After the Egyptian museum and lunch, we had a bus breakdown which ate up time for any smaller trips. So after a quick stop by the Egyptian tomb of the unknown soldier and the viewing stand where Sadat was assassinated, we were off to the airport.
The flight was fairly uneventful aside from some good conversation about reading material about Lawrence of Arabia and a female counterpart that had separately worked against the Ottomans.
We were staying at the Steinberger Nile Palace hotel in Luxor, which was off the Nile and in the city proper, albeit a fair walk south of the main river walk and Luxor temple. They had a nightly show, admittedly a more dinner theater than high culture one, put on by the staff in a lovely courtyard. The balconies were a real perk, both for entertainment and a place for quick drying the limited pieces of clothing I ha brought.
To my chagrin, I did have a couple instance of failures to communicate with waiters that night. First, after ordering for two, I ended up with two beers rather than the beer and wine I'd selected for my mother and I. I just went with it, but, apparently, a waiter was wandering around the wrong end of the table with an extra cup of wine that that I could have easily snagged. Second, I'd joined my mother and two friends after dinner for a hotel meal that was free for them due to their late arrival the previous night, but I would have had to pay for it. I wasn't really hungry and told the manager I'd be content with a piece of birthday cake I'd brought from the birthday party of someone in our tour. I was worried enough about the protocol there that I just resigned myself to paying when the waiter kept bringing dishes. That got him chewed out by a manager and an intentionally untouched dish was reclaimed. We left an extra tip. These fairly ridiculous instances of conflict aversion ended up just complicating things for everyone, and as my negotiating practicums have shown I need to stick up for myself early and often. To ameliorate the angst of this past paragraph, here's a picture of the first cat I saw in Egypt while wandering around Luxor that night. It wasn't an especially interesting trip, but it was still great being out on my own for the first time.
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