Mara’s (Marie Vaughan) personal diary of daily life running a hotel in Luxor – Egypt as lived day to day, not as a destination: the people, the setbacks, the small victories, and the long relationship with a place she now calls home.
All foreigners living in Luxor were invited to a meeting at the Sofitel Hotel last Saturday night – I was really surprised to find there were so many ex-pats living in Luxor! I am not good with estimating crowds but I reckon there must have been up to 150 people at the meeting with the…
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I am attempting to focus only on positive stuff – since I believe in Law of Attraction…therefore, I didn’t want to comment on this – but really I do so want to comment on this. So, I am going to look on the subject as a positive instead of a negative while still getting my…
When it appears that something is happening in Egypt – most likely nothing is happening in Egypt. When you think something is going to happen in Egypt – most likely it isn’t. We live in a kind of twilight zone. We always have one way or another, just our physical or economic survival was not…
We marvel at the Ancient Egyptians, what they did, what they left behind. We dig in the sand for their treasures, rob their tombs and put their bodies on open display in museums so we can gawk at death. We crave information on them. We crave connection with their spirituality. We wonder what they…
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There are 2 “Mara’s” – there is the practical adult who forgets what she is doing and gets bogged down in Egyptian/Middle East politics and ‘reality’ that is presented on the TV. Then there is there is the childlike one who comes from a magical Irish place, of faeries, leprechauns and mythical warriors which is…
So where are we today? Personally – and this is more of a personal touchy, feely post today…. Personally I have been DESPERATELY trying to NOT focus on Syria or Egypt’s ‘stuckness’. Am I succeeding? Of course not! Every time you see a FACEBOOK or TWITTER posting you know I’m not. But, as Esther once…
It appears that Egypt has lost and is still losing the international media war. They are short of video and stories of violence because to a greater extent the situation has stabilized here. Yet they continue with the insinuations of civil war, chaos and mayhem – Obama even linked in Egypt with Syria! Syria is…
My efforts over the last few months to bring businesses in Luxor together to discuss and to plan how to improve Luxor; solve some of our problems; make it a better place for ourselves and for tourists; to plan our own marketing, has all come to nothing. Why did I want to do this? Mostly…
Yesterday I went into Luxor – more accurately, I went on a bit of a joyride around town to catch up with some friends and see how the land lay. the first noticeable thing was that there was nothing to notice – as in no street riots, no burning building, no bloody or mutilated bodies…
I hardly know where to start this morning. Once again the CNN, BBC World and Al Jazeera English are continuing their “…….” I don’t have a word to put in there – let’s just say that their slant on the news from Egypt seems to be from some parallel universe to the one that I…
So far UK has been quiet in response to what is happening in Egypt and rightly so, with the exception of William Hague’s bit of non-specific waffle deploring deaths etc. I am taking this opportunity to remember the UK responses to the London riots in 2011 – where mainly young people ran riot across London…
Statement by the State Information Service (SIS) on current events in Egypt (August 17, 2013)The State Information Service (SIS), as an Egyptian national institution, welcomes and appreciates contacting all media outlets and extending all assistance for facilitating the great job of foreign correspondents through supplying them with all facts about the current situation in Egypt. The SIS while underlining…
For the last two days I was not able to write a post even though I started four different posts which I will finish and post at some stage. My mind was all over the place – there was so much happening all over the country my mind simply could not take it in. …
Early yesterday morning before turning on TV or opening the internet I sat on my doorstep in the deserted street. I looked at the dark ring around the manhole cover in front of me, an indication that the sewer was ready to overflow – the pipe is obviously blocked somewhere up the street. Two days…
What is happening in Egypt now has never happened before in many ways. While we do not have a civil war in Egypt in the traditional sense we do have a war being waged on many levels between two groups. First group are the Egyptian people who went to the streets on 30th June and…