in the dishwasher and running away with it, sometimes I even find silverware back in the drawer with the clean stuff. If there are no chores like that do be done, I try to get in some quiet study time. I have been working through an Arabic grammar book for a while now but I've almost made it half-way so just a few more co-naps or even sleeping in a little in the morning and I'll be able to move on to the next Arabic language book in our library. If I have time after this then I move downstairs and try to get in a mile walk on the treadmill while listening to my audio book. Being that this is near the end of nap time, I usually get interrupted by Karim who hears the treadmill and gets excited and wants to have his turn. He says, 'you can share mama', 'I wanna go fast too'.
I don't have any napping pics of the kids, I've been really bad with the camera lately but here are a few that we took a month-or-so ago

Karim being silly

The kids got new outfits and Karim wanted his picture taken standing up there

Roqaya was really excited about her pants, she really loves them

And I was wearing one of my new hijabs from Egypt