Nile Sunset
All of these Egypt postings took place over the last two weeks, I will be posting one or two per day until I get caught back up with real time.
Celebrating Christmas morning on a train was a little bit different than what I am used to but I’m in Egypt and I couldn’t expect a normal Christmas. Once in Aswan we got a bus to our hotel where the high temperature for the day was 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Most of the group then took an optional add on tour to Abu Simbel but Janelle and I decided that it was too expensive and we were too tired after all of our traveling to hop on another flight to look at a monument for an hour and then fly back. Instead we spent the day relaxing by the pool and walking around the nearby markets in Aswan.
While in the markets a man approached me and we had the following conversation:
Man: Welcome to Aswan, come and look in my shop.
Me: No thank you.
Man: I have the very best deals…
Me: No thank you.
Man: Please come and look in my shop.
Me: No thank you.
Man: But I said please…
Me: (While laughing) And I said no thank you.
The markets here are very similar to the ones in Morocco and Turkey where people stand in front of their shops shouting at you to come and buy their goods that are identical to every other shop on the street. As usual I wasn’t interested in anything that anyone was selling.
Sam, the Tour Guide, suggested that if we wanted any alcohol we should go to the duty free shop down the street and pick some up because alcohol can be difficult to find in some places in the country. With everyone else away for the day we figured we would go and get some for us and the rest of Janelle’s friends that were also on the trip. We walked to the liquor store was but found it closed. A man who was badly dressed and one lazy eye told us that the duty free shop was closed but there was another shop open upstairs and started to lead us into a very rundown building. At first I didn’t want to follow him into the building but I saw a sign for a hotel in the building and felt a little reassured. The man led us up several shady flights of stairs and I started to feel uncomfortable again and decided that I wouldn’t climb past the current set of steps. Fortunately this was the level the man was leading us to and we turned the corner to a bar. We didn’t want a bar, we wanted a liquor store, so we thanked the man for his help and quickly ran out of the building and back to the hotel.
When the rest of the group got back from their day trip we met up with them again and boarded a boat to take us to a Nubian restaurant accessible only by water further down the Nile. The restaurant served tagine (I have a heavy note of sarcasm here because I ate so much tagine in Morocco, I would be happy to never hear the word again, let alone eat it). It was however a pretty decent tagine as far as tagines go. After dinner there was a dance show with whirling dervish dancers that ended with a congo style line around the room that got half of the people in the restaurant up on stage dancing together to the music.
The only thing that was traditionally Christmas about the day were some songs I played on my laptop while we sat by the Nile watching the sun set over a couple of drinks. Even though it wasn’t a traditional Christmas I really enjoyed myself.
I have started to get a cough, I think it is from too much time on a plane and then a train, I hope that I’m not actually getting sick and that the cough will go away soon, it’s really annoying.
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