This is the life

Yep, this is the life. My days go a little something like this: sleep, breakfast overlooking the Red Sea, chill with friends and listen to music, stroll the bazaar, afternoon coffee and siesta, Arabic lesson, more food, more chilling...okay, you get the picture! I had forgotten all about the Egyptian hospitality. I can't walk by a restaurant without the manager/owner pulling me in for a free meal. I thought I might slim down a bit while here--but at the rate I'm going, it's not going to happen.

Anwar and Mohammed

The past few days I've been trying to settle into my new little house, buying the necessities like cleaning supplies blah blah blah. Unfortunately, the mosquitoes have heard on the grapevine that I am here and they've been relentless. They love me...always have. I'm not getting much sympathy as they don't bother the locals at all. I'm hoping they'll get over the novelty of fresh white girl blood and leave me alone soon. But I searched high and low and found a fly swatter. My houseguests love to watch me run around and kill mosquitoes and flies--they get a good laugh out of it and it helped me to learn my new word 'magnoona'...which means crazy (but in a good way of course!) I'm also finding out about the wonderful efficiency of having a toilet/sink/shower bathroom combo. As I shower I can clean the bathroom at the same time and then you simply use a giant floor sqeegie (sp?) thing to push all of the water down the drain. This is great b/c living in the desert, everything seems to be covered in a fine layer of sand each morning.

My daily breakfast spot

Not much else to report I guess...I'm just having a blast relaxing. It's well-deserved after the past two years. It's funny how quickly the days can pass whilst doing not much of anything really. The other observation is that tourists annoy me! Funny how things change when you are on the 'other' side living in a place...I guess it's a different perspective. Dahab gets inundated with Italian tourists who are actualy staying in the expensive resorts in Sharm El-Sheikh and come over here for the day to dive The Blue Hole and then have lunch and shop in the bazaar. It's so odd to see them walking around in their thong bikinis and designer sunglasses with veiled women alongside. I've met a good deal of the expat community here. Mostly Brits, Swiss and Aussies working as dive instructors. My neighbor is a hippie family from Austria with the cutest little white-haired boy running around the yard. Yesterday, my tour leader from when I was here in January, showed up with a new group. I served as the warning that Dahab can be addictive and you may come back and never leave again!

My house

Okay, gotta run. Everyone here is in love with the iPod and I'm trying to figure out how to download my songs onto the computer at Al Capone (restaurant where Anwar works) and then we're going to borrow some CDs from the music store to get some new songs on there. I figure since I don't do much of anything, my future logs will try to describe life here and culture and whatnot so you can get a better idea of life in Dahab. Everything is great...now if only I could get rid of the mosquitoes...

My living room

My street

The daily catch