Fire in Luxor's Savoy Bazaar! Yes, really!

We had a bit of excitement this morning!

As we were preparing breakfast for our current guest, and laying the table on the roof terrace, we saw some balloons had drifted over to our side of the river. They aren't supposed to come over here, but when the wind is in the right (or wrong) direction, it must be quite a job not to just "go" with it. Anyway, one of them carried on going down, and down, and down, until I was convinced that it must either be in the river, or landed somewhere about the Karnak St area, and then; it began to deflate!

It was then that I noticed the smoke. There was some to the left of my field of vision, and more to the right. This isn't unusual, as many Luxor folk burn their rubbish to save them the troublesome burden of carrying it a hundred yards or so to a skip (dumpster, for the Yanks), but the column of smoke to the right was a fair bit denser and blacker and higher than the other. It was also drifting towards the balloons. I thought to myself that I wouldn't like to get caught up in that, it wouldn't do your lungs much good, and that's for sure.

The next time I looked over at the larger column of smoke, it had turned to grey!



"Ahh," I thought " that's a fire, with water being poured onto it!"
I was right, as well! Apparently, two shops in the Savoy Bazaar went up in flames. We walked through there tonight and the whole place is absolutely stinking of smoke and dirty water. Horrible!

The only consolation being that no-one was hurt, as it was only around 07.00, and there were no shops open yet. As if that wasn't bad enough, in these straitened times, I see that the electricity supply must have been damaged, and all the shops (except the very end ones) were in darkness and closed tonight.

Apology

I was a bit ashamed about the misleading headings to my last two posts, in fact, I was riven by guilt as I remembered the tale of the "Boy Who Cried Wolf".

Well here we are on a different day, but this time we actually DID come across a REAL DEMONSTRATION!

No pictures, obviously. You do remember who's writing this blog, don't you? We were riding on the local 'bus, on our way to Tutti Frutti, when we saw this small demonstration coming down Sharia Mahatta (Station Street).

We were actually on the roundabout, where Station St meets Karnak St, before I saw it out of the corner of my eye. There were around 50 or 60 people, some of them children, and those at the front were carrying an oblong banner which was maybe 20 feet long. Of course, the writing was in Arabic (which might as well have been Double Dutch for all it meant to me) but near either end of the banner there was a portrait of someone. They both were of our beloved Governor Samir Farag. Then I noticed that each picture had a large red cross struck diagonally right across it!

The camera was in my pocket, ready for exactly this kind of opportunity, but as you might expect, by the time I thought about getting it out we were approaching the traffic lights beyond McDonald's! Another missed opportunity, the story of my reporting life!!!!!