Sunday, March 29, 2009

2nd week in Egypt...

The start of this week saw Nick and I hauling ourselves up and down the swimming pool at the Dive School, attempting to pass the divemaster timed swim tests. As it happens we did quite well, and our score was higher than we'd hoped. I suspect that John our instructor was surprised at my times. Lets just say I don't look like a finely honed althete at the best of times. This is the pool at the dive school:


We also had another exam this week on Supervising Student Divers. We both got 100% again. Either we are geniuses or the exams are a bit easy!

Along side all the training drills and dive theory lectures we had to deal with hotel problems, which has resulted in us moving to a different place. A bad combination of an internet hotel seller selling rooms they didn't have, coupled with a hotel that was overbooked anyway means we are now in a nicer hotel at a not such nice price.

On thursday we took a holiday from our holiday and went to Luxor, then Cairo, then Alexandria. Now I am totally exhausted but Wow, what an amzing 3 days. We did a whistlestop tour of the Valley of the kings, Karnak Temple (utterly staggering and my favourite place of the trip) Queen Hatshautsut's temple, The Pyramids and Sphinx, The Cairo museum (lots of Mummies and everything from Tutenkhamun's tomb)The Alexandria library and roman catacombs.

I could write for hours about what we saw but I'm in an internet cafe so time is limited. Here are a few snaps:


Valley of the kings. (no cameras allowed insdie the tombs)


Karnak temple (a tiny bit of it - it is MASSIVE, and 4000 years old.)

Nick at Karnak


The sphinx. After dark we went to the Pyramid Sound and Light show. James Bonds fans will know it from The spy who loved me. It was hilariously tacky but still cool.

Thats all for now folks. We have got 2 days of diving for fun coming up, and then we start back on the course on wednesday.

Note for Ed and Jon:

In the name of research for our new library in Edinburgh, I visited the amazing library in Alexandria for some ideas. What do you think? Should we include palm trees? It's on a slightly different scale admittedly. The ancient library was nearly totally destroyed, only 7 million scrolls and books remain from antiquity. This was just 10% of what was there originally!

2 Comments:

Anonymous Jon said...

Went to King Tut's museum in Cairo in '72. Found that all the exhibits were in London. Story of my life, really...

Is that a sun tan or is it just a patina of silt from the Nile....?

Jon

11:10 AM  
Anonymous Fiona said...

Your hair is now officially Pale Hound Yellow. An executive decision was taken by the team and even Ian can confirm it is no longer dayroom yellow!

10:14 AM  

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