Another snow day!!

Yippee!!!  Another snow day!!  I made pancakes for the first time ever today!  I don't know why I've never tried before but I made some and they were so good!  I made a Mickey Mouse pancake, a snowman, and a Winnie the Pooh that looked more like a little teddy bear person.  I'm definitely gonna eat some more tomorrow since we have a 2-hour delay!  Oh and I finished the Egypt video so I'm going to upload it!  

SNOW DAY!!!

No school!!! No school!!! No school!!! WOO HOO HOO HOO!!! You gotta love the phone call that comes at 6:28 AM with an automated voice bringing the message of, "All Albemarle County schools will be closed today." It's enough to make you jump up, screaming and running around the house with joy...and then go back to sleep. I, of course, have not been playing however. I've been working almost non-stop on school work. I'm going to try to work on my Egypt video that I've been making for the past two weeks. Maybe I can even finish it! I'll post it when I do...although it's really long. Like 15 minutes. Maybe I can't post something that long. We'll see...

Bendito sea el SENOR, Dios de Israel!

Miguel and I had a totally sweet day yesterday!  We went to Portico with two other friends and learned all about the 2nd commandment.  We learned that we have to be really careful to not put anything in front of God, because whatever consumes the most of our thoughts and energy is what we worship.  Pastor Chris said that to know what it is that we put before God, we just have to think about what we are super focused on all the time.  What occupies every thought?  What do you spend all your time thinking about and then are prompted to take action based on those thoughts, in order to accomplish them?  The problem for me is that I spend so much time thinking about EVERYTHING!  Like Spanish...super focused on that.  Soccer too...  Photography, making videos, computers, any technology really...  School and how to get my kids to learn...  Traveling...  Baseball...  Snowboarding...  Guitar...  Legos...  Movies...  Pysch...   Lost...  24...  Mooses...  SERIOUSLY, the list continues.  

Now I don't seriously think I worship all of those, but I definitely spend a huge amount of time thinking about them and acting on them.  Anyway...so then after Portico, we decided to try a new church that we just found Saturday night.  It's a spanish church that's very small.  It meets in a little store building that's part of other stores.  It was AWESOME!!!  It was completely in Spanish and it was so cool being there with people praying and calling out Jesus' name, singing songs, and teaching about Jesus all in Spanish!  Miguel and I left saying, "We're definitely going back next week!"

Then we went to a friend's basketball game at Monticello High School to make a video for him to send to colleges.  He's really good and it was great to see him again because we haven't seen him since the soccer season ended in the fall.  It was a busy day, but AWESOME!

Ivan's first A!!!

PRAISE GOD!!!  Ivan and I have been studying for his history test for over two weeks because the kid DESPERATELY wants an A or a B.  He usually gets C's but it's just because he's still learning English and all the instruction and assessments are in English.  So we decided to make this semester different and study a little bit every day.  We've held to that plan every day since school started again and Ivan had his first test since Christmas today.  On Friday they had a review day at school and he was so excited after school because he told me that he knew all the answers for the first time ever!  He said he was so proud that he knew the answers and he was helping the other kids in the class.  There's a new girl in his class who just moved here from Mexico and she doesn't speak any English so he said that he translates for her now.  He said that since we go over all the information every night, he understands it more the next day when the teacher is talking, so he's able to translate it for the new girl.

So today was the test and I was praying about it all day!  After school I said, "Soooo?"  and he tried to keep it a secret for a while and finally it came out with a huge smile and exclamation, "I GOT AN A!!!!!"  He showed me his test and he only missed two things!  He got his very first A!!!  He was so happy and we showed it to his mom and she was so proud of him too!  It was totally cool watching him get his confidence back and realize that not only can he learn this information but he can also help other kids learn it too!  God is so awesome!

