We saw A LOT in Egypt…so much so that I’m in a little bit of overload for facts and dates and pharaohs and gods…and honestly if you want to know all the cool stories you can Google them…or just come to Egypt yourself!   But, in order to not gloss over an entire week of really cool things, I figured I’d pop a few photos in here while I tell you about the strangest thing I learned here…

I’m not sure about everyone else, but I find it really annoying to go to something cool and old (like the Colosseum or Notre Dame) and see that walls scratched up with “Kevin loves Tess 2012” or whatever.  If you absolutely have to graffiti, why not save it for the bathroom stall? (It was good enough for Jenny…)  So here I was entering grandpa mode (aka “get off my lawn…”) to fuss that people who had drawn on the temple walls that were two to five thousand years old and had maintained the original paint color in some areas despite all odds and Nile River floods…and our guide enlightened us.  Apparently, graffiti is as old as these tombs and temples almost!

There are ancient Egyptians who wrote on the walls of the Step Pyramid, the first pyramid ever built, basically saying, “wow, this is so cool and old!”…because when this site was visited in the 20-something dynasty of Egypt, the Step Pyramid was already around 2,000 years old!   Also, when the Christians came into Egypt, they tried to paint over some of the temple scenes with saints to show that they old gods were no longer worshipped…

So I guess I can’t really blame people too much for the human nature that seems to be ingrained in us since the start of time…but if you absolutely must leave your mark like this, please at least as well done as a work of the old masters and don’t just phone it in with “John wuz here…”