El Andalous - Christmas 2014

My Christmas Tree and Flowers from Orbit

I hope you all had the most enjoyable Christmas ever!

Now that I’ve been here for more than a year, I’m starting to do things for the second time and that also includes Christmas. Last year I had Holger visiting and I was still recovering from my broken foot, although I was pretty much better.

This year, I was fully fit and spoilt for options, so I guess this means that I must have settled in. I ended up with a total of three celebrations (so far). It’s actually not so easy to celebrate a British Christmas over here since the relevant populations are either Europeans, who celebrate on 24th December, or Russians (Orthodox Christians) and Coptic Christians, who celebrate on 7th January.

I put up a small Christmas tree in my flat (shipped over by Geraldine from Switzerland to the UK and then by me from the UK to Egypt!) and this year I bought some extra tinsel for it and some lights, which were available in Spinneys.

My first celebration was the “European” one on Christmas Eve. Joke (pronounced Yoka – yes, I was also surprised when I first saw the name written down!) had organised a celebration at her home for a group here called the Lotus Ladies. As Sheila pointed out, this all sounds fairly exotic, but actually the group was set up for foreign women married to Egyptian men as a support and social group, but now includes any women who wish to join. Various classes and activities are organised via this group as well as a range of discounts in and around Hurghada.

Anyway, Nicole offered me a lift, so I went along with her to celebrate on the 24th. It was a “bring your own” affair, so I took along cupcakes and shortbread. Joke lives in a place called The View in Hurghada and it has stunning views of the Red Sea. The apartment was huge (there were fifteen of us, with one table for ten and one table for five, and we hadn’t even taken up any of the lounge area or the balcony). Really, it was a privilege just to be able to go in and see the view. The block has a swimming pool, a gym, and a beach across the road.

We were a variety of nationalities. There are quite a few Ukrainians here these days escaping from the violence in their home country; the Russians are struggling due to the plummeting rouble. So, for those who think that Egypt is a problem country, perhaps think again!

Anyway, we had a lot of delicious food available to us and it was really a great event (after I’d got over the stress of having to bake! I ran out of butter while cooking my shortbread so I made half with margarine, and I ended up having to throw that half away, they tasted so bad!).

On Christmas day, Nicole, Ajay and I met on the beach as usual for our Arabic session. I can’t remember if I said, but we’re now working our way through a set of 8 CDs and meeting up each day to practice what we’ve learned. I’m coining this as (Egyptian) Arabic on the Beach and it’s really working out quite well.

Because it was Christmas Day, we’d agreed to celebrate by bringing some items to the beach with us. Ajay made a completely wonderful smoothie (it turns out he’s a qualified raw food chef), Nicole made some great pizzas and was kind enough to do some without cheese especially for me (I am so spoilt), and I brought along, yes, you guessed it, cupcakes.

I went for a swim afterwards – it was a beautifully warm day with little wind – and so all in all it was perfect.

In the evening, Safi and I dressed ourselves up and went to the Premier Romance for their buffet dinner, starting off with a drink beforehand and then moving on to the food. We’d discussed and booked with the hotel beforehand, agreeing a price and having our local discount cards photocopied. These were supposed to be at the buffet reception when we arrived, along with a note of the agreed price, so that it would be trouble-free when we were there.

We had a fantastic meal – they had roast chicken and I also had some steak with pepper sauce, fish and chips (mistranslated in reality into crisps in UK English), a curry dish, a kebab... and I can’t remember what else, but also mushroom soup and a selection of desserts.

As you might have guessed, by the time we came to pay, it turned out that the bits of paper with the agreed price had gone missing and we were charged 170 LE instead of 150 LE each (discounted from 220 LE without the residents’ card). It took us almost an hour to get it sorted as they couldn’t work out which manager we’d spoken to who had given us this price and it was, of course, 11pm on Christmas Day. We got there in the end, but even now I don’t know if the manager quoted us the wrong price or whether the guys at the till got it wrong.

