Home Safe

I'm back...it feels good to sleep in your own bed again!

We had a great last day in Cairo. Afaf and Hassan picked us up from the hotel and took us to the Khan el Kalili market after all...and they were right about the parking..it was chaos at best but we got a spot. I'm really glad we went! It was a cool place to shop...I only wish we could have had more time to leisurely roam through, but for the sake of my wallet it is good we didn't! We shopped for a couple hours and had a really good lunch/dinner at 3pm(our last Egyptian meal, sniff...)

I bought a really cool Arabic guitar..it is called an oud and it is a kind of lute. It was a pain to lug with me the whole way home but will be an awesome souvenir and hopefully I will figure out how to play it...I'm not sure I'll be able to find enough info about it because it's kind of obscure. I did manage to find out what to tune the strings to but it isn't the same standard tuning of a 6-string and the oud has 11 strings so regular 6-string chords won't apply either...that and there are no frets which would require real precision to play and hit the right spots. It may just become decoration, but that will be fine too. I also bought some perfume. Sue got this 40 pound marble "mummification organ jar" it will look cool in her house and thankfully we managed to fit it in her luggage!

Afaf and Hassan took us back to their house to wait for our plane..it left Cairo at 4am so we slept at their house until 12:30 and they drove us to the airport . We were very lucky to have them to take care of us on our last day!

The flight home was looooong. I can't sleep in a sitting position so wasn't able to get any sleep on the flight to Frankfurt and then there was the 6.5 hour layover in the Frankfurt airport. At least there is enough stuff in the Frankfurt airport to entertain us a bit. We both bought our bodyweight in German chocolate and Haribo(German licorice . The last flight to Calgary was the worst part: 10.5 hours cramped on an airplane. By that time we were exhausted and sick of sitting around...not to mention we had been awake the better part of 48 hours. Guy, Sue's husband, picked us up from the airport and I was so glad to be home. My house has never looked so good. My wonderful mommy left me flowers and stocked my fridge so I had some dinner and unpacked a bit. I wouldn't let myself go to bed before 9pm so I could switch myself over to the different time zone and avoid waking up at 3am wide awake. Despite my efforts though, I awoke at 4:30 wide awake but remembered that Sue gave me an emergency Imovane before we left the plane so gulped that down and slept until 10am. I still feel a little crappy...but should be back to normal in a day or two. I think a shower will help...I wanted one so bad last night but remembered to late that I turned my water tank down to vacation setting and it wasn't hot enough...I settled for a quick hot tub instead.


THE PYRAMIDS

AFAF AND HASSAN

THE WESTERN DESERT































































ASWAN


















NILE CRUISE
































VARIOUS TEMPLES: ESNA,KOMO-ONU,EDFU,KARNAK, ABU SIMBEL, AND LUXOR





PARASAILING

SUNSETS


MY 30TH BIRTHDAY DINNER LUXOR
SHARM EL-SHEIKH
CAIRO


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Farewell Cairo...We'll miss your honking...

The end grows near...

Back again in Cairo...complete with death-defying taxi ride...this one was unique in that our bags were tossed haphazzardly upon a "roofrack"(I use that term loosely) with no form of tie-downs other then our driver occasionally reaching his hand out the window to ensure they were still up there...I'm still not convinced he cared...but we, despite the odds against us, arrived at the hotel in one piece... with our luggage!
Sue and Deb:1 Cairo: 0

Sharm El-Sheikh was amazing..it was very relaxing...5 days to sleep in and suntan and feast upon the buffets!!!

We went snorkelling again the next morning at 9:30pm when it was high tide and the sun was still low over the ocean which gave good light. It was 100X better the the first time!!. You don't realize how many fish are in there until you put your head under the water...hundreds of them and the most brilliant colours!! There are neon fish, turquoise fish ,huge schools of bright blues ones...I can't really do it justice. I brought a underwater disposable camera with me and before I got in I didn't think I would be able to fill 27 pictures of fish....but I could have taken 100 pictures easy. I must have seen 25 different types of fish and each was more colourful then the next.

Yesterday me and Sue went parasailing! It was Sue's idea and she was just going to do it alone but when we went to sign her up there was a tandom para-sailing option for a cheap price so I joined in! Para-sailing is when you are attached to a parachute which is drug behind a boat with a rope that soars you about 100feet in the air. I was really scared before we took fight but once we were up it was really fun. It felt like you were just floating in the air...like at the top of one of those amusement rides where they raise you up and hang you there for a minute while you wait for it to drop you to the ground in a free fall....It was funny cause it was Sue's idea and the whole time she was the one who was terrified...When we looked afterwards at the pictures they had taken with my camera and zoomed in on our faces: Sue had a look of shear terror on hers and I am smiling....it is really funny.

