Support Your Local Comedy Festival

It's been the Colchester Comedy Festival - hooray - but it took me a bit too long to get into it - boo. They had a pretty good line up, but a mixture of other commitments and laziness meant that I didn't get there until Richard Herring, a few days before the end.

I went along to that there New Comedian of the Year competition - one of the heats and the final.  It was in the old bus station waiting room, which had been turned into a rather tasty little venue.  I don't remember it being half as nice when it was an actual bus station. Toilets were a bit weird, with everyone relying on a radar key tied to a walking stick; queues a plenty.

Congrats to Ben Clover, a most worthy winner, not least because he did a different set in the final to the heats. Feel I should drop mentions at Ed Hedges and maybe Mark Sidcox whose party popper joke was one of the funniest things I've heard in ages.

Aswan

I like Aswan.  It's a bit more chilled out than either Cairo or Luxor.  By which I mean there's a lot less dudes with guns, which is quite a relief.  i get the feeling I'm not great for Africa. Aside from a couple of weekends in Morocco I've had three proper holidays in Africa; the main destinations of the first two - Zimbabwe and Mali - went absolutely nuts as soon as I left and this Egypt place seems to be absolutely on a knife edge.

Went to the temple of Philae (the one on the island).  Now don't get me wrong, all these temples are proper old (this one's a comparative baby dating back only to Roman times; but all the biggies date back to 1400BC, except the pyramids which add an extra millennium and a bit to that) and it's amazing that they managed to do what they did, and even more so that it's lasted so long but they do get a bit samey after a while, what with all these Pharoahs (that look the same) giving gifts to all these gods (that look essentially the same as the Pharoahs, give or take the odd animal head).

I feel a little bit hieroglyphicked out...

Exit Through The Crocodile Museum

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I didn't realise that Luxor Museum was in Luxor - I've seen pics of it. I assumed it was hewn out of a cliff - it's not. It's bang in the town centre.  Still wherever it is, it's a pretty good place to spy some sphinxes.  Between there and Karnack there is pretty much loads of them.

Saw that Valley of the Kings place too, whilst I was in Luxor.  Didn't get to go ballooning, apparently they're looking into the safety aspect.  Big fat boo.

Currently cruising the Nile. The boat goes from Luxor to Aswan, via two other temples which, whilst plenty temple-y, don't have the big name cache of, say, Valley of the Kings.  So they've tried to do something a bit different to make it memorable. In Edfu (formerly Apollopolis which is a lot more fun to say) they've made it so that the only way to travel is by horse and cart. In Kom Ombo (fun to say as it is) they found a heap of mummified crocodiles dedicated to the local crocodile god, consequently you exit through a crocodile museum, which makes a change from a giftshop.

Pharoah 'Nuff

So Cairo, biggest city in Africa; one of the biggest cities in the world.  And it looks big, anytime you get up above the building line the barrage of ugly, beige, half-built blocks stretches further than you can see. After the bigness - in fact, well before the bigness - you notice that the temperature here is a whole heap more balmy than that sub zero nonsense back in Blighty.  It's just about the first time I could classify the ambient temperature as "not cold" since leaving Latin America last year.

Cairo is pretty much empty of tourists at the moment due to the old civil unrest thing.  Not certain whether this (the emptiness) is good or bad. On the plus side you do get the big sights - like King Tut's mask - almost to yourself; conversely the millions of people that rely on tourism are all trying to sell you a statue of a cat anytime you do anything.

So yeah, been doing the cliches. Perhaps not in the order we intended, again due to politics (FYI avoid "the Garden City district on a Saturday" is a bit like saying avoid the Trafalgar Square area, it takes a bit of a dent out of the 'stuff what you can see').

Saw the museum and the Tutankhamun stuff. Not meaning to belittle him, but he wasn't one of the big Pharoahs, what with dying when he was still a kid, and if his tomb was so chock full of trinkets the important Pharoahs - your Ramses and whoever - must have been, well, quite shiny.

Staying in Giza, so can see the Pyramids from the roof, which is a bit surreal. Just been out there for a spot of Sphinx watching. Only saw one, poor show.

Haven't You Been There Before?

So Egypt.  That's one of the biggies, right?  With its sphinxes and pyramids and deserts and camels. I guess it's understandable that everyone assumes I've been there - it's Africa 1.0: the bit that everyone knows about; the bit with the resorts and the Wonders of the World.

But I've not been before. Time to pack some Immodium, get a typhoid booster, check the FCO website and see what all the fuss is about.

To Cairo...

The Oyster is Your World

So in the last week I've finally got round to doing some of the things that people have been raving about for ages but I've either not got round to doing or been blissfully unaware of.  Here are three of them:

Mersea Island Oysters
Essex strives to be derivative.  We really don't have anything which is truly ours - one of the things that we do have is oysters and the best place to go to eat them are the oyster shacks on Mersea Island. They had common-or-garden rock oysters there, as well as the Blackwater oyster - which is the proper local delicacy.  I Pepsi challenged them - I preferred the rock oyster - presumably because I'm a pleb.

David Thorne
Not certain what I've been doing thats meant I've been oblivious to David Thorne until now. His 27b/6 website is proper funny.  At least two of his emails made me lol my face open way harder than that Book of Mormon thing did.

The Fault in Our Stars
I've been meaning to read this for a while.  Crikey it's hardcore, it made Looking for Alaska seem as emotionally charged as a knock knock joke. Had one slight downside, more to its juxtaposition with me watching Breaking Bad (something else which really should be mentioned on this page, but I can't help but think that writing any commentary at all on Breaking Bad is a waste of your eyeball juice), namely any slight niggle I've had this weekend I've assumed is cancer.  It's clearly not - all evidence points to an old running injury, a stitch and a 24 hour sickness bug, but turns out I can be somewhat suggestible.