25th January One Year On

 

Last night it rained! We walked back from the annual MES Science department curry night as it fell down around us. As you can guess, it was gentle rain not the tropical down pour that sometimes happens

It was this time last year the revolution started and Mubarak resigned. Now we have an elected parliament, some of the emergency laws have been lifted and Mubarak is on trial for allegedly ordering the attacks on the demonstrators that left people dead and injured.

Many Egyptians have spent today in Tahrir square celebrating their freedom, not, as the media seems to be reporting, protesting. The media also seems surprised that in a country where 90% of the people are Muslims we have an Islamist parliament. Just what did they expect? We are now waiting for the Presidential election, he then gets to tell parliament which party is in charge and can make the decisions!?

At church they have spent from 12 noon to 6pm praying for the future of the country. I went for an hour as it is a holiday today, last year they called it Police Day, this year it seems to have been un-named as the people are not happy with the police.

Tomorrow we are back to school but I suspect not all the students will be there!

Oh Happy day

 

We are all back at school, such joy and happiness! All 3 of us have been back all week, buses at 6:50am home for 4pm, meetings after school –well for Geoff at least, Maddy and I will start using the late bus this week as her singing lessons recommence and my meetings kick off. Round the house we have tidied away out Christmas projects, Geoff added 10 planes to his fleet hanging from the ceiling today. My scrapbooking has gone away until I find some ink for the printer, the pages are prepared but I am unable to print on photo paper! I may have to use ordinary paper in the normal printer and work with that until Geoff nips back to the UK at Easter.

 

All the extra activities will  start next week so I will be busy Monday, Tuesday and Friday nights at church.

Nile Cruise Day 5

 

Our last day and what a busy one! We started the morning at the Aswan dam, the old one and the new one and saw one lone crocodile swimming on the Lake Nasser side. From here we travelled to the island Temple of Philae, another Greek/Egyptian temple, you can tell by the change in the way the women are depicted. A boat ride took us to the island it was moved to to preserve it after the Nile was flooded. You can see the old water lines (black markings) around the temple and the faces of the gods the Christians could reach to erase.

The next stop was an aromatherapy centre, Aswan is famous for it’s aromatherapy, where we sniffed mint and eucalyptus designed to clear your sinuses (it didn’t) and then lotus flower. We were given a flyer on what to use for what that I will scrap book later (the colour ink has run out and we can’t find any!) with the pictures. Our final stop of the morning was the Nubian Museum which had on display some amazing exhibits wonderfully labelled. Before we had lunch (which was extra as we had to check out before we left for our tour at 6am) we went on a short, 30 min,  felucca ride, fortunately there was enough wind, not like yesterday when we were on the motor boat and the feluccas were getting stranded.

		Day 5 morning VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

In the afternoon we took the land tour of Aswan and visited the Coptic Cathedral, a mosque, the unfinished obelisk, an Aswan spice market  and finally a Nubian house that served tea and coffee to watch our final Nile sunset from.

A driver took us to Aswan airport at 6:30 pm, the flight was delayed and we finally landed at 10:30pm, to be picked up by our taxi driver and delivered home. The first thing we saw on tv when we got back was The Mummy 2, we watched the bit when he travels to Karnock (we didn’t think there was that much sand  and where was the causeway to Luxor and it was much closer to the Nile than the TV shows), and the part where you see the Temple of Philae (much more accurate) then collapsed into bed.

		Day 5 afternoon VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Nile Cruise Day 4

 

The included tour today was to the Temple of Horus which we visited in the morning. An extra tour was on offer for the afternoon, a motor boat ride looking at the local bird life. We all signed up for this, some more willingly than others and spent an interesting hour sailing round the cataracts spotting herons, pied kingfishers, an osprey and other more local birds. We came back to the boat to find our towels had been folded into amazing birds! In the evening it was the Galabia party. Maddison and I had bought them the day before at the Valley of The Kings in a shopping area called, quite aptly, The Valley of the Vultures at a very inflated price – he gave us free scarves and scarabs but it didn’t ease the pain .

The hieroglyphs are a calendar and ancient Egyptian medical tools

		Day 4 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL