Happy boxing day!

And MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Christmas in Egypt was a strange experience. There is no such thing as Christmas here, so no Christmas decorations, no Christmas music etc. The fact that it is sunny and warm makes it even more surreal to me. 'I'm dreaming of a white Christmas'...
Basically, there was no getting-into-Christmas-mood time, so when it was finally the evening of the 24th, after a long day of work, everybody from a culture used to celebrating Christmas was starting to feel down. Thank goodness we still managed to get a Christmas dinner organised at the nearby hotel! And surprise: the hotel personnel had even made turkey! Ok, not stuffed, but still, I was so happy when I saw that!
After dinner we all started dancing and also the bellydancer was there again. A bellydancer for Christmas, how absurd :-)
I left the party around 22.30 and joined some others on a trip to Alexandria for midnight mass. It was beautiful! The mass was held in the huge (size of a large church) chapel of the only catholic school in Alex. There were Christmas decorations and a nativity scene, and there was a choir that sang all the classical mass christmas songs: adeste fideles, silent night, ... The mass was partly in French and partly in Arabic, but I felt suddenly so at home there I was almost crying. And what luck: I was sitting next to a couple from Arlon that could speak Dutch! We got home around 2.30 to find the party over because everybody had got so drunk they went to bed early =D
Yesterday after a lazy morning we all headed to Alexandria. The original goal was to do some sightseeing, but me and some others ended up having a loooong Christmas dinner in a marble hall of a fancy hotel called 'Windsor Palace'. So you can imagine...