After a trip to Luxor we returned to Cairo and the Cosmopolitan Hotel last night. It seemed a bit like a return home; at least the musty smell and vintage German elevator are familiar. And as we ventured out for dinner tonight, we remembered the Cairo traffic.

Our first two weeks in Egypt have been very full with classes at the American University at Cairo, visits to museums and Pharonic sites, and dinner with all the students in small groups of five or six. The last we accomplished by taking them to a well-known tourist destination, FellaFella's. Jimmy Carter signed the menu when he ate there! I can recommend the fallafell and desserts. Several students ventured so far as to eat pigeon, but I did not. By the fifth set the waiters seemed amused by our return.

We've seen THE pyramids, THE Sphinx, lots of tombs, several temples, and thousands of ancient mud-brick walls. Oddly I was particularly impressed with the bricks; perhaps because I've heard about them so long in Sunday School. In Luxor we hiked over from one temple to the Valley of the Kings: about an hour in the hot, dry sun. From now and forever more my students in Religion 121 will hear about the way St. Olaf students murmured as they wandered in the desert. Of course by the end of the day they were congratulating each other on their accomplishment. For my part, I had a tuna and onion sandwich for lunch in memory of the Hebrews and their longing for leeks and onions.

Cairo had recently earned the title "most polluted city." This shows on the buildings which are almost uniforming sooty and in the haze that hangs over the entire metropolitan area. Today we saw it as we returned from a "free day" trip to the Red Sea for swimming and resting in the sun. In that direction, through the eastern desert, we did not see the stunningly sudden transaction from the lush green land where the Nile used to flood to the desert, but we did see the equally stunning density of housing both in the secure neighborhoods and those comprised of unauthorized housing thrown up on former crop land. Again and again we hear that over-population is the problem Egypt must solve and yet no one has a plan for how to do it.

Tomorrow our class at AUC moves on to Coptic Christianity. I'm eager to add to my small knowledge of this ancient and still vibrant community. I plan to take students who are interested back to the Coptic Museum where the three of us spent part of last Sunday.