Ok, so I'm back now. 2 week trip. Had a lot of fun.
We barely made it through the steps of Umrah. I brought my wife and 20 month old child with me which really slowed me down which meant we were walking barefoot on marble floors for like 3 hours straight carrying our son so he didn't get lost in the crowd. It was the first time my feet have been bruised. Then i slept for about a day trying to recover. We stayed in Mecca for 2 days then made our way to Medina which is the city in which Islam expanded from, home to what we call the Prophet Mohamed's Mosque which is also very sacred to us. (Our 3 sacred places being Mecca, the Prophet's Mosque in Medina and Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem- not the dome of the rock, mind you) Anyhow we went to Medina and stayed for a day and prayed our 5 daily prayers there. On the way to Medina i always see a "Beware of Monkeys" sign but i have never seen any and couldn't imagine monkeys living in such a barren desert. So on the way back i was talking to the driver and asked him if he had ever seen any of these monkeys and he said he personally hadn't, but he had heard stories of them. About 30 minutes later we saw a bunch of cars stopped on the side of the highway surrounded by, low and behold, BABOONS! First time in my life to see a wild baboon. It was like going on a safari side trip in the middle of our pilgrimage. We fed them some bread and saw their bright red buttockses. Mind you, the ones you see in the zoo have much prettier cheeks to sit on. The ones we saw looked burnt from the blazing sun and/or domination quarrels between the males. It was kinda yucky tbh, but the monkeys themselves were pretty. Enough about monkey asses, we fed them some bread and we through a packet of BBQ sauce out there and got to see them open it up and enjoy the goodness inside. Then at the end the driver puts the car in drive so the doors lock automatically and the sound scared one of them that was sitting next to my door. He jumped back as if he was insulted by the noise then jumped at me and smacked his face into the window. Scared the crap out of me tbh, but no damage was done. We were out there, though. came back from medina and stayed another week in Mecca praying all the prayers we could in the Holy Mosque there. I read much Quran in the Arabic language and have becoming much more literate thankfully. I prayed and worshipped God alone with pretty much nothing else to do, which was a very relaxing vaccation. We just got back to Egypt and are getting outselves readjusted. It was a wonderful trip, we had lots of fun and felt we had fulfilled a part of what we owe to He who provides us with everything.
I'm too tired to even proof read so forgive my unedited ranting. Also-
Weather was actually nicer in Saudi Arabia than it is in Egypt. We're having a heat wave atm and people are having a lot of trouble.
<3 from Meso
