We bypassed the ready cooked breakfast stuff simmering under the hot plates, and started off with freshly chopped fruit salad, yoghurt and honey.  But we couldn’t resist following this up by heading to say hello (‘merhaban’, as in Turkish ‘merhaba’) to Ahmed, the egg man, who was always ready to come up with a fresh omelette or one or two fried eggs, expertly flipped over halfway through.

Jane’s idea of fried egg heaven was learned from grandson Lucas, and involves flash-cooking thinly sliced garlic before adding the eggs; so we got some from the kitchen that first morning (‘garlic’ sounds like ‘tomb’ in Egyptian Arabic) and handed it over to Ahmed, who took it in his stride.

A cup of tea with the eggie stuff, segueing to coffee and sticky pastries, and we were ready to face a tough day of  gentle reading on balcony or beach, with only our all-inclusive lunch and dinner to break the dreadful monotony.

We had actually intended to spend a pre-Christmas week somewhere rather colder, in the Black Forest; but the company in question hadn’t managed to fill their quota of passengers, so that was off. Then, strolling through our local market town early in December, we decided to see if Thomas Cook had any deals going; which is how we ended up at the Sunrise Holidays Resort, in Hurghada, on the west coast of the Red Sea.

The room we’d been allocated was on the ground floor. But, after a quiet word at reception, and an extra 70 euros added to my credit card, we ended up in a rather posh room on the 6th floor, looking down on the private beach below, with a pool scooped out of the sea, gently fed with chlorine-free salty water throughout the day and night.

                    

That first morning I’d woken up at sunrise, around six. When I’d lived in North Africa it had been too cold to go swimming in wintertime, and I’d assumed this would be the case here in Egypt. But, as I looked down, I saw that someone was already having a pre-breakfast swim. As Jane was recovering from an operation on her knee, she wouldn’t be doing much swimming; so I walked down the five flights and was delighted to discover that the water was surprisingly warm.  As I came out a few minutes later a friendly German guy told me I should bag my place for the day before all the best ones were gone.

Now I’d thought that this business of the Germans rising at dawn to place their towels on the choicest spots was a myth. No way, Jose. In fact, I discovered that some of them actually left things in their favourite spots the evening before!  Now that is not on.  As a seriously early riser myself I can go along with the morning towel assault; but hours before, that’s grounds for serious friction.  I was told one day that there had been actual fisticuffs between a Brit and a German one morning, though I didn’t actually witness any untoward goings on myself. In fact, as a fluent speaker of their language, I got on pretty well with the various Germans I spoke to during the week, most of them being from the former East Germany, which meant that - since Russian had been the compulsory foreign language - few of them had any English at all.

The local people working on the beach were surprised to see me, a tourist, wearing a ‘galabiya’, which is the local word for what they call a ‘djellaba’ in Algeria.  When I managed to tell them, in fairly halting Arabic, that it was a ‘kaftan’, from Turkey, they were even more surprised. (During the week I didn’t hear a single tourist even have a go at ‘hello’, ‘please’ or ‘thank you’).

I’ve already written about my problems with learning Arabic.  (Click here)     Basically it has to do with the fact that I was first exposed to the language in western Algeria; just about the farthest point west in the Arabic speaking world, meaning that the dialect would be very different from those of the Middle East. Not only that; this was in 1965, when most Algerians with any form of education could still speak excellent French, which meant it made no sense for them to put up with my elementary Arabic when we had another language in common.

Within a couple of days, word spread that there was this strange Englishman who’d lived in Algeria and was having a go at speaking Arabic. They eased me in gently, greeting me to see if I could make the appropriate return.  (In Algeria one might have asked ‘kerak?’ with ‘la bes’ as a response.  Here I heard a variety of different equivalents of ‘how are you?’, the most common answer being ‘el hamdu lilla‘, basically ‘thanks be to allah’, which works whether you’re feeling good or not).

Often, when I asked ‘what is this in Arabic?’ I was just not understood, the question being one that was rarely asked, if ever.  But I really needed to find out what the people here, in southern Egypt, would actually say. (Remember that, as I write in my earlier posting, I discovered that the words for ‘two’ and ‘oranges’ were entirely different when going from Algiers to Tunis).

It didn’t help that the three Arabic phrase or course books I’d brought with me seemed to be based on different parts of the Arab world.  When searching for the word for ‘wine’, for example, I found three words: ‘khamr’, ‘habiidh’ and ‘libit’, of which only the third seemed to be understood in the hotel restaurant (though the word for ‘red’, ‘ahmar’, was what I had hoped for). So ‘libit ahmar, min fudluk’ (‘red wine, please’)  worked very well at dinner time, with ‘birra, min fudluk’, replacing it at lunch-time. ‘Shukran’ was more than acceptable for ‘thank you’, followed by ‘jazilan’, if I wanted to go as far as ‘thank you very much’.

I’m afraid it didn’t get all that much farther; though, come the final day, I was able, with some care and attention, to come up with reasonable (and understandable) equivalents of ‘everything here is delicious’, ‘thank you for everything’ and ‘we are  going home tomorrow, unfortunately’ (the last word having gone straight into Turkish as a loan from Arabic, along with ‘insha’allah’, ‘meaning ‘God-willing’; ‘salaam aleikum’, literally ‘peace be with you’, though used as the most acceptable greeting;  and ‘ma’ashalla’, used - for example - to comment favourably on an interlocutor’s young child).

Anyway, the positive and friendly way my attempts at speaking Arabic were welcomed throughout the hotel means that, next time we go there for some winter sunshine, I will have made a serious attempt to improve my knowledge of the language; insha’allah!