I am back

Hello Everyone,

I am back from upper Egypt and successfully returned safely from my building and have suffered no injuries. I know some of you are anticipating me to talk about the build and what i did and what i got from it, but i am sorry to disappoint you all that i cant. Its not even that i wont its seriously i was in awe and i dont think i can express it in the form of writing. I will however gladly tell all of you about it when i return and can do it in person and be able to use the proper hand movements to describe things!

I will give you some minor demographics however. We went to a village in Minya called Tayeba ("Tie-ay-ba") and it was really really amazing. We worked on a house that just needed a few brick walls so we were able to brick up a wall with some cement. I have now learned how to mix cement manually and i am not sure if that will ever prove useful in my life but it was fun learning! Other than that it was nice and i enjoyed it a lot and its really given me perspective on stuff...

My weekend is what i will talk about. It is the end of the semester at the seminary and they had a nice all day fellowship/party thingy and they let me join in. So it was saturday and me with about 40 other students get on this bus at 9am to head over to this place called Wadi Degla (Waa-dee Deg-la) it was this nature perserve...haha and when i say nature perserve i mean a desert. It was really beautiful and amazing. It was like a 10kilometer walking path in between these huge mountains. It was nice and hot (thank God), and i got to just talk with some people and everything. I had a really really cool conversation with this one kid Remy about religion which i enjoyed. Anyway after the walking we headed back to the bus and went to the seminary. There we hung outside did more talking and i was able to eat my first sugar cane! It was really really nuts trying to eat them. What you do is you bite and strip the green layer (i guess its the bark of it) and then once that happens you can bite into and chew on the sweet goodness inside. Its very trying on your teeth and jaw and i definitely felt it in the morning, haha.

After eating and playing some chess with people we ate a delicious lunch of BBQ'ed meat and macaroni beh bashamael. Bashamael is a type of creamed topping you put in the form of a casserole. Then there is macaroni with ground beef(or lamb) and sauce. Basically its delicious. After eating we had a football/soccer game and that is always fun. Afterwards i went back to my room where i then went to my cousins to babysit. Overall it was an excellent day!

So i will post more eventually on stuff but i have some reports to write up and we have vacation tomorrow for the holidays! There is a Muslim Eid i believe and i dont really know much about it at hte moment i am sorry, i know it has somethign to do with slaughtering a lot of animals. There is so much livestock in cairo now awaiting the day to be killed on wednesday? maybe thursday? i dont know. I feel bad though because i live up the street from a butcher where tied the street is a cow, sheep, and...camel. I have never eaten camel and i dont think i will begin...the poor thing is a baby too :'(

anyway tomorrow my little sister joyce is coming and i have to mentally prepare myself for this three week headache that i will soon have to endure....haha joking! haha it should be fun so i'll post later hopefully in the week about what i do. Good bye all.

I hope Joe got to read this