El Andalous - Giving Up (For Now)

Completed - New Bathroom Wash Unit (plus Mirrored Cabinet)

I’m almost done with my reorganization, although that’s a bit of a fateful thing to say. All that’s left to do is to get two new shelves for my kitchen, remove my broken dishwasher, and install a cupboard in its place.

Once again, I asked Medhat to sort a carpenter out for me and once again, he was just too slow. I told him not to bother.

I took a taxi, all the measurements in hand, in order to go to “my” carpenter. The taxi driver decided to speak to me in Arabic – I could understand that he was asking me if I wanted to go to the carpenter, so I confirmed. He said something I didn’t understand, but I guessed he was asking me what I wanted the carpenter to do, so I was able to say “one cabinet and two shelves” (I’d looked up all this vocabulary beforehand). He phoned Esmat and, again, it appeared that Esmat was very concerned about the colour. This time, the taxi driver explained that I’d brought a sample with me.

The taxi driver asked if I had a picture, so I showed him the photograph I’d taken of my existing cabinet and my diagrams with the detailed measurements. He looked at it and asked me (in English, once I couldn’t understand) if I’d measured the items with a tape. I found this highly amusing – as if I’d just guess at the measurements! I know I’m not the most practical of people, but I really wasn’t as incompetent as they were expecting me to be.

We got to the carpenter but when we arrived, his place had been completely cleared out! It looked so different from the bustling place it was before with loads of work ongoing; it was like he’d done a runner. I’ve asked Esmat three times now to find out if he’s back, but Esmat isn’t getting back to me. I’m now beginning to think that I’ll just leave this until I’m back next winter. I’d like some time just to sit back and enjoy life a bit.

One other thing I did get done (sort of, which is always the caveat over here) was to have my lounge walls painted. They were a magnolia colour, which is fine, but it somehow makes the room quite dark. A couple of people have told me that if you paint your walls white, it really lifts them.

So, I decided to have the walls painted white with one feature wall by the patio doors painted the same green as my cushions. This too has taken me months and months until they’ve got round to it.

Ksenia had warned me that when you ask for your walls to be painted, you’ll have one idea in mind and they’ll have another one. Consequently, I explained quite clearly that I wanted the wall to be the muted green of my cushions. They informed me that they’d taken a photograph and would get it digitally matched in town. What could go wrong? What was unclear about that?

To give praise where praise is due, they completed the painting really quickly – the paint dries fast here, which helps. I kept out of it and just sat on my balcony. But when I went in to see the finished product, they’d painted the feature wall a really bright primary green, and they praised me on my good choice of colour!! I didn’t have the energy to argue. Maybe it will grow on me.

I’ll see how I feel when I’m back next winter and if I decide I don’t like it, I’ll have to go into town, buy the paint myself, and ask them to re-do it. We’re finally back to having good weather now for a while and I want to enjoy that. Also, after paying out so many “baksheesh” – I’ve been quite generous since the work has been done for free and I know the men aren’t paid very much (and I’d rather they get the money than the management company) – I’m starting to feel like my money is just draining away before I can even touch it. It’s time for a rest!

El Andalous - More Organisational Woes

Work In Progress

Well, I’ve given you all a few weeks rest from my organizational woes, so I’m now going to return back to them, since this is really taking up most of my life just now.

As I said, I decided to offload all my broken and unwanted stuff on Joke (pronounced Yoka rather than as Joke as in witticism!) to sell to charity. Again, this sounds easy, but it wasn’t. I needed to clear all my files off my laptop before giving it away. This must have taken me at least two days and I began to feel that this was a lot of work to do something where I got no reward!

The main problem was that my laptop screen was no longer functional. I managed to hook it up to the TV, so that I had a proxy screen. Unfortunately, the software that I’d downloaded to remove all the files didn’t automatically execute for some reason. I googled and found a way to get it to execute by going into the BIOS on start-up and changing the start-up command. However, all laptops are apparently set for the BIOS screen only to show on the primary screen, which is the screen on your actual laptop. Therefore, it wouldn’t show on the TV screen. I had to give up.

My old laptop was also very slow, so downloading programmes took forever in itself. I ended up trying to download another programme to remove all my files, but it just wouldn’t ever fully download. In the end, I found yet another programme, but I had to erase most things individually and it took forever.

I made an impulse buy in Spinneys of a set of plastic drawers which I thought would serve well as bathroom storage. However, when I got home, it didn’t fit, so it had to go in the lounge, which wasn’t really where I wanted it. Moreover, I thought the children’s design down the front of the drawers was just a bit of cardboard on the packaging, but it turned out to be the picture on the actual drawers. I didn’t really want a set of drawers with a children’s cartoon emblazoned on it! It was all a bit of a disaster.