We took a bus back to Cairo today..a 6 hour cramped bus..it is nice to be off of it!!! I still have to get organized for our trip home tomorrow. Aunt Afaf is picking us up at 11am tomorrow and is going to entertain us for the day. I'm not sure what exactly is in store. I really wanted to go to the Khan a Khalili Souk and do some souvenir hunting but is sounds like Afaf can't take us there because there is no parking and there is no time for us to do it before she gets us...which is my lesson not to leave all my shopping for the last day. At least I picked up a few things in Luxor so I won't come home completely empty handed. Afaf and Hassan are nice enough to take us for the day and drive us to the airport at midnight so that will be a good trade off. She said she can probably take us to some shops for some of the specific things I want and get us a fair price, I held off getting perfume because the prices are so inflated, as is everything else in the tourist areas, so hopefully I will come home with some.

Our plane leaves Cairo at 4am(what the...) and then we have a 6.5 hour layover in Frankfurt before our flight home. We get back to Calgary at 3:55pm. It will be nice to be home again...seeing how poor so many people are here and how little they have makes me very grateful for my house and my city...and most of all: my traffic laws....

Get your hairdryers out and start melting the snow for me...could someone pre-heat my electric blanket....

See you soon...thanks for reading!

Basking in Sharm El-Shiekh

The website  I use to write my posts has defaulted to German and I am unable to fix it so this will be fun....At least I have done enough posts to know what buttons to hit.

We are into day 2 of Sharm El Sheikh...all I can say is WOW. This is easily the nicest resort I have ever been to. It is so beautiful here. Sharm is a resort town on the tip of the Sinai peninsula surrounded by coral reefs and the Red Sea. Our resort is the Iberotel Grand Sharm. We got 5 days/4 nights of half-board(breafast and dinner) for about $325 Canadian each...An amazing deal for what we get!!! The buffet dinner and breakfasts are very elaborate...so much food it is overwhelming(I wish I had the stomach of a guy to eat more)...and my favourite: a crepe guy making as many made to order crepes as you can eat!!! We have been undertaking an elaborate food liberating scheme at each buffet so we can eat free lunch...it has become something of an art form with us. They have 4 pools here..one is heated and easy to climb in if you're hot. They have a Gym complete with steam room, sauna and hot tub,a pool guy that walks around and spritzes you off with rose water,a bar, shisha pipe corner,nightly entertainment(if you can stay awake to 9pm which I'm sad to admit we cannot..) and everyday when the guys make our room they cover the bed with rose petals and more origami towel art! The only downside is that all the wait staff are young guys who don't know when to draw the flirting line or how to take a hint...this one guy is so annoying I run into the pool when I see him coming...he can't walk by me without touching my head or my foot, he is invading my personal space....I even told him I am married but that doesn't seem to matter...he must get a lot of action..or at least hit on every girl he sees and play the numbers game.

Our last day in Luxor was good. We found a cool Souk and did some shopping...barganing is interesting here...it involves a screaming match in the street and a faux-walk away but everything is cheap and all parties agree on a price.

Remember back 15 years ago or so, before everything had to be low-fat, and McDonalds had these deep fried apple pies...they were crispy with bubbly flaky delicious pastry and yummy hot apple filling??? Well, they were replaced years ago, to my dismay, in North America with a low-fat baked version which is neither flaking,crispy, deep fried or delicious...We went to a Mcdonalds in Luxor for ice cream and to my surprise they still sell the old-school apple pies!!! I was so excited and made Sue walk all the way back there the next day to get me another one.

On our last night in Luxor we finished dinner and were walking down the road to get a cab...we don't want to pay more than 5 EP for the trip to the hotel so we turned down the first cab. One of those horse drawn carirage guys was stalking us, as they do every day, but he was yelling after us "Anywhere for 5EP" so we asked him to take us to the Sheraton knowing he'd up the price once we agree to his offer(that's what they do with everything and you have to barter them back down)we didn't think he'd actually go as low as 5 but as we were walking down the road while he yelled lower and lower prices at our backs he stopped at 5....so we took a 10 minute carriage ride back to our hotel which was really fun and kinda cool for our last taste of Luxor.

Today we went snorkelling in the Red Sea and it was amazing...it was like swimming in a tropical fish tank...there we fish everywhere and lots of different coloured ones...you could almost reach out and touch them(they're too fast)...we are going to go again tomorrow morning at high tide when the sun is rising and shining right at them for a better look.

We have 2 more days to laze around here then on March 6 we have booked a bus at 1pm back to Cairo(a 6hour ride)We stay one more night in the Nile Hilton and on the 7th Afaf is taking us shopping at the a huge souk in Cairo. Any requests???: Get them in now.

Start melting that snow...I'm coming home soon.