Your Egypt

[Claire]

I am sick to death of the hassle in Luxor......

[Hedgehog]

I am sick to death of....RAIN

[moll]

Ohhh Claire :shock: I thought you'd have been used to it by now....was it something that happened, or just a buildup of things?

I've got to admit, much as I love Luxor, the hassle is something I absolutely do NOT miss :twisted: We were in Portugal last week and we went to a market, we were absolutely gobsmacked that they just let us walk past without hassling us to stop, without all the 'good price just for you my Queen, feel the quality, special for you' crap......we were actually free to walk past :shock: and if we stopped, we weren't taken prisoner and held for ransom until we bought something at some stupid bloody price that we KNEW was way overpriced but we were just worn down by the sales pitch and desperate to escape and too soft to be downright rude...

Maybe you mean something like getting tradesmen to come, or something like that? I know living there's a whole different thing from just being a visitor, but to be honest I'm kind of re-evaluating just how much I DO love Luxor, I have been for the last year or two. The people are great (in general) but I think they just have no idea how they can actually kill it for themselves with their tactics.

[Claire]

Think I was just having an off day...... they seem to be getting worse.... and the gropping is awful....

[moll]

Well I guess I'm lucky, I've never really been subjected to the groping that I know a lot of women get in Luxor :twisted: that's either because I'm nearly always with my husband, or because I'm ungropeworthy :cry:

One of the reasons why we're a bit 'off' Luxor at the moment, is this

(ramble coming up)

We've been visiting Egypt 4 times a year for the last 6 or 7 years, as you know......and on one of our first visits, we visited a shop in Sharia el Mahatta (how do you like the arabic 8) ) and we just got into the habit of dropping in every time we were there, just to say hello, and we'd always spend some money on a few things, we'd haggle kind of half heartedly but end up paying what we knew was too much, but we didn't really mind because we knew they had families to feed......

So anyway, over the years we must have spent a bloody fortune on stuff we didn't really want and we knew was overpriced, but we enjoyed just drinking tea with them, catching up on how their families were doing, blahblah..

Then our daughter decided she wanted to visit Egypt to see this Luxor place we were always droning on about :smt015 and as usual, we paid a visit to this particular shop, and she picked a few little bits and pieces to take home as presents for people (and I mean tourist tat, I don't mean anything worth more than a few pounds)

My daughter was a student at the time and she didn't have two pennies to rub together. And she has always been a Daddy's girl, they think the sun rises and sets on each other :roll: SO, when she picked a few bits and pieces worth maybe 20LE max, and they asked her for 200LE, that was IT as far as my husband was concerned........Goodbye Luxor.

I know that was just one shop, but I think that would probably have happened in 9 out of 10 shops in Luxor..........they see a new face, they see a chance to take somebody for a gullible fool. Only they made a mistake choosing my daughter and they did themselves out of repeat business that would have made them a lot more in the long term than the quick profit they were after.

My husband STILL feels resentful about that, that they treated us like we'd just got off the latest tourist boat after everything.........and it was just the last straw after several other instances when we felt that people just looked at us and saw ££££.

(BTW the shop's not there any longer, it was there before Station Street was redone)

So now, we're in a bit of a confused state because we both did and DO love Luxor.............but we feel disillusioned with it too.