Things to be grateful for this morning in the Sinai

we’re not dead yet. so far we are safe.
the mountains here are really beautiful.
the ocean is too.
and the weather is nearly perfect.
i’ve been able to get coffee every morning, even though it’s not very good almost anywhere in egypt
i slept pretty well, even though a mosquito kept waking me up, and i was greeted at 5 am by a house mouse
a cat showed up to get rid of the mouse, but I turned it away. 1 strange animal in my room was enough
everything is a teachable moment, including when i casually threw away the dead cockroach in the kids’ shower last night
they gave us a bodyguard, a logistics manager, and flew out a guide. we cancelled one of the guided trips, the one that this guide specializes in. oops. too tired, and afraid of travel advisories from our government. but he was really nice about it. so there’s that.
the buffet at this hotel is good.
they found us connecting rooms after all, although it took a while and they probably have not been cleaned in a couple months.
tourism is low here, since the revolution. but that means that it’s not crowded, and everyone is really grateful that we are here. I think the media has made out Egypt to be a really unsafe place, but the people here feel pretty secure. I suspect it’s safer than Israel, or most parts of Oakland, but somehow doesn’t feel that way. Maybe it’s all the security checkpoints where there are lots of people but they don’t seem to be doing much…maybe it’s that the army seems to run the government here but it’s not really clear how things work…