Another early start

I'm up early this morning, before even the wake up call to prayer. In Egypt you soon become accustomed to the call to prayer which echoes over the city 5 times a day. It can be a hauntingly lovely sound or it can be rather disturbing - in my experience the difference lies in the quality of the speakers and your location to said speakers.

Here, the speakers are located several kilometres away, so the call to prayer is a soft and musical cry that echoes in the air and blends with the other sounds of the city. In the darkness of early morning those sounds are the occasional car and the chickens next door. At other times of the day it can go unheard as it competes with the busy sounds of a crowded city.

I have had the experience of staying in a rented apartment which seemed to be right next door to the speakers. I was dead asleep, still suffering somewhat from jetlag and when the call to prayer blasted in my ear I almost levitated off the bed! It was not only loud but distorted as well because of the proximity. When I went to Cairo to pick up gamer son from the airport we stayed in a guest house that had speakers right next door, you could see them from the roof of the guest house. The call to prayer was so loud that the owners supplied ear plugs for guests. The speakers were either very poor quality or damaged in some way so that it was impossible to make out anything but a distorted and garbled noise that didn't resemble words in any language. It was quite horrible.

The call to prayer, when heard from a distance, is a musical sound that floats in the air and blends with the landscape. It reminds the foreigner that he or she is indeed in a strange and exotic land. It's also a useful way to divide up the day. The first call is before dawn, then around midday, in the afternoon, just after sunset, and at night.

Now I know there are a lot of bad things happening in the world right now - this blog is not about them. I'm not an expert in theology or political science. I don't know enough to be able to give an informed opinion and besides which this blog is about me! All I will say is that atrocities have been committed throughout history by fanatics in the name of religion. These fanatics have left a blood stained path right through human history but the religions are not to blame. Religions do not preach death, destruction and torture - it is the fanatics who do that and they use whichever religion they have hijacked as a figurehead and scapegoat. Here there are mosques obviously, Egypt is primarily a Muslim country. But there are Christian churches too, and both religions live side by side. <steps off soapbox, back to self>

So why am I up so early? Yesterday I spent the day learning how to convert my wee little book into an ebook for Amazon. I've learned a new skill :) However I realised in the middle of the night that I'd uploaded the wrong version of the book and I had to change it for the right one. So this blog, which is supposed to contain the link to the little book which is going to be sold for .99c since it is only a short quirky thing, is instead telling you that it's not there yet. (You can take a breath now, sorry about that long sentence.) Guess I got over confident... So next blog I'll include the link. It takes Amazon about 12 hours to upload a new title.

I guess it's all a learning experience. For my first book I was not at all confident I could follow the steps to convert from a Word document to an ebook format so I paid someone else to do it. But this time I couldn't afford that and besides, it's only a very short book. So I took the time yesterday to do it step by step and you know it's not hard at all. Just tedious. Like many things that look so daunting that you don't even begin, once you break it down into steps it's do-able. Kind of like life.


The mosque at the Marina:

 Hurghada at night from my apartment building roof top:

 The mosque at the Marina again:

 This is why we stayed at the guest house with the noisy speakers:

 And this:

And this:

 My reward for getting up so early - look at this sunrise!

This is the cover for my little ebook, link next time :)

Afternoon off

Lately I've been having nightly visits from my old friend Insomnia. He comes to chat, we hang out and drink tea and watch the sunrise. Then presumably Insomnia heads off to his black palace to snooze the day away and I struggle to function on 2 hours sleep.

I've been working on the Werewolf book - named now, Zora's Dawn :) The last couple of days though I've had a bit of a crisis, a bout of writer insecurity I guess it is. I write, and it comes so easily to me. Editing lightly is easy, hard editing which is taking out whole sections is more difficult. Then I start second guessing myself. If I can take out whole sections of the book that are irrelevant to the storyline then what sort of writer am I? If it comes so easy to me does that mean it's not actually any good? What if I've written a book that's not good, but cheesy and horrible? What if I suck at my chosen career and I'll never make any money, what will I do now that I've burned all my bridges? And so on...

Mr Insomnia comes to visit every night, we chat about all the things I worry about in a way guaranteed to take them from every day stresses to major life issues. I finally fall asleep around 3am and wake sometimes at 5am - I've got some great dawn shots to share though. Some mornings, like this morning, I sleep until 7.30am and wake feeling like death. It's a bit tricky writing in this sort of mood, which is why today I'll be working on turning a wee little ebook I wrote into the proper ebook format. I'm going to put it up on Amazon soon, as a little experiment. That's something that takes nothing more than focus on the tedious steps required for formatting. The cover is already made, and this one has photos for each page too so I've plenty to keep me busy and potentially make a little money down the track.

Yesterday I was up and writing before the sun dragged itself over the island I can see across the Red Sea from my balcony. But plagued by these doubts I didn't get that much done and found myself paralysed with indecision - is it good enough, does it fit in with the storyline, that sort of thing. So since I've received a teeny tiny amount of royalty payments (and I am not understating, it is really teeny tiny) I went along Sheraton Street and this time I took photos of some of the wares available in the shops.

These pics are only a very small slice of the things available on Sheraton Street and there are no pics of the many stores that sell the knock off designer bags, clothes and shoes. I've never understood why such a rich culture sells this sort of tat, but then I see all the tourists walking around carrying their designer knock off bags and I guess it's consumer demand. I daresay the sort of stuff I'm drawn to is considered by Egyptians to be tourist tat as well, but I always was a sucker for teapots and teacups.

There are a myriad of strange lights made up of I think coconuts which blows my mind - both because they look like something you would get in Hawaii and because some of them are downright scary! There are the egg lights that I love for reasons I can't explain except that I also have a love of flashy, trashy, lights. There are the usual tourist types of clothing - t-shirts, stylised belly dancing outfits which make me laugh, that sort of thing. There are fridge magnets, stuffed toys, sand filled camels, embroidered towels, wooden furniture which I adore even though I know it's aimed at the tourists, marble everything and of course pyramids,camels, and Aladdin lamps in all kinds of materials. You can get a marble pyramid light - kitsch but I have a weakness for kitsch. There is also a staggeringly wide range of complete junk in frighteningly bright colours. I meant to take a pic of a shop that has a huge range of this stuff, you almost need sunglasses in that section of the shop. Sadly, I forgot to take that particular pic so you'll have to wait for that one.

So, here are the pics, starting with my sunrises, enjoy :)

Cup, plates, etc.

Marble marble marble

Scary lights

See?

And a kangaroo in case I get homesick :)

Pyramids pyramids pyramids

Aladdin lamps, camels and assorted stuff

Stuffed monkeys (why I don't know), the egg lights, sheesha pipes

Clothes

A gift for the gamer son, a bongo drum :)