This morning we did some really cool stuff. We packed up and left from our hotel (thank goodness—the air conditioning in our room was terrible! Bleh!) and we visited the Cairo citadel. We went to one part of town and saw an Arab synagogue (seems kind of contradictory doesn’t it?) which was really ornate and it was pretty cool, and we also intruded on an Orthodox worship service of some sort (I’m not sure why we even went in…I felt bad). It was neat, though—it had a very distinct mystic feel to it with the incense, the singing, the echoes, the vaulted ceilings…it wasn’t the same spirit I feel in LDS chapels but I felt that God was pleased with them anyway for doing the best that they could (the girls all looked really pretty in their veils they wore inside too). After that we visited the Muhammad Ali Mosque, which isn’t in operation anymore but it was one of my favorite places we went on this trip. As we went into the courtyard we took off our shoes, then went inside the Mosque itself (which was gorgeous—both inside and out!) Our guide is Muslim, so he explained the daily prayers that he takes part in and what each part of the mosque was for (there were four distinct features that will be found in every mosque: 1) a niche towards Mecca; 2) domed ceilings for acoustics; 3) a stairway to climb for giving sermons; and 4) a minaret from which to administer the daily prayers). It was neat to see how important worship was to him—I’m much more impressed with the Muslims and their devotion than I was before. They truly care about God. After we took some pictures there we went to another mosque (the Al-Nasir Muhammad Mosque) close by (modeled after the Blue Mosque in Turkey), and there our guide (Islam was his name, by the way) told us about the Five Pillars of Islam. He also explained a few other miscellaneous things (like why their women wear veils). We got a really neat view of Cairo from that Mosque, with the Pyramids just visible in the background. It was a really neat morning.
After that we drove for quite a while to get back to the area where Mt. Sinai is located (wouldn’t you know it—it’s in the Sinai Peninsula). We stopped at a couple places that the Israelites would’ve had to stop along the way (Oases)—there were just a few trees by all three of them, I can’t imagine what a struggle that kind of a journey would have been for them. Wow. Bro. Judd (my Old Testament teacher) had some guys re-enact the story of the water at Marah and that was pretty entertaining, plus we met some Bedouin children, but other than that it wasn’t much to see. Just kind of fun to contemplate. We got to the Morgenland Hotel sometime early evening, had dinner, and went straight to bed (we’re getting up really early the next morning). Au revoir!
No comments:
Post a Comment