Jesus talk

Today Brian and Robert went to church with me and I was so happy that Brian came!  He's been with us before, but this week he was asking ALL WEEK to go with us.  He said he just got a new bible and he wanted to take it with him!  At church, the pastor was talking about the first commandment and when he read, "Have no other gods before you," Brian leaned over and said, "That's Exodus 20:3."  I was totally impressed and said, "Whoa!  How did you know that?"  (The pastor had not said the exact verse yet.)  He said, "I learned it."  I thought that was the coolest thing ever, sitting next to a 10-year-old kid who recognized the exact verse from the bible that the pastor was reading.  Then when we sang a song and the words said, "Beautiful is the One who is speaking," Brian said, "They're talking about Jesus!"  That kid has to be one of the coolest kids ever!  

Then at McDonald's later with Edith (see the post below this one to find out WHY we were at McDonald's), Edith and I were talking in Spanish about Jesus.  We were talking about whether we thought Jesus likes ice cream.  I said, "I think he does, because Jesus is everything good and ice cream is definitely good."  Edith said, "Then he must like chocolate cookies because they're REALLY good."  I said, "What else is good?  What else do you think Jesus likes?"  She thought and then said, "Kangaroos.  Kangaroos are great."  Hahahahaha.  I love talks with kids about Jesus!  In the car on the way home, we listened to a Spanish song about how Jesus is our best friend and Edith said, "Jesus is my best friend too!"  Cool, cool kids!

Ice cream on a cold, cold day!

Coldest weekend of the year.  5 degrees at night.  Wind chill below zero.  Ice cream???  ABSOLUTELY!  Why would we eat ice cream on a day like this, you ask?  Well, to celebrate!  Edith has been learning how to read and today she read a list of the first 25 words in Spanish for the first time!  She's been trying to read the list of words all week.  Finally today she got every word!  To celebrate, Edith, two mooses, and I went to McDonald's for ice cream!  

elephants and real, from-the-clouds snow

Zorro left. I am so sad without him. He found out that a kid in my class was going to Colorado for a week and he asked to go. At first I told him no, that he's too young to go on such a far away trip by himself. But then he told me that he wanted to see real snow. I reminded him that he already went to Wintergreen last year and saw snow. He said that he wanted to see real, FROM-THE-CLOUDS snow so that other snow didn't count. And he also pointed out that he's a global fox who travels internationally, so clearly he can handle a little skiing trip to Colorado. So I told him he could go. He's coming back on Friday but that seems like so far away from now. What will I do without him????

In other news, Miguel, Peter, the Adams, and I went to see this National Geographic photographer speak at PVCC last night. He showed us all of his photos of elephants in Africa and they were amazing. It was totally cool and the photographer was really funny! His name is Michael Nichols and he does lots of work for National Geographic! This is one of his beautiful pictures! He talked a lot about helping to save the elephants there. He gave us this website to go to if you're interested in helping:  www.savetheelephants.org.

mummies and pyramids

When we were in Egypt one of the coolest things that we did was see the mummies! Here's one of the totally cool mummies! It was so awesome to see how preserved they were, after all this time! How they figured out the perfect process of mummification, I would love to know!
We also got to go inside the pyramids! It was awesome in there! It was kind of freaky at first because as you're going in, there's a bunch of people coming out, gasping for air and exclaiming in desperation, "AIR! FINALLY! I CAN BREATHE!" That's never a good sign. If you get claustrophobic, I would never recommend going inside a pyramid. It is hot. It is stuffy. It is cramped. It is small spaces times not much air times creepy feeling of entering a gigantic ancient structure with a dead pharaoh inside from 3,500 years ago. All of that equals just one thing:

AWESOME! TOTALLY SWEET! LET'S DO IT AGAIN!!!!!

Here's Kathryn in one of the passageways.
See how cramped some of the passageways can be? That's Ali, so imagine us as adults bending over to fit down there!

We're pointing at the exact center of the pyramid!

This is the room where the mummy is. It used to be filled with treasures until the tomb robbers stole them. You can see where the mummy is behind me. It's where that light is coming from.
Here we are in the center of the pyramid! Kathryn's taking the picture!

These are just some random pictures of the hieroglyphics and pictures that they drew all over the walls of EVERYTHING - the tombs, the temples, EVERYTHING. They are so beautiful!