I tried to rectify it by buying some sticky-backed plastic (good old Blue Peter!) to hide the garish cartoon. As I’ve said before, I’m not really an arts and crafts type person. Although the covering looks pretty good if you just glance at it, if you pull a drawer out, you can hear the bits of jutting-out plastic scraping against the drawer below. Still, they are functional (for now).

I gave up on Medhat ever finding me a wash unit for my bathroom. I told him to forget it and I confidently strode into town thinking I would just sort this myself. However, instead, I got a bit bamboozled. This often happens when I go into Hurghada.

I got a quote from one place to have one made specifically for me, but then realized there were things I hadn’t thought to consider (I couldn’t remember if my tap went on the basin or if it was fixed on the worktop, I wasn’t sure how the basin was fixed to the worktop, or how large a hole was needed etc). I went to another shop and found a nice self-contained unit for 2000 LE. But when I sat down to order it, it transpired that it actually cost 10,000 LE - I’d completely misheard the price. And then a tap would be an extra 1500 LE. I had no idea that taps were so expensive! This was more than I'd intended to spend, so again I gave up.

Finally, I decided to take the plunge and go back to the first place. However, when I got to the shop, the guy who had served me before wasn’t there and they couldn’t work out what he’d recommended to me. Moreover, it turned out that I had to order the granite top separately from another person; they only did the bottom part of the unit. The granite person would have to come to my house , I’d have to see how long it would take for him to prepare the granite, and then they could do their part of the unit after that. My heart fell – this was getting complicated and beyond my capabilities as a non-Arabic speaker. Yet again, I gave up and went home, feeling frustrated.

Eventually, I spotted Medhat’s manager, Mohamed, and he found me a suitable unit within one day. If only it had been that easy from the start! To install it, though, my pipes in my bathroom had to be moved, meaning the wall tiles had to be broken, and I needed replacement tiles. Fortunately, these were in stock.

It all got done in the end, but it was an uphill battle all the way. I had no idea that getting a new wash stand for the bathroom would be so difficult.

El Andalous - Daily Life

Beachfront from Sahl Hasheesh Old Town

After about two months of unusually cold weather here (I mean windy and around 20 degrees centigrade), we’re finally back to a spell of “normal” weather, perhaps even a little hotter than usual (around 24-26 degrees, calmer). This has made me think a bit about what “normal” life is here.

What’s not been normal is me sitting on my balcony wearing a cardigan, having the heating on at night, wearing bed socks in the evening because my feet are cold…

However, most of my life has, of course, stayed the same. The Egyptians don’t miss much. When I arrived back I walked along the seafront to see if anything had changed and to go to BestWay. I was stopped by one of the shopkeepers and asked where my bicycle was. It appears that my little flying pigeon has become famous in its own right!

The weekly bus to Senzo Mall is still running, so Mondays are defined in my head as “KFC night”. Last time I returned to Egypt, I was joking that even though I’d been away for quite some months, the guy in the KFC recognized me immediately and still knew my order off by heart (“original recipe, no coleslaw, double fries, diet coke” – the irony of double fries paired with diet coke is not lost on me). This time, on my second KFC visit, the guy (a different one) explained that he’d given me 2 small pieces of chicken and was this OK? I said yes, but actually felt a bit miffed. This must have shown on my face, because he took my meal back and told me he’d give me two big pieces instead since I was a regular customer. I smiled broadly in return!

For Europeans, Egyptians can perhaps come across as too over-friendly, but it’s also an attraction to living here. On my way to BestWay, Tony, one of the shopkeepers, stopped me and was eager to tell me all the latest gossip about what was going to happen in Sahl Hasheesh, who he’d talked to, and what he was up to.

When I went to the bank, the security guy at the door recognized me, as did the guy at customer service, and on subsequent visits the security guy reminded me that if I needed any help, I only needed to ask him. Again, my face must give away my true emotions, because I came out of the bank feeling a bit annoyed that I hadn’t really got a resolution of my internet banking issue, and the security guy asked me if I was OK as I was leaving. It at least made me feel that I belonged!

I hired a golf buggy to go to the ERC (resort company) offices to collect my year’s residency card, and an Egyptian guy shouted out to me that the coast was clear. The only problem was that he said it in Arabic and I didn’t have a clue what he was saying, so it was more of a distraction than a help. But it was all resolved with good humour.