In a way, I’ve also had a fourth celebration, because Safi and I followed it up with a buffet breakfast at Premier Romance on Sunday. Again, this was super and included all the things you’d usually expect from an upmarket hotel at breakfast (beef bacon, eggs, beef and turkey sausages, fresh doughnuts, cereal, fried aubergine, juices, various breads, fresh fruit, cheeses, meats, etc). We’d never received a quote for the price, but we got the standard residential discount without any fuss. It’s been ages since I’ve had one of those breakfasts, so it was a great thing to do (it almost made me miss my days at Novo Nordisk!).

All in all, I have to say that I’ve had the most enjoyable time!

Hurghada - All Change!

Hurghada - Carrefour Supermarket (It's Bigger Than it Looks!)

Not only are there improvements afoot in El Andalous, even Hurghada is undergoing quite a few changes of late.

We’ve got two new supermarkets in Hurghada now – Best Way and Carrefour. Carrefour (yes, that’s right, the French supermarket chain) has been rumoured to be opening for about six years. I’d been following all the rumours on the internet before I moved over here – people couldn’t even agree where it was supposed to be, so it was quite hard to get people to believe it was opening. This wasn’t helped by the precise date changing each time the so-called opening day approached. Nevertheless, crowds of people stormed the supermarket on the first day. A Carrefour hypermarket is still rumoured to be planned further north of Hurghada.

The current store is a pretty decent size with a fresh fish counter and bakery and it sells some non-food items, too (eg, kitchen utensils, televisions, etc). Price-wise it is comparable to Spinneys with some different items in store, but less of them, than in Spinneys. Still, it gives residents a bigger choice of things to buy, which is great. Spinneys is still by far the largest supermarket in Hurghada and has the convenience of being situated in a mall.

Best Way is also a reasonable size and sells a wider variety of non-food items than Carrefour and possibly a wider selection of European items, for a cost. You can even buy a bicycle there and it has its own in-house cafe where Safi and I had coffee and cake (well, only I had the cake). I keep on thinking about buying a bicycle, but each time I come to the conclusion that I don’t need it and won’t use it.

Anything that increases the amount of choice is a good thing and both openings have been greeted with much enthusiasm, particularly since many of the Abu Ashara supermarkets have closed.

What’s maybe even more exciting is that the much-rumoured new airport terminal has also opened and is now operational. Hopefully, this will bring lots of people to Hurghada and improve the economy. I guess it will take a while for it to be fully operational with shops and everything and I’ve yet to find out whether it’s now one terminal for International flights and one terminal for local flights or whether it’s one is Arrivals and the other is Departures.

President Sisi even came to open it; all the roads were cleaned and long-outstanding repairs hastily completed so that Hurghada could look good for his arrival. I believe they even removed the speed bumps for when he was here and then put them back as soon as he left!

In Sahl Hasheesh, we now have a wonderful new restaurant called Chez Paul. I had a steak there and it was delicious; I’ve booked a table there with Safi for their New Year’s Eve celebrations as they are charging a reasonable 290 LE (vs 600 LE at El Gusto and 1200+ LE at Premier Romance). I’m looking forward to tomato soup, waldorf salad with shrimps (could have had smoked salmon and caviar), a T-bone steak (could have chosen roast turkey), banana flambé, and an Irish coffee! There’s also seasonal entertainment such as belly dancers.

In addition, El Andalous now has its own small fruit and vegetable store, also selling fresh juices to take away. I believe the prices are quite high, but I guess that’s for the convenience of not having to go all the way to Spinneys in a taxi. We also now have our own pharmacy attached to El Andalous with a doctor available; another valuable service, even if we all hope we won’t need it!

I’m curious to see what the new year will bring. One big rumour on my list to watch is the opening of the Hurghada aquarium in January; going by the artist’s pictures, it looks as if it also contains something like a mini Eden project with a tropical forest in the building as well. We shall see!

El Andalous - Intermediate Egyptian Arabic, Module 1

Fossilised Rock in Sahl Hasheesh

I’m not quite sure how I end up being too busy to do my Arabic on a regular basis; I think it’s partly because I can dictate my own timetable over here and so I’m not obliged to do anything at any particular time if I decide that’s for the best. At the moment, I’m feeling motivated to work on my second novel (Space Shapes; no you didn’t miss it, my first one isn’t out yet!), so I’ve used any spare time to do that rather than my Arabic while the mood takes me.

