A day of Recovery

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Our room, which is on the interior of the hotel, is completely quiet which is a welcome relief after being woken up by traffic noise and the call to prayers each morning. After the hotel buffet breakfast, Evy and I go for a walk and book an organized tour through Thomas Cooke travel at the Winter Palace. Though this is expensive compared to our Cairo tour, they all seem to be a similar price and we figure that having a guide would be useful after visiting the last few sites with just our guide book for information.

Joshua needs blank paper for a project, so we stop by a dusty roadside stationary store and try to find some. It looks like we are the only people the shop keeper has seen in some time but he is unable to produce a book of blank paper from amongst the grimy samples.

Next we stopped by the bus station (it turns there are two) and found out information about the overnight bus to Dahab on the Red Sea, our next destination. It turns out there is an direct overnight bus that leaves at 4:30 pm and arrives at 9:00 am for about $25 per person.

We returned to pick up the kids and take them for lunch at our new favourite restaurant, the Lotus, before spending several hours at their INTERNET café on the lower level.

Later that day, after dinner, Joshua tried to race the elevator up to our room. The hotel is all marble staircases, and with thin coating of dust that covers everything in Egypt, he slipped on one of the turns and badly banged his knee on one of the marble stairs. From the elevator, I could hear his cry of pain and Evy was convinced that he must have broken something. We carried him upstairs and iced it, hoping it is merely a bruise.

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