November 30, 2007: Agaza (holiday)

I’m out of the water again with another ear infection — the other ear this time. The doctor I saw says he sees more ear infections here in the El Quseir and Marsa Alam area than further north in Hurghada or Sharm El Sheikh. He figures there’s a particular type of plankton that grows in the water here that doesn’t occur further north, and that’s what causes the infections. Makes sense — I had no problems the year I dived nearly every day around Hurghada, and here in less than a month I get infections in both ears. And I see plenty of fish in the water that you don’t find further north, so why shouldn’t it be the case for plankton too?

Anyway, they don’t need any help in the dive centre so I’m basically on holiday until I can get back in the water next Tuesday or Wednesday. My Italian flatmate Laetizia was off today too, so we walked across town and spent the day by the pool at another hotel. We met an American (well, Californian really — it’s practically a different country) woman there who’s been living in Egypt 10 years already and runs a learning centre in town. The centre runs various youth and community programs, English classes for Egyptians and Arabic classes for Europeans. So I’m going to see about taking some classes. We also spoke about women’s health seminars for local women, which is something that she’s interested in doing. Like in so many other countries, there’s such a need for sexual and reproductive health education here. I would love the chance to contribute. But this is Egypt and things don’t happen overnight, so we’ll see what happens…

On the way home, we stopped in at the Marianne coffee shop—our favourite hangout— for a shai and a shishah.




There was a group of Nubian musicians performing for some Italian tourists when we arrived, and one of them somehow ended up joining us for tea after the tourists were gone. Letizia is looking less than impressed in this photo because by this point he’d shown her a bunch of videos on his phone, including one of dead bodies being cut open and having their esophagi stuffed with hashish before being sewn back up again and flown to (or from?) Cairo in some sort of completely fucked-up drug smuggling operation. Or at least, that’s what I understood of his explanation. I could be wrong; I didn’t watch the video. In any case, she was a little disturbed by the fact that he thought that it was the sort of thing that was appropriate to show to both a woman and a complete stranger, not to mention that he had it on his phone in the first place.