Anyway, it’s not as if I’m not progressing at all. I finally managed to read all the dialogues in my first book in Arabic script and so I’ve moved on to the first chapter of my Intermediate book. As I said in an earlier blog, this Intermediate book is all in Arabic script; the last time I looked at it, I wasn’t able to read a thing. By the time I started it this time round, I managed to read the first dialogue with hardly any difficulty. Progress!

Fortunately, the Intermediate books starts with very basic vocabulary that I’ve already learned, for the most part (what’s your name, where are you from, the verb “to have”). It’s more thorough than my other book, so rather than just the basic “I’m from England”, you also learn, eg, I’m from North America, South West America, the capital of America (the book is by the American University in Cairo) and the names of a whole bunch of countries focusing on those closest to Egypt for the most part. For me, this is good, because the grammar is familiar and yet I still get to learn a few new words while practicing my reading.

The difficulty now in this first chapter is working out what all the exercises are since they are explained in Arabic script as well and I don’t know the vocabulary for “repeat”, “fill in the missing word”, “answers are on the recording”, “grammar”, “pronunciation”, “vocabulary” etc.

It’s easy to think that I could just look the words up in a dictionary, but it’s a skill I haven’t yet developed. I can’t remember the order of the alphabet and, because the shape of a letter changes depending on where it is in a word, I have to work out what that letter in the middle is like when it’s written at the beginning of a word in order to identify it in the alphabetic list. Even then, it's not so easy, because I can never remember which letters come before and after my target letter and when I'm looking through the dictionary when I've got to the middle of a word, I have to work out for each letter what it looks like at the beginning, and where it is.

In addition, there are a few letters with similar sounds, for example, a hard D and a soft d, and a d that sounds a bit like "th", and I have to remember which is which and, again, where they are in the alphabet, which is completely different from the position the similar letters are in my mother-tongue alphabet. It's complicated!

I started to look the words up in a dictionary thinking it would be good practice, but it took me several hours to look up one word and sometimes the word didn’t appear to be there. I was never very sure if it was because I had looked it up wrongly or if it really wasn’t in my small dictionary. Or maybe the word I was looking up was part of a verb and I needed the infinitive? Or maybe it was the plural, so I needed to look it up under the singular, but if it’s a new word, I don’t know what the singular is (since in Arabic the plural can be quite different from the singular). Alternatively, maybe it’s an Egyptian word that’s not listed in my strictly Arabic dictionary. Really, using dictionaries is a pretty advanced skill, I now realise. It’s amazing that we ever manage it.

My next technique was to use my little Egyptian Arabic to English dictionary which has Egyptian Arabic words transliterated into the English alphabet. Unfortunately, this is closer to a phrase book, really, so terms like “basic vocabulary” aren’t in there.

It wasn’t possible for me to enter the words into google translate, since my book is in hard copy and I didn’t know – or think how to fathom out – how to write the Arabic letters on my computer. As it is, google translate for Arabic is a joke. You can pretty much pick any sentence in Arabic and when you put it into google translate, it comes out as gobbledegook. Here are two comments that I saw on facebook on Esmat’s page, “translated” into English:

Any fresh mashy ya am murdoch senior wekoltli dollar on cam

Any sweet Dee I love you red mesh hataadi taking account of their path and purify your health workers Anta



Then I suddenly remembered that I’d downloaded an Egyptian Arabic / English dictionary that was online. It took me a bit of experimenting to learn how they represented the various Arabic letters in the transliteration, but once I’d got the hang of that, it worked not too badly. There are still lots of words that I am unable to find, but I did manage to get quite a few (“words”, “the basics”, “repeat”, “colleague”, “pronunciation”, “map”, “chart”, etc). It’s a super dictionary actually as it also has sound with it so that you can hear a real Egyptian speaking the words for pronunciation, and, of course, it has the word written in Arabic script so that you can check it letter for letter against your target word. Moreover, it even tells you if it’s an Egyptian word or a Modern Standard Arabic word. I couldn’t get the sound files to download at first, so I emailed the creator, and he fixed it for me the next day, which was absolutely brilliant. It turned out that he lives in Hurghada!

