where you from

Ten phrases that remind you are in Egypt:

1. Where you From (closely follwed by "Kiwi" when you say NZ)
2. How you doing
3. Hello my freind
4. No hassle
5. Please take a look in my shop!
6. How many wives you have?
7. Look this, it is made of high quality (insert material here)
8. For you my freind, I give you very special price
9. Hello Cowboy
10. You need scarf, spices, t-shirt? very cheap! Best prices for you!

Although a few of these apply equally to Morocco, and I guess, Turkey and a whole raft of other countries as well. Pleasingly I can announce after a couple of hours shopping that I am now best freinds and get no hassle with the best prices from most of the shop keepers in Dahab! (Of course its all a load of bollocks but to their credit they are much much less pushy here than in other parts, and in fact you can walk into a shop and some barely say anything at all! It feels like home almost!).

People do do strange things here, for example, at the moment there is a guy with a bucket of water and the bottom half of a plastic bottle walking around outside. He is using the half plastic bottle to throw water all over the promenade for no particular reason at all, except from my window perch I can see that the pavement stones outside his restaturant are now a little shinier as they are wet!

Two nights ago I watched lord of the Rings - Return of the King on TV, it was quite good. The channel here (ironically channel 2 with a very similar logo), usually plays B grade movies, so it was a nice surprise for something decent to go on. Its the only channel in english except for an even worse music channel which is barely worth a mention except it played some obscure U2 song which was a relief.

One thing we don't have at the hotel is a news channel, so I have been suffering without my daily dose of the BBC. They don't even have the Arabic version (let alone the English version) of Al Jazeera which is quite disappointing.

I was terribly windy again today, so I haven't had much lying around in the sun, despite our beautiful beach resort with large swimming pool and deck chairs. No one mentioned to me that apparently the Red Sea has "reliable" strong winds which are good for windsurfing. Sadly the winds today were too strong for windsurfing even!