Uncle Steve Took Me for a Walk!!!!
I knew this day would come. I think Aunt Kathy and Uncle Steve were working together on this. Aunt Kathy took me on those hour long walks just to get me ready for the big one. I thought when we sat around all day Saturday that maybe Uncle Steve had gotten old and lazy and we would not be going on one of us long treks. Wrong. We left the house and went by Dad's office. So far, so good. But then we kept going past Trader Joe's, then to Lake Calhoun, then to Lake Harriet, then to 44th and France, and finally we came home. I walked for two hours. The belly bath actually felt pretty good. Once Uncle Steve dried me off, I really surprised him by just ripping around the house at full speed. I wanted dinner and I wanted it now! As soon as he cleaned up the tub, Uncle Steve fed me a well deserved dinner. However, as soon as I finish today's blog there will be some serious nap time.
Uncle Steve and I are continuing to hunt the hippo. So far it has survived, but the squeak is so obnoxious that Aunt Kathy may weigh in and help us finish it off. As you can see, I get a little crazy went I go hippo hunting:
Your trip just sounds neater, and neater with every E-Mail. Uncle Steve would not let me look at the R rated pictures. He thinks I am so innocent. I'll just wait until he goes to work tomorrow.
Love,
The Speckster
posted by Math Jarl @ 4:08 PM
1 Comments:
Hi Speck,
Wow, you were really cruising on that walk! Papa says he can't ever get you to go two feet without a sniff-fest! Hey, guess what? A lot of dogs in Cairo have jobs! As a matter of fact, there's a german shepherd that works at our hotel. He sniffs all of the cars that want to come into the Four Seasons. What a lucky dog, getting paid to sniff!
Today, we went to Khan al Khalili market in Islamic Cairo. We got to go into a mosque with a nice Egyptian man who showed us around and told us when to take off our shoes, and when "camera okay" and stuff like that. He even opened up the locked door to see the tomb of the guy who the mosque was named after. Then he opened up another locked door so we could go up into one of the Minarets. The stairs were spiral and cramped, and when there was no window slat, it was completely black in there! No lights! Once we got to the top, we had a beautiful view of Cairo and the market below us.
We went to the market next, and bought all sorts of fun things for people back home. They have perfume oils that smell really good (not the kind of smells that you like, sorry) and spices in giant sacks to buy. They also sell Frankincense and Mhyrr there. We asked the guy at one of the spice stalls if this was real Frankincense and Myrrh, and he had us follow him to another shop where the guy was a perfume expert. He brought out a jar of rocks and crushed one up with a mortar and pestil, and then put it in a clay bowl and lit it on fire. It smelled really good! Then, he got some Francencense and added that to the fire, it smelled really neat together. Of course, it cost a whole lot more than the stuff in the regular spice stalls, but, hey, when in Cairo...
So we had him crush us up a bunch of Myrrh, and he added a bunch of Frankincense, and burned it, and smelled it, and adjusted the ratio, and burned it again until he had it just right. Now we have a bunch of Frankincense and Myrrh to give to people at Christmas time. Kind of a fun quest to have in a really cool market. We went to another Mosque later, the Mosque of Sayyidna al-Hussein. It is the holies site in Cairo for Muslims, it is said to contain the head of Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammed. Normally, non Muslims cannot enter this mosque, but we met a nice man named Yahya who asked us if we could help him buy some stuff at the duty free shop in the Sheraton (back by our hotel) for his neice's wedding this Thursday. Sounded a little shady, but we talked with him for a while, and found out that the only place to buy non-Egyptian booze was there and you had to have a passport stamp that you were only here for three days in order to be able to buy it. Well, being a sucker... for weddings, we agreed to help him out, and he was so happy that he showed us into the mosque. We had to go into separate doors, one for women and one for men, then we got to see the giant silver shrine that housed the relic chamber for Hussein's head. Yahya told us that the rest of his body is in a Mosque in Karbala, Iraq.
We drove back to the hotel to get our passports, and Yahya told us bad Polish jokes, then, we went to the Sheraton and loaded him up with Scotch for the wedding. Then we had to convince him that he didn't need to drive us around all day tomorrow showing us the sites to pay back the favor.
It was kind of interesting to go on an Egyptian beer run and hear about an Egyptian wedding. They are having a six tiered wedding cake, he has bought two lambs, and they are expecting about four hundred people. The whole wedding reception will cost 500 Egyptian pounds! He couldn't believe how much a wedding cake costs in the US.
Anyway, we're back at the hotel, and room service just brought dinner, so we'll sign off now.
Thank AK and US for taking such good care of you. We'll email again tomorrow.
Love, Mom and Dad
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