Another good thing about the online / electronic dictionary is that you can store words in your “learn” file and then test yourself. It’s quite addictive because as you look for the word you want, you come across other words that you feel are useful, and before you know it, you have tons of words in your “to learn” list.

Consequently, this first chapter of the new book is taking me forever and I’m still in the process of looking up the vocabulary. However, I’m persevering and taking it slowly, because I reckon all these words in the first chapter will be repeated throughout subsequent chapters; after all, the exercises ("pronunciation exercise", "fill in the gaps", "find the word that corresponds to the verb") will probably be similar throughout the book, so it should be a one-off task and things should go a lot faster after that.

In the mean time, I’m now spending half an hour a day with Ajay, who is also learning Arabic, so that the two of us can practice speaking with our limited vocabulary. Slowly, slowly….

El Andalous - All Change!

El Andalous - Rooftop Pool in Use

El Andalous is really more than a block of flats; it’s a small community. At least, in my time here, it’s been a small community, although I think this partly came about due to the water and electricity being cut off (see blog 2013, September, Flashback - What Could Go Wrong?). This action brought all the owners together to discuss how to proceed and we’ve stayed together ever since. I’ve been lucky, because I haven’t known it to be any other way.

It’s all a bit of a long story, but many owners weren’t paying maintenance because they felt the standards here were unsatisfactory given the amount charged for upkeep. Finally, we got together as a group, and tried to negotiate in a friendly manner, and to date this has achieved some success. I’m not a negotiator and I’m also not someone who really notices dirt or who worries about noise (although the rats were a problem!), so I let others handle that aspect of things while I report back to everyone as to what’s happening via the newsletter. It’s always best to play to your strengths!

We also meet every week to get to know each other and to let people voice any issues that they have. This has had the bonus effect of people now feeling they belong here more and that it’s a community of friends rather than of strangers. We are now also the envy of the other two beachfront apartment blocks who are not so organised (yet).

Of course, we are in a way just a random bunch of people thrown together and, of course, there are differences of opinion and differences of culture (predominantly UK and Russia, but some other Europeans and some Egyptians, too). We’ve learned how to communicate with each other, hunted out the few people who can speak both English and Russian (all Russians or Eastern bloc, of course, thus confirming the prejudice that the British are lazy with languages!), and come to understand why others have the concerns they do.

This time of year is always a bit sensitive because the next year’s maintenance is approaching and there’s usually growing unrest about how satisfactory the services are. This then calls for a new set of negotiations about what should be achieved.

Anyway, thanks to our negotiators, we’ve now got several improvements at El Andalous. We now have a gold and silver membership system, allowing benefits such as discounts at our local restaurant, use of an additional beach, etc. The hope is that the benefits will grow over time; getting the membership system started was a major hurdle overcome.

We also got agreement to have the use of the heated rooftop pool. The pool had already been there for a while, but we weren’t allowed to use it and it was rumoured to be earmarked for the use of the building company’s benefit only. Anyway, loungers were provided, we’re now in, and people have been using it. We still need additional furniture (bins, parasols, etc) and it turned out not to be heated yet due to a missing part (the heater?), so we continue to push for this.

Another huge benefit was a weekly bus to the shopping mall for a fee of 5 LE return per person. It’s a little minibus that holds 9 people plus shopping, leaves at 7pm on Monday and returns at 9pm. Given that a taxi is 60 LE return, it’s a great plus.

We were also supposed to be having a security gate installed, but this seems to have got a bit lost in translation somewhere, but we’re still pushing at the moment.

In addition, we were provided the services of a professional trainer to bring the cleaning standards at the complex up to scratch and to train the management here. This is still in progress, but we have high hopes.

In some ways, it all seems a bit surreal to me, as if I’m playing a part in some kind of reality-TV show where they thrust people together and they have to organise themselves; a TV set where some people will find one thing a huge issue that others just don’t understand, and vice versa. But, at the end of the day, surprisingly, we actually do all get on pretty well and manage to reach a pretty broad agreement.

