Sunset Shali

We are making good progress with the website design considering he's now actually working in Romania for a few months. I think the plan might be that me and the kids might go over there end of the winter to catch some end of season snowboarding.. which will be great.

The nearest off license is 300km away so the term "stocking up" takes on a whole new meaning. I recently took a trip there with P her to extend my visa and found the secret (only) shop that sells alcohol. A dark and dingy hole with nothing but old dirty cardboard boxes strewn around and not a bottle or can in sight. Anyway I managed to stock up a bit. I think if I didn't have a drink after work one or both of the children would surely be dead by now.

We are all off to Cairo in a few days to sort out more visas etc and are going to visit the pyramids and go horse riding. We can go buy some "normal" products like insect repellant spray and tampons. Siwa really does sell the minimum. They grow dates, olives and Balsam (for donkeys) but apart from that everything else is imported and arrives in a worse state that if you had scavenged it from land fill site.

Hardly anyone has a fridge or washing machine including the family house ( as they have no electricity, only a generator) so essentially there is no such thing as a shelf life here..more like a considerably short life.

Siwa is an amazing place even though it is small, surrounding it is the Libyan desert which is the biggest expanse of desert EVER. and in the middle the tiny oasis which only came about because some money hungry Westerners drilled for oil back in the day and much to their disgust hit water. There are lots of hot springs which you can go swim ( sit) in under a breathtaking night sky. with some of the springs the source is so far under ground that the water is too hot to touch.

Apart from the day to day rigmarole and sometimes visiting a camp in the evenings ( desert camp where there is generally a spring and the Siwans have fires and cook food for tourists) Siwan life is pretty relaxed although it doesn't always feel like it. Evenings are pretty laid back if you managed to dodge Anus's attempts at mass Cluedo or Scrabble sessions. Because there is no electricity the solar powered battery which powers the house lights often goes off which makes reading a little tricky. No TV or mains for laptops either. I've read about as many books since I've been here than I have in the past 3 years and because a fair few of these have been GCSE related, I feel my brain is benefiting from the challenge. I've decided to not pursue Arabic but try and learn Romanian for when we all end up there for the Summer.

I just thought that I might as well have a Siwan Christmas this year as I probably won't have another out here and they have a party-type thing with all the westerner who live out here ( all of which are really old and are either old male and gay or old female and an artist who have clearly taken far too many drugs in their earlier years and have banished themselves to the oasis in an attempt to cleanse themselves from their old free-loving hippie ways)

Apart from the Siwans themselves, the population is made up of a collection of French, Egyptian and German Tourists, the occasional sane (ish) Westerner who has brought land and is running some sort of business venture.. and a hand full of the most eccentric characters you've ever seen. It's not dissimilar to living next door to a bunch of circus freaks, all of which are permanently on crack and are so detached from reality that conversing with one of would require the patience of a vegetable.

There is an old German lady called La Rosa who has lived here for a while and she, from what I hear is quite a reputable artist back home in Dusseldorf. She is nearly 70, dresses like a cross between Tommy Cooper and an Egyptian Bus Boy and passionately recalls her days at the theatre when she used to live the thespian dream along side other German wack jobs. Those are the sort of expats that live in Siwa. Not exactly what I was expecting but then I've come to realise it's always best to have less expectations so your rarely disappointed, only perhaps surprised and bewildered which in my opinion is much more manageable.

I'm writing this mail in the dark of my room as the house battery has died, my laptop battery is about to give up and everyone's waking around with candles and kerosene lamps and any second the whole house will go up in flames so I'm going to sign out until next time. Last night there were two wild dogs in the garden, obviously chatting to their friends in the next garden I actually felt like severing my ears off with whatever blunt object there is to hand and shoving sand down the canals in a vain attempt to drown out the sound. I eventually got on to the roof and hurled stones at them, hard. That seemed to do the trick.

Right.. small delay in posting this as it is infact two days later and have spent the time recovering from a bout of Gastroenteritis which was painful. I'm quite surprised I didn't get it sooner but I spent a whole night with stomach spasams and vomiting which was lovely. The next day I tootled off to the hospital..which looked like it had just been bombed and sick people had taken up residence in what was left over. Sanitary wasn't the word that came to mind, infact Hospital didn't either. Anyhow, I had two needles in my butt administered by some merciless nurse who I had just recently seen ruthlessly stabbing a poor baby in the leg. This however prevented me from puking up again and I then proceeded to munch on a cocktail of anti agony pills, Buscopan, Motilum and Antinal.. possibly supplies left over form the 1st World War who knows.

I'm just about 100% again and all is back to normal ready to start another sandy weekend!