Birthday - Nile Style

I spent my birthday floating in a felucca boat on the Nile River in Egypt.

It is safe to say that my 26th year will be one that will always stand out as a fabulous one in my mind. Appropriately, my 26th birthday was a day that I will always remember. In Aswan we caught our felucca boat and took it up the Nile to Luxor. Clearly Mary and I pimped our ride by busting out the iPod speakers, cards, dice, and beers for the day boat trip. It was a picture perfect day: sunny, clear water, great company, rocking tunes, and oh yeah, we were in Egypt. In addition, our felucca boat was appropriately named Bob Marley. Our boat was paddled by people from the local Nubian village who were awesome guys that obviously loved Bob Marley too. We had a motor boat following us which was complete with a kitchen (the Nubians cooked us lunch, dinner and breakfast) and bathroom. In the late afternoon we stopped on a little island for the night where we played some football, hung out, played cards and grabbed some dinner from the Nubians. Later that night we built a campfire and had a little kumbaya session where we learned some Arabic campfire songs- think people singing slight variations of some "ahh-o ahaha-o" song with drums. That night I was surprised by a cake and several versions of the Happy Birthday song, the Arabic way. After we stuffed our faces with cake, the group started in on some serious card games activities accompanied by some even better jams. The late night party crew consisted of Becky, Matt, Jason, and the two of us. We invented this awesome card game called spit-head which consists of a card being stuck to your head and guessing if your card is higher or lower then everyone else's. (Go ahead and steal the spit-head card game- I know you want to.) While Adel claimed he was going to sleep with one eye open, the Nubians came to join the party and we ended up staying awake late into the night talking to them about their life living in a small village and how different it was from our lives. When we took a moment and looked up into the crystal clear sky we saw hundreds of shooting stars. We spent some time just enjoying that. It was truly a memorable experience spending my birthday with people from all over the world, living such different lives, on a felucca boat in Egypt, just drinking and playing cards. Maybe you had to be there to understand how special the day was for all of us - needless to say it was wonderful. I owe a big thanks to Mairs, it would not have been nearly as great without you.