Certainly, since I’ve been here, there have been many new things that have improved my life here (the beach being the main one, and I wasn’t even particularly fussed about having our own private beach originally!). Bit by bit, we really are moving forward.

Hurghada - SubZero

Geraldine and Fiona in SubZero. Photo (c) Geraldine Thompson

One new thing (for me) that Geraldine and I did while she was over was to try out SubZero – the new bar totally made out of ice that has opened up by South Beach in Hurghada.

I’d read a bit about it online and I’d heard that your feet can get uncomfortably cold, so we took socks along with us. This turned out to be one of the wisest things I’ve done in a while (it doesn’t happen often!).

We arrived and were the only people there. I negotiated a discount for being a resident, showing them my Sahl Hasheesh resident’s card, and they let Geraldine have the discount too, so that was a good start.

They explained that the entrance fee included the price of a shot and one cocktail (at first I thought they were saying a shot and a Coke too!). Both drinks were alcoholic, so I’m not sure what happens to people who don’t drink alcohol. Anyway, for us this was fine!

We were then taken into the next room, where they handed out heavy capes with hoods and some gloves for you to put on. The staff was suitably impressed when we both whipped out our socks. Apparently, they plan to provide socks at some point and my guess would be that it would be quite a good merchandising trick as well. The capes and gloves weren’t really the sort of things you’d want to buy as they were very heavy duty!

They ushered us into the ice bar; there’s a time limit of 25 minutes. As you might expect, the bar isn’t huge, but there are a few ice sculptures to look at and ice benches covered with white fur for you to sit on.

To my surprise, the shots weren’t schnapps, but flavoured alcohol and you could choose your flavour. I can’t quite remember the options, but they were quite interesting – perhaps caramel, parma violet, and blackberry were among them.

Apparently, the guy at the bar downed his in one so Geraldine did the same. I was focusing too hard on trying to pick the glass up, which was made of ice. I don’t know how the other two managed to do it with one hand while wearing those huge gloves (I now see from the photo that maybe Geraldine didn’t wear hers!), but I had to use both hands to ensure a firm grip (I wasn’t going to lose my alcohol!). Consequently, I was lost for a while in my own little world and just took a sip of the stuff, only to look up and find that the other two were watching me with empty glasses and waiting.

The man serving us was very personable and told us that the ice was brought in from Dubai (isn’t that weird!) as it was a special ice that was transparent. The temperature was maintained at -5 degrees celcius. They’d had quite a bit of trade in the summer when temperatures outside were in the 40s and really it’s probably best to go when you can get the optimal contrast between heat and cold. We went in the evening in November, when temperatures had already cooled quite a bit outside (relatively, of course! For those of you in Europe or the USA, it was still fairly hot). 

It must have been a bit of a shock for the owners of SubZero when they opened only to find that almost immediately afterwards the government decided to increase electricity costs by something like 100% over five years, starting immediately. I did ask them about this but I can't remember their reply now, other than I think he gave me an example of an astronomical electricity bill!

We had our delicious cocktail next, picking from a list provided to us. As Geraldine pointed out, the cocktails were all premixed and in plastic containers behind the bar, presumably because it wouldn’t have been too easy for the barman to mix them in sub zero temperatures. It felt a bit strange not seeing them being mixed in front of you, but they were really good, so no complaints from me!

Maybe because we were the only two, and maybe because Geraldine drank quickly (ha, ha), we were even given an extra shot for free. The guy pointed out that although the drinks looked colored, they were actually transparent – they just took on whatever the current hue was of the alternating lamps shining through the ice bar counter.

It was hard to know how to pace yourself as we had no idea how much time was passing or how much time we had left. When we came out, there was a group of six people just putting on their cloaks, so I was pleased to see that they had a stream of business, as I would like to see the place thrive. We chatted with the new group for a while as they dressed and we returned our cloaks.

All in all, it’s a great place to go in Hurghada; I can’t praise the staff enough. And it’s just next to South Beach, which means you can stay on afterwards for a well-priced meal and even listen to the live band at 10pm and make a night of it.

I guess writing this blog in December doesn’t make the concept of an ice bar very tempting to those shivering in Europe or the USA just now, but over here, it’s all quite a novelty!