Sheryl Lee: Another early start

I'm up early this morning, before even the wake up call to prayer. In Egypt you soon become accustomed to the call to prayer which echoes over the city 5 times a day. It can be a hauntingly lovely sound or it can be rather disturbing - in my experience the difference lies in the quality of the speakers and your location to said speakers.

Here, the speakers are located several kilometres away, so the call to prayer is a soft and musical cry that echoes in the air and blends with the other sounds of the city. In the darkness of early morning those sounds are the occasional car and the chickens next door. At other times of the day it can go unheard as it competes with the busy sounds of a crowded city.

I have had the experience of staying in a rented apartment which seemed to be right next door to the speakers. I was dead asleep, still suffering somewhat from jetlag and when the call to prayer blasted in my ear I almost levitated off the bed! It was not only loud but distorted as well because of the proximity. When I went to Cairo to pick up gamer son from the airport we stayed in a guest house that had speakers right next door, you could see them from the roof of the guest house. The call to prayer was so loud that the owners supplied ear plugs for guests. The speakers were either very poor quality or damaged in some way so that it was impossible to make out anything but a distorted and garbled noise that didn't resemble words in any language. It was quite horrible.

The call to prayer, when heard from a distance, is a musical sound that floats in the air and blends with the landscape. It reminds the foreigner that he or she is indeed in a strange and exotic land. It's also a useful way to divide up the day. The first call is before dawn, then around midday, in the afternoon, just after sunset, and at night.

Now I know there are a lot of bad things happening in the world right now - this blog is not about them. I'm not an expert in theology or political science. I don't know enough to be able to give an informed opinion and besides which this blog is about me! All I will say is that atrocities have been committed throughout history by fanatics in the name of religion. These fanatics have left a blood stained path right through human history but the religions are not to blame. Religions do not preach death, destruction and torture - it is the fanatics who do that and they use whichever religion they have hijacked as a figurehead and scapegoat. Here there are mosques obviously, Egypt is primarily a Muslim country. But there are Christian churches too, and both religions live side by side. <steps off soapbox, back to self>

So why am I up so early? Yesterday I spent the day learning how to convert my wee little book into an ebook for Amazon. I've learned a new skill :) However I realised in the middle of the night that I'd uploaded the wrong version of the book and I had to change it for the right one. So this blog, which is supposed to contain the link to the little book which is going to be sold for .99c since it is only a short quirky thing, is instead telling you that it's not there yet. (You can take a breath now, sorry about that long sentence.) Guess I got over confident... So next blog I'll include the link. It takes Amazon about 12 hours to upload a new title.

I guess it's all a learning experience. For my first book I was not at all confident I could follow the steps to convert from a Word document to an ebook format so I paid someone else to do it. But this time I couldn't afford that and besides, it's only a very short book. So I took the time yesterday to do it step by step and you know it's not hard at all. Just tedious. Like many things that look so daunting that you don't even begin, once you break it down into steps it's do-able. Kind of like life.

The mosque at the Marina: