What did the fish say when he hit his head?

Friday, our last day on the cruise started in a typically Egyptian way. We were told only that breakfast was between seven and eight-thirty and that our guide would come on the boat to pick us up “then.” Whether “then” referred to seven, seven-thirty, eight-fifteen, eight-thirty, or whenever, we had no idea. I waited until eight-forty to call our Upper Egypt-based travel agent and ask when the guide was coming. “The guide is not there yet?!” he asked in alarm, then promised “I’ll call you right back.” Fifteen minutes later, he still hadn’t called and the guide had not arrived. The receptionist in the ship’s lobby told me they were about to move the boat into a different position at the dock and I called our agent back and let him know that the guide wouldn’t be able to get on the boat for “fifteen, twenty minutes,” as reported to me by the receptionist. “He is not there yet?!” asked the agent (again – you’d think he’d have asked the guy to call or text to confirm he’d picked us up, not to mention the agent was supposed to have already called ME back to confirm).

Also typically Egyptian was the fact that the receptionist’s “fifteen, twenty minutes” actually took an hour and a half. The boat finally resettled at a different dock, a five minute drive from where we started so when the guide came on board we had to taxi back to the first dock to catch our felucca. A felucca is a beautiful Egyptian sailboat with a triangular main sail with graceful arcing lines. We spent over an hour drifting up and back down the Nile around small islands of granite.

We ate lunch at a pizza place, then Philae temple, a Greco-roman period temple with a portion designed by the Emperor Trajan. All 47,000 pieces of it were moved by workers funded by UNESCO from a nearby island in the Nile when the High Dam caused the original location to flood up to within a few feet of the tops of the pylons. They moved the entire temple complex and reassembled it in an unflooded location. We did visit the High Dam and the largest man-made lake (in the world?), Lake Nasr, which Egypt shares in small part with Sudan. All of Egypt’s electricity comes from the hydroelectric power generated by the High Dam and enough is leftover to sell to other countries as well.

The trip back to Cairo on the sitting train was much smoother than the trip to Upper Egypt. No wild braking and squealing on the tracks and I slept most of the way home. The day we got back we had to see the Egyptian museum (King Tut's head is even more amazing in person and there were many other gold and sparkly things besides) and go to the Khan el khalili bazaar because it was Helen's last day and we didn't want her to miss out on anything important.

The next day, Saturday, with Sarah and Suzie was spent doing some last minute shopping and they left just in time for me to briefly clean my room and work myself into a panic the night before my first day at my new job. Even with a sleeping pill, I barely slept and among my million worries was the fact that the office assistants at my old job ordered lunch for everyone in the office from a cheap Egyptian place and, as such, I have no idea how to order lunch from myself and give directions to my office, all in Arabic. How true it is of me that of all the things that could go wrong my first day in the law firm, I am most worried about lunch!