Similarly, I was riding along on my bike, and someone (an Egyptian) stopped me to say that I needed to pump up my tyres (that might explain why I was finding it more exhausting to ride my bike recently!). I was at first reticent to listen to him (which I think he sensed), but then I realized he was just trying to be helpful. Really, the people are great!

By contrast, it made me laugh when one of the new staff in El Andalous saw me trying to work out which way to go to get to Kathryn’s old flat and thought I didn’t know where my own flat was. He led me all the way back to my own flat before I realized he’d got the wrong end of the stick!

My Blog - 10,000 Page Views

Entrance Piazza, Sahl Hasheesh

I thought I’d stop and do a geeky summary of my blog so far, now that I’ve passed the landmark number of 10,000 page views since it started (I wanted to write this last week, but I was 3 page views too short!).

A total of 10,000 page views sounds quite an impressive number but, to be honest, I don’t set much store by the accuracy of the figures put out by Google Blogger. They’ve never really matched up – the number of page views by country never matches with the total of page views each week; maybe it counts for each blog read on one counter and by visitor for another, but it’s not very clear. Still, 10,000 sounds good and that’s what’s important.

If you sign up for the blog to be delivered to you by email, you won’t be counted in the statistics that I’m reporting here. I don’t even know how many people have opted to receive it by email. I’m kept completely blind to that side of the blog. So, the statistics here are for visitors to the actual blog page.

I think the most exotic country (a very subjective thing, of course) I can remember reaching was the Solomon Islands. I’ve received the most views from the UK – these outnumber the second country (Switzerland) by about 150%. This probably demonstrates that despite living outside of the UK for coming up to 10 years, I’m still really fairly rooted in my homeland. Countries that came in from 3-10 as being my most frequent visitors, which all in turn fall quite a bit behind Switzerland, are in order: USA, Russia, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Egypt, Germany, and Ireland.

It seems that 30% of you are using Google Chrome (which I use, too). It’s followed closely by Safari (28%) users and then 20% with Explorer. A further 11% use Firefox.

Over half of you (55%) are using Windows. Apple products come next with iPhone (18%), MacIntosh (13%), and iPad (8%). Surprisingly, Android is fairly low, coming in next with 2%.

The search keywords used to land on my blog are fairly predictable; the one that kept me amused for ages, but has now dropped off the top ten list, was “sahl hasheesh naked”. Other than what’s totally predictable (eg, “searchingthedream blog”), “re-entry visa” has featured more than once, and a search for the baron palace hotel, and a search for a massage in Sahl Hasheesh.

My biggest surprise for Referring Sites was the goodreads site (6th in Referring URLs), and I guess this is where most of my US readers have come from (thank you!). Since I really haven’t sold many books, I’m surprised the goodreads site had any impact. I’d also like to thank those from the ShareKnowledge site for their interest (2nd in Referring Sites) – I’m not sure anyone from there is currently reading, but thanks anyway! This is also probably a reason for the high UK readership since most on ShareKnowledge are UK citizens (as far as I know).

My most read posts are hugely influenced by whether anyone has commented or not. If someone makes a comment, the readership for that post usually increases by at least 50% (I guess people go back to the page to read the comment).

Nevertheless my most popular post by quite a bit is Sahl Hasheesh – First Snorkeling on 26 October 2013, despite the fact that it had no comments. I’m very surprised by this, but maybe it’s because it comes just before I broke my foot (Hurghada – First Trip to Hospital on 27 October 2013), which itself comes in at 6th most popular overall or 3rd most popular of those that haven’t received any comments.

The second most popular post (no comments) was Flashback – The Decision (23 Sept 2013), which was about my decision to move to Egypt and is perhaps key to the blog, so not so surprising.

Posts in positions 3-5 all had comments (the ones on Japan were deleted to protect privacy); in order these were: The Netherlands – Renewing a Friendship, Basel – White Dinner, and Japan – Some Sightseeing. This might also have something to do with them being “sociable” posts, where presumably friends of friends mentioned therein may have been pointed to them.

Posts in positions 7-9 all had comments or I’d posted a link to it on facebook: An Awakening (describing my return to Zurich), Egypt – Journey to Luxor, Sheila’s Words – Egypt for the First Time. Well done to Sheila for writing one of the most popular entries!

At place number 10, no comments, and 4th of no comments/promotion posts, was Flashback – The Party. I was quite surprised about this but it supports my conclusion that “sociable” blogs may be passed on to others more.

I thought that my Rats posts would have been popular, since for me that was the most dramatic or stressful time so far in Egypt, but maybe the topic just doesn’t appeal. I can’t understand that at all.