Journey to Egypt, Part 6: Coptic Churches & Ben Ezra Synagogue

December 25, 2018 We left the Egyptian Museum ready for lunch. We boarded our bus and headed to Old Cairo, where we would go to a restaurant for lunch and to the Christian Quarter of Old Cairo. At Felfela Restaurant we were greeted by this hookah-smoking dwarf. The restaurant had interesting décor. Our tummies satisfied, […]

WPC: Going Up & Looking Up

Sue W. sponsors the WP Weekly Photo Challenge prompt and this week the word is Up. Up makes me think of stairs or other means of ascending. These are photos from our most recent trip to Egypt and Israel, Dec. 2018-Jan. 2019. One of the women in my Egypt tour group confided to me (partly […]

Journey to Egypt, Part 5: Cairo Museum of Egyptian Antiquities

December 25, 2018 The Egyptian Antiquities Museum in Cairo is a huge neoclassical building which is home to the world’s largest collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts. The collection contains over 100,000 pieces, so it is said that if you spend just one minute on each piece, it would take over nine months to complete the […]

Journey to Egypt, Part 2: Giza – Pyramids, an Ancient Boat, Camels, & the Sphinx

December 24, 2018 Our first full day in Cairo began with a trip to Giza to see the famous pyramids and the Sphinx. Egyptologists have identified 118-138 pyramids commissioned by ancient pharaohs as burial tombs. The oldest known pyramid is the step pyramid located in Saqqara, which we did not visit. Egyptian pyramid building was […]

Getting Our Kicks in the Painted Desert of Arizona (Route 66 Day 4, Pt. 2)

June 10, 2018 The Painted Desert is part of Petrified Forest National Park in eastern Arizona, bisected by I-40 and Historic Route 66 (which run parallel to each other in this area). My husband and I first visited this national park in 2006 when we were in Arizona for another of my high school reunions […]

Artful: Chinese Ancient Bronzes & Music (Part 3)

This is the last part, Part 3, of the Chinese Ancient Bronzes exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute. Besides the bronze objects themselves, the exhibit included rubbings and paintings of these objects, including of emperors surrounded by and admiring their collections of bronzes, and members of the intellectual elite studying them. Depiction of Ruan Yuan […]

Izapa: A Crossroads of Trade

April 1, 2017 Chiapas, Mexico Our tour’s first destination today was the ruins of Izapa. To get there, we drove east from Puerto Chiapas until we were just a few miles from the Guatemalan border. Our guide, Cora, told us the history of Izapa. It was the […]