Rome to Egypt

I have genetic predisposition to choking, something I share with my mother. I’ll choke on anything, pepper especially, but I’ve been known to choke half to death on my own saliva. So I always figured I’d die by choking on something stupid like a lentil. But the universe reminds me every so often that there are many stupid ways to die, and that I have no idea which of them is going to do the job for me.

We ended our month in Italy with a few nights in Rome. Great hotel, but because in Rome it’s still 25 degrees during the day, the management hadn’t turned on the central heating, so a little too cold at night. There was a little wall-mounted electric heater above the sink in the bathroom, useless except to heat the bathroom itself, but I figured that I could improve things in the bedroom by removing the heater from the wall and propping it up outside the bathroom. After unscrewing the heater (using my Leatherman Tool, of course) and unraveling a length of wire from the wall, I found that I could at least get the heater onto the floor of the bathroom, facing the bedroom, thus warming things up nicely.

It wasn’t very intelligent of me to decide to have a bath in the circumstances, but it isn’t often that we’ve been lucky enough to have a tub in our rooms on this trip. I say ‘tub’, but what I really mean is a fixture about twice the size of the bidet (I’d like to note at this point, that in the entire month we’ve spent in Italy, I haven’t made a single joke about bidets. They worry me a little, so I ignore them.) The idea is that one sits in it, while using a hand-held nozzle to spray oneself down. While I was preoccupied with trying acquire the skill of washing one’s bottom at the same time as one is sitting upon it, I lost track of the precarious bit of folding glass that I think was intended to be a shower curtain, and didn’t notice that I was spewing gallons of water out onto the floor of the bathroom. By the time I’d got the soap from my eyes, as it were, I’d managed to flood the bathroom with a good half inch of water, enough to submerge the feet of my code-violating heating system.

I gallantly asked Cara to place a wooden chair in the bathroom and then stand on it to yank the cord from the wall, while I stood as still as possible so as not to create waves that could reach the element. No-one was hurt, but I have sent the Darwin Awards my stats to save them time when I am eventually included in their literature.

We’re now in Egypt, sort of. We’re staying in a four-star resort at the Hilton in Sharm el Sheikh. The purpose of this resort is to persuade Russian and British tourists that they haven’t actually left home, but that it’s miraculously become really hot outside. The illusion is pretty good, so long as you can accept that bacon is made from chickens rather than pigs.

Cara and I find ourselves in the unfamiliar position of being the least understood English speakers here. The Egyptian resort employees are so used to the Pidgin English spoken by the Russians (and the British, come to think of it) that they understand them with ease. American and Canadian tourists are so rare that our accents cause complete bafflement every time we open our mouths, even to ask for drinks. I asked the bar tender for a guava juice for Cara and an apple brandy for me, both of which items are on the list of six ‘all-inclusive’ drinks. The bar tender looked so confused that I pointed out the two items on the menu (written in English, of course), and he understood completely: that I wanted an apple brandy made with guava juice instead of apples. He had no problem at all understanding the Russian tourist who wanted a sextuple pina colada, hold the coconut and pineapple juice, at 11:00 am this morning.

I realize that this blog so far is rife with stereotypes, and that this will make it somewhat less certain that I will win anything at all from the Nobel committee next year.