Arrived in Edfu :)

I’m alive and safe in our apartment in Edfu. But it was a long time getting here.

We got into Luxor around 8:30 last night, and after a brief fight with the horde of men trying to carry our luggage for us and get us taxis, we made it to our hotel. We stayed last night at the Iberhotel, which is quite nice. AC in the rooms and western showers, plus a nice buffet breakfast in the morning, was just what we needed after travelling for so long. We had been awake for something like 36 hours by the time we got to the hotel. Unfortunately, we forgot that we wouldn’t be able to access the Duty Free shop at Luxor Airport, so we didn’t get to buy any booze for the season. That might be a problem later…

This morning Nadine and Greg came to pick us up from the hotel and drive us to Luxor. We had a driver, and some of the guys came with us to help tie the luggage to the roof and get stuff down and everything. The drive to Edfu from Luxor is about 2 hours, but it went by pretty fast. I read and everyone else listened to iPods. We got to Edfu and to the “new house” we were supposed to have. Nadine had wanted to move further away from the police station and off the main street so that we would be a little less visible to the locals. We went to look at it, and it was really nice and clean and new- and REALLY small. We would have been packed in like sardines. The other problem was that the third apartment, for the guys, wasn’t finished being built yet. Nadine didn’t like the idea of the guys not living with us, so we went to look at the place the Edfu team had stayed at a few years ago. It wasn’t new, and was quite dusty, but we ended up deciding to take it. It gives us more space, though half of the apartment looks like an episode of Hoarders. The bathroom is… special. But we’ll deal with it. Unfortunately for me, my bedroom is one of the rooms full of stuff, so I’m sleeping in Kat and Susan’s room for the time being. My room will be the one with the rotating roommate once it’s cleaned and a fan installed and stuff. I’ll have it to myself for the first few weeks though, which is cool.

Nadine and Greg went to the Temple to handle paperwork and stuff while we set up our rooms. It turns out that somehow three of us (including me) were left off the security paperwork, so we won’t be allowed to work on site tomorrow. We can be there, but we can’t actually touch anything. Hopefully the paperwork will be here in a few days so that we can start working!