Another day in Sharm

Photo: Some Amazing Egyptian dancers provide evening entertainment (see extra photo)
 
We should have left today for Scotland. Instead we are enjoying a few extra days on the beach.
 
In fact we know nothing of the chaos at Sharm airport except what we see on the internet. Here everything is calm and peaceful- we feel we are living in the equivalent of the eye of an international storm.
 
So far we have received excellent treatment and we are even staying on in the same hotel room. There was a minor hiccup lunchtime when we tried to get back into the room to find that the electronic key wouldn’t let us through. Officially we should have checked out at noon. But a quick trip to the reception desk sorted that out.
 
Those on medication though are having some problems. We met a guy who should be having chemo on Wednesday and he is stuck in Sharm. The tour rep promised to see if he could get him on a flight, any flight, back to the UK.
 
Another man in the middle of cancer treatment had run out of pills and money and was emailing his daughter to put £500 into his bank account and asking for a copy of his prescriptions  to be emailed so he could give them to the hotel pharmacist.
 
There is a well-stocked pharmacy in the hotel complex where you can get any drug you wish.  Viagra seems to be very popular. At least it’s very widely advertised.
 
Here’s another tale of serendipity, one to equal the one  earlier this year in the Caribbean when I met a Welsh woman who had dated my brother as a teenager.
 
A Welsh couple joined our beach bar table lunchtime. Recognizing the Welsh accent, more specifically a South Wales ones, I introduced myself.
 
“Where do you come from?”
“Tredegar.”
“What a coincidence! I am from Crickhowell.”
“Never! My brother bought a farmhouse near there. I can’t pronounce the name but its up a hill and it begins with P.”
“You don’t mean Penprisk?”
“That’s it. Lovely place.”
 
“I come from the adjoining farm, Ty-Llangenny.”
We sit and drink our cold beer amazed at this coincidence and stare out at the Red Sea.
 
“What does your brother do?” I ask. Now to non-Welsh people this my smack of rudeness, more than a trifle nosey, but I knew as a Welsh couple they would be only too proud to tell me – and they were.
“He is a self made millionaire,” she said. “I don’t like to boast but he has done very well for himself. He works with computers.”
 
   
I can’t wait to tell my brother this bit of news.