Days 43-58

Yes, yes, it's been two weeks. In my defense though when I sat down to write this I thought it had only been one week. The calendar set me straight pretty quickly. Based on all that I guess I can say that time has been flying here, of course if thats true then I can't figure out why every day goes by so incredibly slowly. I think I'm getting to that point where maybe I should start a diary instead of a blog because it is increasingly the case that I have nothing to say that will be of much interest to an audience, but that I'll probably want to muse back over in a few years.

But maybe I'm just tired. So here:

When I left Cilantro two weeks ago, after suffering a crushing spiritual defeat on train back from Luxor, I went with Anna back to the apartment of Alison's boyfriend, Nork, in Maadi. We all camped out there for a couple nights then returned home Monday evening where the wreck of our former apartment awaited us. All the furniture needed to be moved out of Anna's room and the floors needed to be cleaned and the smelly fumes needed to be coaxed out etc. Anna opted to sleep on the couch for a couple nights, but I had Tuesday off so I decided to just get to work that night.

Well my room looked like this. Naked and sad..

So I decided to just start fresh and clean with the extended window sill thing first, get all the dirt off, then move on to the room itself.

So the sill (what do you call the part outside the window? I'm just going to call it all the sill) is always just super nasty dirty, theres an old chain sitting on it and some rocks and broken flower pots and stuff, so I got rid of them all (pushed a few off the sill... then realized that was a bad idea after hearing all the shouting). Whatever was covering the top was all chipped and cracked so I decided to just get rid of all that too (hence the knife) until I realized that the entire sill, like most things in Cairo, is made entirely of dirt. You can sweep it all you want, pour as much water on it as you want (hence the bucket), but in the end it's just all dirt. If I poured enough water on this building I'm convinced it would just wash away, unfortunately its so hot here that all the water usually evaporates before I can test the theory. So I just got the broom and swept as much of it off as I could. Being the naturally lucky person that I am though, the head of the broom popped off mid-sweep and fell out the window. I didn't hear it land, (previous experience with things falling out the window assured me that someone would let me know if it had landed), so I walked around to our balcony to get a better idea of where it ended up. And there it was, just sitting on a ledge right underneath the sill. So I did the only reasonable thing, climbed out my window and tried to nudge the broom head over to the balcony so I could save it, at the last minute of course the broom stick had a seizure and the brush went flying of the edge. The people below let me know it landed.

It headed that way..

After laying on my stomach in the pile of dirt on the sill. Mission: Fail.

So the next day I went out to buy a new broom, complicated by the fact that I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to say broom in Arabic. After wandering around for way too long looking for a broom on display that I could point to, I finally broke down and drew a picture of one for a shop keeper..

...who promptly brought me a nice new broom from the back of the store. (So thats where they keep them....) I'm cheap so I just bought the head of the broom and used the stick we already had. After sloshing dirty water around all day and killing my knees I cleaned myself up really fast around 5pm and publicly transported myself over to Maadi where I was due to meet with a wonderful American family interested in my babysitting skills. For the sake of preserving their privacy I won't say too much other than that I love this family and their apartment and their absolutely adorable children, especially the hopscotch loving three year old (she insists on having her first initial in all the squares, not numbers). As a parting gift Mrs. X invited me to an amazing dinner that she whipped up from scratch and I'm happy to say we'll be working together in the future; more on that later.

If anything happened Wednesday, I don't remember it.

Thursday, the end of the week, the bottom of the hill, the last stand, the... yeah.... the night we went to party with the Marines stationed in Cairo. I'm still confused about what exactly they're doing here, but they have a great club room and some nice pool tables. We kinda just forced our way in. Overall, good night.

Moustafa is a hoss

see?

Saqa being a gentleman and holding all our bags

Afterward we had the munchies and went to Minousha (sp?) where Moustafa promptly fell asleep on the bench while cuddling his cowboy killers:

I don't remember Friday, but chances are I slept all day. As I mentioned before, we're on the lookout for a new apartment, so on Saturday we went to look at a few potential places. The first one had a really nice location. Cute cafes and a church nearby, clean everything, and a .. resident.. bowab.

The elevator actually works, and there's no trash!! (the bowab lives back there..)

The place was a little small though...

.. And we would have had to make this a bedroom...

.. And the purple plastic chairs were just a little much for me..

..Not as much as the rent though, so we unfortunately declined the landlady's offer and sidled off to another potential place. Though large and clean, it was farther away and in an area not as nice. It was charming and emitted the authentic air of in insane asylum.

They're coming to take me away....

Later that evening the aforementioned Moustafa (who is an amazing and wonderful and thoughtful person, and who reads this blog, so let me heap more praises on him) had a yen for bowling and was trying to rally a team together, but I declined, because I'm a thoughtful student and wanted to get to bed early to start the week off right. I made up for it the next evening, however, when, after a series of unfortunate events, we ended up at the bowling alley. Since I only go bowling about once every two or three years I forgot how awful I am at it and definitely talked myself up way too much.

ouch.

This place is legit.

This guy is legit.

They make you wear special surgical-bootie things over your bowling shoes so you don't mess them up. Lame!

Which reminds me- a special thanks to Karim for buying me three pairs of high quality Nike socks to bowl in, since I didn't bring any (I didn't know we were going bowling.... it was the backup plan. And you guys know how I am about socks)

I'm more or less out of pictures so I'll sum up. On Monday we were going to look at more apartments, but due to some poor timing on a number of people's parts we ended up postponing and by means of (completely unnecessary) apology Moustafa took Anna and I to Orangette (this guys killin me) and bought us dinner (we owe you). I got fajitas and haven't been that happy in a long time. On Tuesday I decided to start my no bread diet because I've started getting a bit fluffy around the bread basket. To get started off right I ate all my bread, that way I wouldn't be tempted to cheat(yer doin it wrong). Thursday night was exhilarating. I forgot my camera though. I went to Stilleto accompanied by approximately 3-4 Egyptian youths. The boy to girl ratio was a little more than off so we didn't get in. We proceeded to another club and also failed to get in , at which point some of the group gave up and went home. This got us down to a better number and it was a more reasonable time of the night, so we ended up doubling back and getting into Stilleto, which is a fantastically wonderful club. Apparently the munchies are good too, but I didn't get that far.

(Not my picture) The windows open out to the Nile! Dance floor to the left.

So I got home that night, full and satisfied (we got shwarma after.... i.e. Moustafa got shwarma for me (more $$ plz, parents!)) and I slept in to an unreasonable hour the next day. And the next day. And then school started, and eventually it was today. Today I went to see The Odd Couple performed by a theater group on campus, it was hilarious, especially with the Egyptian accents, and I enjoyed it immensely. Future plans include Halloween party this weekend, a couple midterms and some babysitting. I sure just can't wait for it all to go down.