A summer week---hot, but fun

Brent got home from Kazakhstan today. It is between Russia and Mongolia. He said it was beautiful, very large country and the people looked mostly asian (very similar to Mongolian people) and they ate a lot of meat. He even got to eat horse:) He brought these dolls home for me and the girls and a hand-made horse whip home for Josh. He said the mountains were snow-capped, the air nice and clean and the new capital city was less than 10 years old so the buildings were an amazing colleciton of modern structures....weird after being surrounded by ancient, crumbling things here. He stayed at a 6 star hotel and got to go running outside----now that makes me a bit jealous!

While Brent was gone, I got invited to go downtown Cairo and tour a mosque. It is famous because it is very old and it has a square-base on the minaret instead of round. The big dome in the center is the fountain where they would wash themselves before praying. It is dried up now, but the architecture is amazing. The wooden staircase/stand is where the singer says the prayers from the holy text (koran---I don't know how to spell this....sorry!). This is located in the eastern most position in the mosque, to be as close to Mecca as possible. It was very interesting inside and beautiful, though in disrepair unfortunately. You take your shoes off to enter and I covered myself with a shawl out of respect. After the mosque we went into this little, dirty looking shop which turned out to be the most amazing place. I don't even shop much, but it was so fun in that store! I found an Egyptian nativity set, which I wasn't sure I was going to be able to find. It was great:)

Here is another example of a public water "foutain"(see last weeks blog for first one) for me to add to my collection of crazy things. Gotta love Egypt!

Summer is going well. The kids and I are trying to get out every morning to exercise, we are having math, science, Egyptian history/arabic, and cooking classes (as much as I am capable anyway) and we are trying to do a fieldtrip each week (or a service project). It is going ok and I am feeling pretty good about things right now. We learned about states of matter this week in science, and the kids liked knowing that atoms build molecules and that molecules can be close together or far apart and that you can know that is what happening when you see water boil, freeze or melt. Pretty cool stuff, eh!