Happy Halloween!

Though Halloween doesn't exist in Egypt, we did find time to celebrate. We took a one-day break from excavation on Saturday-Sunday to head up to Luxor for the annual Chicago House Halloween Party. Chicago House invites all the Luxor excavations plus Edfu (the Director, Ray, being an OI colleague of Nadine’s) for drinks and dancing at their beautiful house. It’s not even really a house- it’s more like a walled compound of multiple buildings with gardens and even a tennis court. We had a wonderful time at the party. I wore devil horns and a tail ;)

We took the opportunity while we were in Luxor to handle visa extensions, which was a surprisingly quick process. We also did some shopping, picking up both gifts and necessities (like chocolate bars!), and ate a lot of good food. I think I’ll be doing my Christmas shopping in Luxor again this year. We buy all our souvenirs at the fair trade centers, which sell crafts made by local women or Bedouin, who receive fair prices for their work. We also had a lot of fun playing around Luxor Temple- we pretended to be tourists and took funny photos. We’ll be heading back to Luxor at the end of the week for the Muslim holiday Eid. We’ll get a few days off work to travel, and we are very much looking forward to it.

On our way to Luxor, we saw camels in a pickup truck!

We had some fun running around Luxor Temple:

Here's Janelle having some fun in Luxor Temple:

And here's Kat checking out some reconstructed columns:

The Battle of Kadesh!