luxor market

The street markets of Luxor, Egypt are very colorful places, with lots of great bargains, friendly people, goats wandering around and many unusual things to see, along the banks of the Nile.

Sharm el-Sheikh and Luxor are the latest cities to get on board Egypt's fast-moving roll-out of Wi-Fi hot-spots.

The tourist destinations of Sharm el-Sheikh and Luxor are the latest cities to get on board Egypt's fast-moving roll-out of Wi-Fi hot-spots.

Although prices in these places will be expensive, they are considerably cheaper than the current alternatives in local tourist hotels.

Under a USAID-sponsored project, "While in Egypt Stay Connected," tourist destinations in Sharm el-Sheikh and Luxor are serving as pilot cities for Wi-Fi deployments. In each city, sixteen Wi-Fi access points swathe tourist areas. Visitors purchase prepaid Internet access cards for about US$6.74 an hour.

Although hotels in Cairo have been offering Wi-Fi, there has until this point been little in the other two tourist destinations. Cairo's Marriott with its relaxing courtyard garden offers a 24 hour access card that lasts three months for US$30 and it is always full of people using laptops. What they might lose one way, they gain by users paying for their premium price drinks.

In Luxor, Wi-Fi covers a 5 km stretch of the Nile Corniche, connecting users in outdoor cafes and on Nile cruise ships at 256K. Connectivity even extends into Luxor and Karnak temples, allowing the novelty of instant messaging while seated in a 4000-year-old monument. Also benefiting from Wi-Fi coverage, connected users can logon from pedestrian areas in Sharm el-Sheikh's Naama Bay, or even a chaise longue along a beach promenade.

Before this roll-out, there were only a very small number of hot-spots. The cost of rolling out the hot-spots has been paid for by different equipment vendors: SR Telecom in Luxor and Redline and Colubris in Sharm el-Sheikh. The Luxor hot-spots are run by Telecom Egypt's ISP TE Data and the Sharm el-Sheik operation by local ISP Egynet. Both ISPs paid the equipment installation costs.

There is no revenue split with site owners because the networks are outdoors and the ISPs have done all the aerial site leases themselves. However, they are selling the pre-paid scratch cards to vendors at a small discount.

Connected tourists, who travel with laptops or other Wi-Fi devices, have greater income and are bigger spenders when on holiday. According to research carried out by the project, 15% of UK tourists take a laptop and 30% of Germans.

This USAID project aims to boost tourism revenues by establishing Egypt as a "connected' destination, with Wi-Fi and 3G Internet attracting visitors who prefer to visit a country with fast and easy data access. It is part of a wider initiative to persuade local hotel owners to accept credit cards and put in place online booking procedures.
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Hot-spots in these destinations will add to Egypt's already burgeoning hot-spot culture. In Cairo there are a great deal of places offering free access including coffee shops, Macdonalds and a local chain called Cilantro. In each of these places, you will see a mix of tourists, expats and locals working away on their laptops.

Interestingly, these include people using Skype with headsets as PC to PC calls are legal in Egypt. One local visitor reported that the bandwidth was of sufficiently high quality that he was able to use the SIP client on his

hassn fathy ,gourna LUXOR -EGYPT the architect

This film from the design Mahmoud Ahmed Abdel-Radi No one assisted as stated محمود احمد عبد الراضى +20105715292Dr Hassan Fathy, born in Alexandria in 1900, became one of the outstanding architects of his generation in Africa, demonstrating that it is possible to build for the poor and teching people to build for themself. Fathy taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Cairo University and served as head of its Department of Architecture. In 1981 he established the International Institute for Appropriate Technology in Cairo to develop and apply his approach. With the publication in 1973 of Architecture for the Poor (University of Chicago Press), Fathy's work came to international attention. This book, which has since become a classic, describes in detail Fathy's experience in planning and building the village of New Gourma, using mud bricks and employing traditional Egyptian architectural features such as enclosed courtyards and domed and vaulted roofing. Fathy worked closely with the people to tailor his designs to their needs. He taught them how to work with the mud bricks, supervised the erection of buildings and encouraged the revival of ancient decorative techniques. Although New Gourma remained uncompleted, due to bureaucratic red tape and other problems, it has been said of Fathy that he produced 'not only answers but inspiration; hist thought, experience and spirit constitute a major international resource.' In 1980 he received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and in 1984 the Gold Medal of the Union of International Architects. Dr Fathy died in Cairo in 1989.

Luxor temple by Night

This is a short clip showing the Luxor temple by night. Filmed in Egypt