We were pleasantly surprised to find the train from Balyana to Luxor on-time Thursday afternoon and arrived in Luxor by early evening. However, we were unpleasantly surprised to find that prices have gone up on many things in the city, especially on the residents’ price on hotel rooms. I was hoping to stay in my favorite hotel from 2004, but my teammates and I could not afford the nearly tripled price a room fetches from a resident (we have residence visas). Instead, we settled into a cheap, but clean place on a back street. It was much more affordable, at 90 LE per double room, per night (about $16 USD), including continental (in the barest sense) breakfast. The guys had a decent view, but Jane and I didn’t really care that our window looked out on other buildings or that the shower was cold (the latter wasn’t really any different than back at the house) because we were only interested in three things: air conditioning, soft pillows, and a lack of mosquitoes.
On Friday, we walked around town getting some shopping done and bargaining for many items in our combination of newly and long ago acquired Arabic. The ability to say and understand numbers, as well as to ask how much things are and remark “that’s expensive!” in Arabic seemed to help our case a lot, even though we were shopping in a very touristy market. Antonio was particularly impressed with the responses we got to “b’kem da?” (“how much is this?”) and got several hand-stitched pillow covers for his couch at home.
At the end of all that wheeling and dealing, which involved copious walking on paved streets, I was ready to have a shower and a nap, while Jane and Antonio ventured on to an internet café and some local sights.
We had hoped to evade tourist police detection on our train ride back Friday night, but did not manage to do so. When asked where we were going, Antonio spoke for the group and told the police we were going to Girga (they never want foreigners going to such an out-of-the-way place in Middle Egypt) for work. The police waffled back and forth among themselves with little being understood by us other than the word for “problem.” Eventually, they asked us some more questions, like where we are from, and Antonio told them that we are Spanish and that the police in Girga knew we were coming on the train and would be waiting for us. With such a persuasive argument, they seated us on the train (walked us to the particular seats they wanted us to occupy in first class – how could a foreigner ever travel in second, or god forbid, third class? They obviously couldn’t imagine such a situation). The rest of the journey went smoothly, though we were totally exhausted by the time we arrived home, and I ended up quite ill in the morning from some McDonald’s french fries we had had for dinner.
In continuation of our ongoing problems, equipment and otherwise, we were unable to make outgoing calls (including connecting to the internet) for the past week because the phone bill for the house was not paid! We were told it would be paid on three separate occasions before it finally happened and today our connection is back to normal. Of course, the expected DSL is still nowhere to be seen.
