What Dd Saw...

Back Blip

Following on from yesterday's blip, here's what Dd saw from the balcony of our room. At least it was our room at the start of the day but we changed later to one with a terrace and garden view as this one was, quite incredibly, stone cold...it was like entering an underground cellar and we only discovered this when we put the aircon off and things did not get warmer!

Still, the hotel have looked after us very well showing us other rooms whose walls on account of their southern aspect are nicely warmed through! And they put a router in our room as the standard ethernet cable did not fit our MacBooks. An adapter is yet another thing to pack in the future!

On the cable front, I discovered we had left without packing a download cable to transfer images from the big cams to the laptops (yours truly at fault here!), so we headed out the back gate of the garden grounds to where we had been told there was a street of techy shops. That was clearly an overstatement it but we did find a few run down mobile phone orientated shops and a dusty photographic studio.

'Come into miracle land!' I said to Dd.
'Why do you say that?'
'Well, it'll be a miracle if they have one for sale!'
And, lo, Luxor produced its first miracle! The young owner was all over my camera wanting to know the cost and so on. 'Are you a pro?', he asked.
'No', I replied, 'It's just a hobby!' He clearly didn't believe me.
'What do you do, then?' he pressed, with a twinkle in his eye.
'I'm an English teacher,' I improvised which is, at least, partly true as I have a TEFL qualification.

It was interesting to note my spontaneous attempt to present the most neutral image of myself removed from any (mistaken) association with the world of professional photography or journalism (I was not asking any politically orientated questions as I would normally do in these situations). All this, no doubt, because Dd was beside me and she is much more judicious than I am, and also as the diplomatic editor of Le Monde was arrested a few days ago in Cairo for discussing politics at a cafe table after a respectable lady 'good citizen' overheard him and his friends and informed on them to the local police stationed outside near the British Embassy.

It took him over two hours to secure not only his own release but also that of his Egyptian interlocutors; to his eternal credit he refused to go until they too had been released. A few hours later a car arrived at his hotel to take him to the Foreign Ministry where the Secretary of State apologised to him in person. Doubt they would do that for me!