Early this morning, we were awakened by the call to prayer from a very loud singer in a very nearby minaret. The first prayer is at 5:49 am.  Good morning.

Today was a much quieter day, just when we needed one. The choices were either to do a walking/shopping tour in the beautiful town of Esna or to visit the nearby Esna Temple, famous for bright art, lotus flower pillars with stems and binding, then covered in hieroglyphs. The gods here are the god of water, Khmum and Neith, who keep the world in order.

We also visited the Caravanserai, the Wekalet al-Gedday, or a caravan rest stop. This was an ancient building that had been recently re-plastered with the help of US dollars. It had a wide open courtyard and a roof from which we could see over the town to a Catholic Church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, in a sea of mosques with minarets. Our guide knew that we all wanted to make purchases from the “Valley of the Vendors” (or vultures, they say) as we’ve started calling them because tonight would be dress-up night!  To be in the spirit of the evening, we all needed galabiayas (traditional gowns.)

This is when things got interesting. What we should have done (take note, future travelers) was put the price we wanted to pay in a pocket so when the haggling started, we had a limit. The problem was, we didn’t do it that way. Egypt is a terrific country and the people are delightful, but different. We’ve never felt unsafe and certainly never had “an incident,” but they can be aggressive. The way to handle salesmen (they’re really all men) is to approach a gauntlet of venters by looking at the ground and just march on through. If you start to look around, you will be surrounded by items pushed at you with lots of insistent shouting.

At the same time, everything is very cheap, so what’s the problem? It’s that it happens all so fast that you hardly have time to look around and shop. There is no “hassle-free” shopping here and there is always haggling. We don’t know how to haggle so here’s the lesson. Don’t mention a price. Let them do the talking and realize that the first price is 5 times too high at least.

All that said, we came away with two galabiayas. 

The rest of the day was a gentle boat ride south, upriver toward Aswan. At 9 pm, we had a terrific show of Nubian dancers who spoke their own language, were funny, and loved audience participation. John was especially involved!

Tomorrow, the 8th wonder of the world!