Friday, March 03, 2006

Basking in Sharm El-Shiekh

The website blogger.com I use to write my posts has defaulted to German and I am unable to fix it so this will be fun....At least I have done enough posts to know what buttons to hit.

We are into day 2 of Sharm El Sheikh...all I can say is WOW. This is easily the nicest resort I have ever been to. It is so beautiful here. Sharm is a resort town on the tip of the Sinai penninsula surrounded by coral reefs and the Red Sea. Our resort is the Iberotel Grand Sharm. We got 5 days/4 nights of half-board(breafast and dinner) for about $325 canadian each...An amazing deal for what we get!!! The buffet dinner and beakfasts are very elaborite...so much food it is overwhelming(I wish I had the stomach of a guy to eat more)...and my favourite: a crepe guy making as many made to order crepes as you can eat!!! We have been undertaking an elaborite food liberating scheme at each buffet so we can eat free lunch...it has become something of an art form with us. They have 4 pools here..one is heated and easy to climb in if you're hot. They have a Gym complete with steam room, sauna and hot tub,a pool guy that walks around and spritzes you off with rose water,a bar,shisha pipe corner,nightly entertainmant(if you can stay awake to 9pm which I'm sad to admit we cannot..) and everyday when the guys make our room they cover the bed with rose petals and more origami towel art! The only downside is that all the wait staff are young guys who don't know when to draw the flirting line or how to take a hint...this one guy is so annoying I run into the pool when I see him coming...he can't walk by me without touching my head or my foot, he is invading my personnal space....I even told him I am married but that doesn't seem to matter...he must get a lot of action..or at least hit on every girl he sees and play the numbers game.

Our last day in Luxor was good. We found a cool Souk and did some shopping...barganing is interesting here...it involves a screaming match in the street and a faux-walk away but everything is cheap and all parties agree on a price.

Remember back 15 years ago or so, before everything had to be low-fat, and McDonalds had these deep fried apple pies...they were crispy with bubbbly flaky delicious pastry and yummy hot apple filling??? Well, they were replaced years ago, to my dismay, in North America with a low-fat baked version which is neither flaking,crispy, deep fried or delicious...We went to a Mcdonalds in Luxor for ice cream and to my surprise they still sell the old-school apple pies!!! I was so excited and made Sue walk all the way back there the next day to get me another one.

On our last night in Luxor we finished dinner and were walking down the road to get a cab...we don't want to pay more than 5 EP for the trip to the hotel so we turned down the first cab. One of those horse drawn carirage guys was stalking us, as they do every day, but he was yelling after us "Anywhere for 5EP" so we asked him to take us to the Sheraton knowing he'd up the price once we agree to his offer(that's what they do with everything and you have to barter them back down)we didn't think he'd actually go as low as 5 but as we were walking down the road while he yelled lower and lower prices at our backs he stopped at 5....so we took a 10 minute carriage ride back to our hotel which was really fun and kinda cool for our last taste of Luxor.

Today we went snorkelling in the Red Sea and it was amazing...it was like swimming in a tropical fish tank...there we fish everywhere and lots of different colored ones...you could almost reach out and touch them(they're too fast)...we are going to go again tomorrow morning at high tide when the sun is rising and shining right at them for a better look.

We have 2 more days to laze around here then on March 6 we have booked a bus at 1pm back to Cairo(a 6hour ride)We stay one more night in the Nile Hilton and on the 7th Afaf is taking us shopping at the a huge souk in Cairo. Any requests???: Get them in now.

Start melting that snow...I'm coming home soon.

P.S. Sean: wanna keep shovelling my walks when I get home??? Ha Ha:)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Requests for shopping: Gold! Gold! Gold! Can't think of anything better than that. Love Mom.

Anonymous said...

Sure, as long as I have full access to the HOT TUB!