Hey, this is Kirsty not Jon! I’ve decided to post on my wonderful husband’s blog as mine is so infrequently updated I fear all who may have read it have since lost hope a long time ago.

So we’re in Luxor and sitting in a Wi-Fi enabled McDonalds (which speaks volumes about the standard of Egyptian food as I would not go near the joint in the UK!!!). There’s a builder in the kitchen doing some impromptu building work and we’re becoming McFrozen from the aircon outlets we’re sitting under. However, it’s still kinda nice to get out of the afternoon heat.

We arrived Tuesday night via Cairo Airport, where we spent 4 hours sitting in domestic departures waiting for our connection down to Luxor. This was suitably long enough to be ripped off by the cafe staff, and we’ve taken a steep learning curve in the art of bargaining since then! We’ve also learnt that Egyptair can’t be bothered to label their check in desks. Oh, and that security staff are more interested in playing with their phones than looking at the X Ray scanner.

Since our arrival, we’ve been on loads of adventures! Our first outing was to Karnak Temple, which was amazing (see photo taken on Jon’s new Canon EOS – ooooh – I’m sure he’ll post more). The sheer scale of the Temple was awesome. The following day we then crossed the Nile and went to the Valley of the Queens and Old Gurna – 2 areas containing a large number of tombs from Ancient Egypt. Back-sheesh (or tipping) let us into a lot of places we probably shouldn’t have been and we also managed to get a lot of forbidden photos! Then today, we went to the Valley of the Kings and hiked over some of the desert landscape. This all sounds so simple and laid-back but we have so many stories to tell about how difficult it is to get between A and B without being hassled out of our life savings! Jon has also learnt from all the locals that he is a “very lucky man having beautiful wife”…

Anyway, gotta go, Jon is threatening to snatch the laptop off me :-). Next stop today – Cairo! Can’t wait to see our friends and enjoy the Easter weekend in somewhere warmer than the UK!

Kirsty x

Happy Good Friday! Youth work related posts will resume shortly.