Egypt according to Zorro...

okayyyy so first of all i'm zorro.  i'm the ridiculously cute fox with the red sweater.  i am also probably the luckiest fox in the world cuz i got to go to egypt!  oh and since i don't have any fingers, it's very hard to make capital letters on the keyboard...so i'm not using any.  it's not that i don't know where capitals go.  i do.  but it's hard to push shift and then a letter at the same time.  my legs aren't that long you know.  oh yeah, we're off topic here.  back to egypt...

during the camel ride, beth stuffed me in her backpack.  she said it was to protect me from evil spitting camels, but i didn't see anything evil about her camel at all, except that it kept sniffing the other camel.  i think beth just didn't want me to have fun.  so when they got off the camels, i fussed and whined and complained about missing the whole experience.  my good friends rana and ali found a little camel just my size for me to ride!

rana gave me drinks when i was thirsty.  and i was thirsty a lot!  good ol rana.

i even got to kiss a sphinx!  well kind of...

i at least got to ride on one finally!  my dream came true!  i rode on a sphinx!  i rode on a lion too, but more on that later...

we rode on a tilting, swaying boat that gave me great seasickness.  i thought i was going to die.  i held on for dear life but i almost died.  really.

this is me climbing for safety high up.  i thought it would be better up there.  it wasn't.

this is my delicious lunch.  everyone told me my stomach would feel better if i would just eat something.  so i did.  a chocolate bar and a coke.  i didn't really feel any better but the chocolate bar was great!

okay so this is when i rode on a lion!  it was great fun!  the lion was really nice...

until he tried to eat me.  it took three people with experience in lion-wrestling to free me from his evil clutches.  i learned a valuable lesson in egypt.  when a lion says to you, "come closer, don't worry, i won't eat you," [use all capitals here:] don't believe him!

welcome home

So today when I passed through customs in New York, the officer looked at my passport, smiled, and said, "Welcome home." I had a very strange reaction to it because I had such a wonderful time in Egypt, I didn't want to leave. I was almost offered a teaching job in Egypt and I gladly would have stayed. I liked just about everything about Egypt and I was very, very sad to go home. Yet somehow, when the officer handed me my passport with the pleasant greeting of "Welcome home," those two beautiful words had such a nice calming sound to them. It is a nice feeling to know you're back in your country with everything familiar around you, where you feel you belong.

It reminds me of how much I love this world we live in - this planet, with all of its beauty and wonder and life. Yet I can picture Jesus standing at the "Customs and Border Control" entrance to heaven, looking down at the Book of Life. I see him looking up and smiling at me with his eyes and I hear his voice say, "Welcome home." I wonder if it will feel the same way - the feeling of no matter how amazing it was where you've been, this is where you belong.

So now that I've been awake for 25 hours (not counting the hour I slept on the plane from New York to Richmond when I didn't even know the plane took off! I'm not kidding...I fell asleep when we boarded the plane and woke up when we were at the gate in Richmond. Weird.), I'm going to take a shower and go to bed.

Welcome home.

Around our hotel

Here's a view of the Nile River from our hotel.  You can see the Nile with the felucca boat sailing, then the farm land, the mountain where the Valley of the Kings is located (where all the tombs of the kings are).

Here we are:
Sign leading to the temples and museums:
Kathryn driving the horse for the carriage ride we took on the way to the Luxor Museum.
Ms. Forman and I in the carriage of the carriage ride.
The hotel pool at the Nile Palace in Luxor.
Me and the Nile.
Kathryn and the Nile:
Kathryn with all of her Egyptian money!
The main street of Luxor, Egypt.

