Hurghada - Departure of Holger

Touristic Promenade ....

... vs Sheraton Street

Well, without my daily traumas, my life has become quite quiet – weekdays, I do my stocks and shares in the morning and 90 minutes of learning Egyptian Arabic; in the afternoons I go to the beach and read and swim; in the evenings I check my shares again, watch some TV and work on my novel (“Time Tells”). Weekends are similar, except I work on my novel in the morning because the stock market is closed, and spend a bit longer on the beach.

My life will become even quieter now (maybe!), because Holger, the last of my two visitors, left today. We spent his last evening exploring Sheraton Street. I was very well behaved and didn’t insist that we go to the KFC.

Holger was buying T-shirts for his children, so Esmat suggested we go to Cleopatra (I think that’s the right name!), which is a fixed price shop with reasonable prices. We went to Mamsha/Touristic Promenade earlier in the week, but the fixed price shop there was fairly expensive.

Sheraton Street is a chaotic and busy street where taxis probably comprise two-thirds of the traffic; the taxis honk continually as they tout for business. The shop owners do try to grab your attention to get your custom, but it was worse in Luxor when I was there some years ago now and the hassling was not really too extreme (I thought).

At night, Sheraton Street is full of lights – in the shape of palm trees – and there’s a constant stream of people walking about. This was in contrast to the Touristic Promenade (aka Mamsha), which was quiet, less hassle, had predominantly tourist shops, and was relatively expensive.

Holger has a dodgy knee at the moment (I think I mentioned this before), so he noticed that the pavements were very high; you are continually leaping up and down as you cross the side roads. Walking in the Touristic Promenade/Mamsha was a lot easier – also because it was largely pedestrianized.

To cross Sheraton Street itself, you just need to pick a time when the driver coming towards you looks less likely to run you over than others; generally, I have to say, the drivers are polite and the don’t drive so badly. Having said that, the majority of cars do have dents!

For the Brits who are reading, it was interesting to see that there was a Costa Coffee but no Starbucks. Of course, McDonalds was there as well as KFC – I’ve now seen three KFCs in Hurghada, so I’m obviously living in the right place.

We ate in a place that had a varied menu – Holger had his usual Pizza for fear of getting food poisoning; I had a steak with mushroom sauce. I commented to Holger that they didn’t ask me how I wanted the steak and he reminded me that there would be no choice in Egypt (they do not like blood). There was a variety of fresh fruit juices, so I took a strawberry juice which was the reddest drink I’ve ever had (but very tasty). The steak was 52 LE and the juice something like 15 LE.

Egypt, well, Hurghada at least, has a lot of wild dogs and cats, so there were three cats wandering around in the restaurant area (which was outside; it didn’t feel cold, now I come to think of it, although I was wearing a jacket); the cats didn’t really bother us, though. On the way home after the evening at the Touristic Promenade, Esmat pointed out a fox that was running across the road in Sahl Hasheesh. For some reason, I was quite surprised to see a fox.

Anyway, before we finally settled on the restaurant where we ate, we’d sat down in a more Egyptian-looking café. However, the more we looked at the menu, the more confused we got because we didn’t really know what anything was and the prices were so low that we were scared (well, I was, at any rate) that maybe the items were snacks rather than a proper meal (it was a café rather than a restaurant). No doubt, as I live here longer, I will get to know which places to go to, but at the moment I’m no better than a tourist.

Holger will be home as I write this, so my further explorations will be under different circumstances! I still have a lot to learn.