El Gouna Times - Red Sea

I think I owe you a short “introduction” about my person, and the new series about The Art of Living in El Gouna is the appropriate section in the El Gouna Times to bring my own experiences also.

I am 55, retiring from my ISP (internet service provider) business in Belgium, where my eldest son Joe will take over my business midst this year. He is assisting me in our company during the last 10 years, so I am quite confident about him and the company’s future.

My youngest son Mike lives in Hurghada as a divemaster for about 2 years now, so last year I came over twice to visit him, but as I do not fancy Hurghada myself, I decided to stay at the Mövenpick and became only a little familiar with El Gouna then (of course, as a hotel tourist, your view of El Gouna remains very narrow.)

This year in April I rented during 3 weeks an appartment at West Golf, and was able to talk to several landlords in the area as I am almost fluently in 5 languages. From those contacts and the inside experiences from landlords themselves, I got a lot of information about the vision and the concept about El Gouna, and I learned this is much much better than what i’ve seen before during my holidays and business trips in other parts of the world.
Of course, I realize that small problems will always arise when constructing a house, but at least I learned that Orascom, who is the promotor of El Gouna, is willing to find ways to solve problems when they occur.

At the same time Mike came over every evening from Hurghada to El Gouna, so we dined each evening in a different restaurant. That’s how we found out that you can dine very nice in El Gouna, except one minor experience at the Chinese restaurant in DownTown.
Two times I went shopping at the local supermarkets to cook for myself at the appartment and so I discovered also the low cost of living in El Gouna.

So I imagined that, with what I heard and saw, it could be good to start thinking about an investment in a retiring resort like El Gouna for myself, and offer at the same time to Mike a nicer place to live for his work.

Soon my 3 weeks stay in April turned out into visiting some projects by myself.
Besides that, I made several visits to other projects togehter with
- Ralph Knippschildt from Marina,
- by Sigi Sörg from Bawo and
- and a salesman from Orascom (name I do not remember, as I was supposed to do the tour with Gianna, but she could not make it to the appointment and send somebody else.)
I even asked my wife Brigitte to fly in for just a couple of days, because I nearly had purchased a Hill Villa being renovated right now and did not want to make any decision without her, although she emailed me, she would trust me about what I would decide… We are married 31 years, you know…, and she knows I am not a big risk taker…

After visiting those projects once more, we decided not to buy a property right away on the spot, as we discovered the big price difference in
- prices when starting from zero by buying from Orascom
- or buying a already finished object, ready to move in.
So, I decided it would be much wiser to start first living on a regular base in El Gouna and learn yet more about the advantages of it.

That’s why I start renting this West Golf appartment for a one year periode starting from September 2005, (probably we can even move in earlier).
This renting periode will give me the chance to get more experience about living here in El Gouna, before I decide to buy or not.

And at the same time I give Mike the possibility to move out of old downtown El Dahar (yak…) and come to live here in El Gouna also. Starting the El Gouna Times as my hobby is a side effect, which will hopefully brings you, as well as me, more background information about El Gouna…

Hubert

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 at 15:27 and is filed under Editorial, The Art of Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.