When a man loves a pharmacist

Oh how I wish I wasn’t so stubborn. My last post witnessed me frolicking in the Egyptian sands, dancing as water cascaded around me, thrown from pitchers born aloft by belly dancing women. Or so I remember it. Since then has been significantly more difficult, but I have gained some solid abs for my effort. Why they don’t build busses with toilets is beyond me, especially when these busses travel for 5 hours between rest breaks. But more on that later.

Middle Egypt was significantly different from its Upper, southern neighbour. Where Upper Egypt had tourists, heat, scams, attractions and over-zealous street merchants, Middle Egypt had heterogenous friendly non-English speakers and a calm only broken by the sound of my feet galloping to the nearest toilet. Oh, and it had police. The same friendly, non-English speaking, superfluous police that are everywhere else in Egypt. Except that these ones have the order to escort you whenever you leave your hotel. This is amusing for a little while, but soon quite frustrating as they double the time it takes to do anything. It took me an hour and a half to assemble breakfast from the streets around my hotel, as my entourage insisted knowing where I was going, why, to where, for what purpose, how long I would be, whether I would need any help, before giving it to me anyway, and trying to translate everything from me to the local street vendor. Remember, the cops spoke as little English as the store-holder. Go figure.

The best part of the rest of that adventure was spending a day with two novices at the White Monastery outside Sohag (Emad and Atef). These guys were famously hospitable. They paid for everything for me, including a boat up and down the Nile for a while. We gate-crashed a Coptic engagement ceremony, but nobody seemed to mind, including the future bride and groom (see picture). I was sitting up with the priests.

Got back to Cairo and wasted a day trying to get a Turkish visa, before being told that they could not issue me one as I’m not Egyptian, but that I can get one at the border. However I had to wait for an Embassy official to tell me this (after the 2-hour wait) as nobody else spoke English.
I’ve bid farewell to Cairo and am now at Port Sa’id, the northern entry to the Suez Canal. In 2 days I’ll head to the Sinai, but for now I’m just going to relax here and in Suez. And bask in the radiance that is antibiotics.