First Week

Pharmacy Selling Viagra in Old Town, Sahl Hasheesh

 

Well, I’ve had my first full week here and there are some things that I haven’t managed to bring up in the blog yet, so I thought I would just give you a quick list of what’s different for me, now that I’m here in Egypt:

 

1. It’s dark by 17:30, but is light quite early. I find myself getting up earlier and being tired earlier (not sure yet whether the being tired is due to all the new information I’m having to absorb).
2. A few of the pathways have the occasional broken or missing tile, but I was struck by how much work it must be to keep the resort looking good when I saw a guy sweeping the pathway – there was so much sand! So, for them to keep it so clean is quite an achievement.
3. I haven’t had a single cup of coffee – instead I am forming an addiction to chocolate-flavoured milk (I’m using a French brand of chocolate bought at Spinneys), which I make at home (since a milkshake down the road cost me 4 GBP!). I would quite like to have a coffee, but it’s too hot. Maybe in January…
4. I had a banana boat today – instead of a banana sliced longways in half with three balls of ice cream covered with cream and caramel sauce (it advertised it as caramel rather than chocolate sauce), it was lots of sliced banana drowning in a sea of caramel sauce with a single scoop of ice cream and some apple. Still tasty, though!
5. There are many Russians in Sahl Hasheesh, so a lot of the signposts and shop signs are also in Russian. I thought it was Greek at first, and then I realised…
6. You can buy Viagra over the counter and it’s on special offer at the moment.
7. I still haven’t solved my TV problem yet (no sound), so I’m watching UK TV for free via my laptop. Sometimes the connection is good and sometimes I need to run into my bedroom to jolt it to reconnect. I need to (re-)start learning Arabic!
8. I’m settling into a routine of working in the morning from my balcony, which is quite pleasant, and then going off for a swim once the morning’s work is done. This is not so different from what I did in Switzerland, only the weather was suitable only for about 15 days in the year. I hope my writing routine will run something like this once I’m finished at Novo Nordisk. At the moment, I can’t imagine getting bored of swimming, but let’s see…
9. The water temperature just now is very pleasant – I mentioned that it felt cold when you first went in, but it must actually be around 27-8 degrees. Pencil in October or November for a visit, that would be my current recommendation.
10. I was worried before I came that the wind in Sahl Hasheesh would be annoying and limit my ability to swim. In fact, I barely notice the wind. Although the sea has little waves, they aren’t generally – at this time of year at any rate – choppy enough to hinder my swimming.
11. Apart from going to Spinneys, I haven’t ventured outside of the immediate vicinity of my flat. I will explore the rest of Sahl Hasheesh when it’s too cold to swim (after all, there’s no hurry). Tomorrow, I’m forced to go into town to get a document notarised, so let’s see how that goes…

 

Financially, it’s still too early to say whether I’ve allowed enough to live on, although, of course, it’s easy to adapt spending to your means (to a certain extent). My main worry is that the taxi fares really mount up if you want the freedom to go into town whenever you want; consequently, travel could theoretically end up being a greater expense than my annual travel card would be in Switzerland. If I have a busy social life (not that I have one at all at the moment!), I could find it compromised by the cost of getting to places by taxi. Maybe once I’ve found my way around, it won’t be as much as I think because I will find ways round it; or maybe it’s not an issue because I won’t need to use taxis more than twice a week. Time will tell!