Sharm el-Sheikhians are not Cairotanians

As promised in my previous post I was going to use this week to catch up on some experiences in Egypt.

Early May of this year I had my wife and kids over from the Netherlands. When you read the blog regularly you know that I live in Cairo by myself and my wife and two sons are still living in Almere, the Netherlands. Every other weekend I fly back to Holland to see them.
So early May they came to Cairo for two days and we then went to Sharm el-Sheikh and stayed at the Park Inn Resort, a resort very close to the airport (about 10 minutes) with an aqua park. The park is especially nice for younger kids. My sons are 5 and 3 and are totally into swimming and splashing and sliding and this aqua park allowed them on all slides but 3 of them, and these 3 were really a bit too adventurous for young kids like my son.
So we had a blast in Sharm el-Sheikh as well as in Cairo. In Cairo we obviously went to see the pyramids and the Sphinx. We also paid a visit to Cairo Tower. But the real fun was in Sharm el-Sheikh. The weather was great, of course, and so was the hotel. Rooms were spacious and clean. People working at the hotel were friendly. So was the food, buffet all the time, but very well prepared.

But the shop owners just outside of the hotel were pretty much the worst people I ever met. I mean, you know upfront that the shops are trying to sell as much as possible for naive tourists and we all know that typically these shop owners are very aggressive sales people. But the ones around the Park Inn Resort in Sharm el-Sheikh are horrible.
They practically dragged our kids into their shops just to get us inside as well. Probably to force us to buy something or else they wouldn't let us go. Even worse, they treated my wife with a total lack of respect, towards her or me for that matter. One time my wife was walking 2 meters in front of me, and the stares and looks she got were out of this world.

In one of my first posts about my experiences here in Egypt I characterize the Egyptians as the most approachable people I've met. Well I have to retract that remark... Cairotanians are the most approachable people I've met, Sharm el-Sheikhians are the most horrific people I've ever met. Okay, at least those that own a shop.
The badness of our experience was such that my wife didn't want to leave the resort any more, fortunately the kids didn't want to leave the pool either. But this counts for something. She got a pretty wrong idea of what Egyptians are like. I would've too, hadn't I met the Cairotanians. The shop owners we met in Hurghada were not as bad as those in Sharm el-Sheikh and in Marsa Alam I only met the drivers at the diving center everybody else was foreigner.

So my experience with the Egyptians in Sharm el-Sheikh during my vacation with the family was not so good. Thankfully I live among pharao's and they are really nice people.

Iwan