Fall break is here – today was the last day of school until the 29th of October. It is officially the Eid El Fitr celebration. This year it falls on October 23rd. For many of our students and their families, it is a time of family gatherings for prayer and feasting following the month-long fasting that was observed during Ramadan. Many of our families will be traveling to various resorts in-country, usually along the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
For the foreign hire staff, we will be off traveling to many different locations. Pat and I, along with Denny and his daughter who is here visiting, are off to Istanbul, Turkey. Our flight leaves from Cairo very early Friday morning (around 2:30). We should arrive in Istanbul around 6:00 AM. Istanbul is at the crossroads of the passage from Europe to Asia and is one of the oldest cities in the world. We will be staying in the heart of Old Istanbul on the Middle Eastern side. Nearly all of the sites we want to see are within walking distance from our hotel. We also plan to ferry across the Bosporus Sea to visit the Asian side of Istanbul.
Our staff members are headed to Cyprus, Slovenia, Pakistan, Oman, Tunisia and in-country. Those traveling in Egypt are headed to the Red Sea resorts and down to the Valley of the Kings for a Nile Cruise. It will be fun when we all get back to share experiences. This is often how future trips become planned. Many of the arrangements we made for this trip to Turkey came as a result of suggestions by other staff who visited there in the past couple of years.