Luxor Day 2 - Luxor Temple

Luxor Temple was beautiful too, but smaller than Karnak Temple.  See the post below for Karnak Temple since we went to that one first.  Here we are in front of Luxor Temple:

This is the line of sphinxes with lion heads that leads to Karnak Temple.  The sphinxes at Karnak Temple have ram heads.  
Ms. Newman and I standing in a HUGE archway!
The Christians from the time of the persecution of Nero (4th century AD) came to the temples to hide.  They painted this on one of the walls of the temple.  
Here's one of the Egyptians with Ms. Forman.
This was a head statue of Ramses II.  I'm pretending to whisper in his ear, but it's all an illusion.  His NOSE is really bigger than my head...I'm just standing closer to the camera so it looks like I'm proportionally larger.
Huge columns at Luxor Temple:
This is a statue of King Tut with his young wife.  
One of the beautiful sphinxes!
Here's the beautiful Luxor Temple at night!  It looks absolutely amazing!

Luxor Day 2 - Karnak Temple

The second day in Luxor we went to the Karnak Temple, the biggest temple in the world.  It was built for the king of the Egyptian gods, Amun-Ra.  This temple had four entrances - exactly East, West, North, and South.  It led to the Nile River to the west and there was a line of sphinxes that led there.  To the south, it led to another temple, the Luxor Temple, also by a line of sphinxes.  There were 365 sphinxes total.  Here are Kathryn and I in the temple:

This was an obelisk that Queen Hatshepsut built.  She built another one too, an identical match but it fell down.  Here's the story about why it fell down: 

It took 14,000 people and 20 years to build one obelisk.  So Queen Hatshepsut ordered two to be built.  Well when the people where almost done with one obelisk (only 7 months left to go), it broke and they couldn't finish it.  The queen was very mad, and ordered them to make a replacement but it had to be finished at the same time that the original was going to be finished.  So they basically had only 7 months to make the same obelisk.  They did it, but it's because they switched from the harder rock of granite to another type of cheap granite which is softer.  So anyway, they achieved this huge feat (one of the wonders of ancient times), but because it was made out of sandstone, it didn't last.  It fell over in the temple.  This obelisk is the best preserved (it's the twin of the fallen one).  It has a cool story about why it was preserved better than all the others:

King Thutmosis I built two giant obelisks and when his daughter Queen Hatshepsut became queen, she wanted to contribute something huge to the temple too.  That's why she had two more obelisks built.  Well her brother Thutmosis III was jealous and wanted to be king so he killed his sister and tried to destroy everything that she had done.  (See the post below for more information about that!)  He tried to destroy this obelisk but he couldn't because it was too big and too solid.  So he built an outer wall around it to cover it up so nobody could see it.  The end result?  Instead of destroying his sister's obelisk, he ended up preserving it!  It's in fantastic condition!  Here's me looking at the huge obelisk:
This is me being a statue.  I'm the goddess of water (see my t-shirt?):
Here we are trying to pushing over some of the columns.  It didn't work.

This is the cartouche for the king of the Egyptian gods - Amun-Ra:
There were 130 of these columns built by Ramses II and Seti I.  They are ENORMOUS.  They were not built out of one big piece of rock, but they were built in sections.  The ancient Egyptians would build the columns in the quarry.  Then they piled up hills of sand around the place where the column would go.  They pulled and pushed the columns to the hills of sand and then dropped them in their place to put them in a standing position.  They did the same thing with the obelisks, except the obelisks were cut from ONE piece of stone.  Here's a picture looking up at the columns in wonder:
I still don't understand how they were able to build something like this.  It's just HUGE.  Words can't describe how big it is.  
Here are my sister and I in amazement:
This is the statue of Ramses II who built a lot of things in this temple.  He was called the "busy king" because he had 52 wives and over 200 children.  Here he is with his favorite wife, Nefertari, at his feet:
This is part of the line of sphinxes:
Here's Kathryn sitting with a sphinx.  He had the head of a ram.  On the other side of the temple, the path leading to the Luxor Temple, the sphinxes have lion heads.  But here, they have ram heads.
All four of us sitting with sphinxes:

The Egyptian number system!  The made tables and charts to keep track of things!
Here are Ms. Forman, Kathryn, me, and our guide, Wael (pronounced "while")!  We LOVED Wael!  We wish he could have come with us to Aswan!
Here's me with a wall of hieroglyphics and pictures!


The sphinxes at the temple entrance.