El Andalous - Christmas and New Year

Christmas Decorations in Sahl Hasheesh

I can’t really keep up with time and somehow I wrote the last few blogs barely realizing that it was Christmas and New Year, so I’ll talk about that now before it gets too far in the past.

Most Christians over here are Coptic Christians who celebrate on 7th January; thus the festive greetings usually come as “Happy new year, merry Christmas!” rather than the other way round. I put my Christmas tree up early this year (first week of December) as most years I regret leaving it until the last moment. Once it’s up, I love the way it makes my flat feel so cosy. This year, I probably overdid it in the other direction. Although I was sad to see the decorations come down, a part of me was also a bit tired of it by the end. The decorations in El Andalous don’t come up until Dec 24th!

This year, I had my main Christmas meal on 24th December with Paul (another Brit), Nicole (from Belgium), and Jacquie (Swiss French lady) at Bus Stop. Bus Stop was offering a set meal for 500 LE (around 25 GBP) including a choice of roast beef, roast turkey or salmon. I had the tomato soup to start and then the roast turkey so that I could be seasonal. As you come to expect over here, it’s not really what you imagine by roast turkey. It was pleasant enough and seemed to be proper meat, but it wasn’t slices from a turkey that had been roasted; it was more like discrete balls of turkey. I’m guessing that they must be frozen or something. There’s not an awful lot of custom in Sahl Hasheesh, so it’s probably difficult to roast a turkey if you don’t know how many people are going to come or what they’ll want.

Jacquie took the roast beef, which also didn’t look how I imagine roast beef to be. And no Yorkshire Puds, either, of course. The beef was in slices but they were fairly thick, more like little steaks. We had wine with the meal instead of the mulled wine they were offering afterwards. Dessert was a Yule Log and was a standard chocolate Swiss Roll with no Christmas decorations on it whatsoever, but it was actually a pretty good cake. Anyway, that’s Christmas, Egyptian-style!

On Christmas Day I went with Safi to a Thai restaurant in Hurghada; it’s Safi’s favorite restaurant. We had our usual lovely meal there, although it wasn’t particularly festive. Next year, I will probably volunteer to cook a turkey myself, especially now that I’ve finally found my baking tray for the oven. I’ve been without it for the last three months because I couldn’t work out where the cleaners had decided to store it!

I chose to have a quiet New Year’s Eve at home in front of the television. I’d been to a party earlier that week at John and Amanda’s and even though I didn’t drink very much, I was tired the next day. Also, it had been a very full-on few months and my preference was just to have some quiet down-time. I had two invitations to go out, but declined. It was a good decision. I found a good film on TV, ate chicken and chocolate, and in my books that’s pretty ideal.

On the evening of 1st January, Janice and Chris held a party at their flat in El Andalous. I did pop along to that, imbibed some wine, ate some pigs in blankets and other delicacies, socialized a bit. I was still in a bit of an anti-social phase, so I stayed only a few hours and then took my leave. It was a great party though – they’d cooked tons of food and had everything you could possibly want.

So, that was my journey from 2019 into 2020. If you haven’t made any New Year’s resolutions yet, buy my book. You can get them for your dog, cat, or fish, too, if you like. In the meantime, thank you for reading my blog and wishing you a fabulous year ahead!