Hurghada

I went clubbing in Egypt! Wow. Last night was a lot of fun. After we had all had enough of the beach, we got together with Hamada to talk about evening plans. We all agreed that we wanted to go down town and experience some Egyptian nightlife. Hamada got very serious (he rarely is) and explained to us the rules of the evening. He warned us about Egyptian men trying to take advantage of us and taxi drivers being extremely rude and stealing our money. He pointed out that we are all old enough to do what we want, but he strongly recommended that we stay with him the whole night. If we wanted to go home early, he would get us a cab, talk to the driver for us, and write down the tag number in case there were any problems. All of this talk made me extremely nervous to go out, but obviously we all still did. We started out the night by going to a sheesha bar. We all sat around a table smoking some kind of flavored tobacco-like stuff out of a massive pipe. We chose apple as our flavor. I only inhaled twice and it didn't do anything to me - I didn't really understand the point of it. Also, instead of peanuts or pretzels as bar snacks, they served chickpeas! And another chickpea-like food that wasn't chickpeas. I could not stop eating them... SO good!

After the sheesha and some drinks, we walked around the marina area to a restaurant for dinner. As we were sitting at the table and ordering our food, BOTH of my roomies got sick at the table and we had to call them a cab to go home. They thought it was the mix of alcohol and sheesha that made them sick. I stayed out longer while half of the group went back to the hotel.

After dinner Hamada took us to a "disco". It was so fun! There was a really good DJ and the place was full of strobe lights and had a crazy atmosphere. I was feeling confident and grabbed an Egyptian guy's hand to dance. He was such a fun dancer too! Instead of trashy dancing at bars back at home, he was twirling me all around the dance floor. I didn't want to leave! I don't think we got home until 3:30 a.m. but it was definitely worth it and we actually got to sleep in today.

We leave Hurghada this afternoon. I'm a little bummed to be leaving this town because it seems a bit more upscale and definitely cleaner than any other town/city that we've been to so far. I will be spending the next 5 days in Dahab and I don't know if they will have internet there, so you may or may not hear from me until Friday or Saturday. That's it for now!