Month: December 2010

Otherwise known as, “Why I’m glad we arrived in the middle of the night.” While the inside of our apartment is charming, the exterior leaves much to be desired. It’s not winning any style points, that’s for sure.

 This is our building. We occupy the top 2 floors. An unfortunate Navy family lives beneath us. I haven’t met them yet. I think they might be hiding. 

 

Taken from my bedroom balcony: our parking lot and patch of grass. It may not look like much, but it feels like we won the lottery. So many places in Cairo/Maadi have no space for kids to play, but our boys can go outside and run around and play soccer and I don’t have to worry because they are inside our fence. 

I love how Carter goes for the fist pump after scoring against his big brother.

I guess you better start calling me “Robin O’Hara” cause I now have my own household help. Josh and I interviewed and hired a woman to take care of the cleaning and laundry starting tomorrow. Well, he did the interviewing in a mixture of English and Arabic and I just smiled and nodded and looked like I understood the Arabic parts. I didn’t.

So now I have a mountain of clean laundry that I feel like I need to hurry and fold before she gets here, lol. The plan is for her to come 4 hours/day, 4 days a week and I think, “there’s no way she can clean for that many hours. She’ll run out of things to do.” Until I remember that I have 3 boys who are incapable of keeping food in their mouths, clothes off the floor, and pee in the toilet. God bless her.

Each day we have gone out for a walk to explore our neighborhood. When I’m not taking pictures of cats, I’m trying to capture the feel of our neighborhood for my friend Leslee, who is moving here in 30 days. There is a whole bunch of beautiful and ugly mixed together in the streets surrounding our apartment.

breathtaking.

expansive, pristine, and luxurious.

 

 

like this one

while the kids turn a fallen telephone pole into a balance beam.

 

turns into piles of dirt and trash. There is a lot of trash.

 

This post is for Caleb, my little cat lover. We are in a city with rich history, amazing old buildings, sights and sounds we’ve never seen before and all he wants me to do is take pictures of the stray cats we see in the streets. It’s kind of like when we took Calvin to Sea World when he was 2  and his biggest excitement all day was when he started screaming, “Duck! Duck!” as we walked by a random pond on our way out of the Shamu show.

We went on a 1/2 hour walk around our neighborhood and saw at least 25 cats. These are not pet cats, they are scrawny, dirty, trash rummaging cats. But Caleb sees one and says, “Mom! We can take it home with us and then it can be a friend for Daisy!” Um, no baby. I’m not going anywhere near these cats.

Now imagine me trying to subtly take pictures of these cats. I already know I stand out as a crazy American with my crew of blond haired children and a baby strapped to my back. I can only imagine what the Egyptians thought as they saw the white lady with her camera pointed at cat infested piles of trash . . . but he was so excited about all these gross cats, I couldn’t bear to say no.

We passed one trash barrel that had 4 cats rummaging around in it. One was in the process of yacking something up, and two other got in a hissing, spitting brawl over said yack. Seriously. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

This one was begging at the cafe where we had lunch. She kept running around under the different tables crying for scraps. The boys wanted to pet her, but I reminded them that she is the reason why they had to endure 3 rabies shots each before we left, ha ha.

This one almost looked cute and less dirty and mangy than the other ones we saw. But we’re not getting a cat — Caleb will have to settle for pictures of cats.

So we made it onto the last leg of our flight. Bye bye, frigid Germany, hello desert! The boys (and their mom) were thrilled that this flight had individual screens, unlike the shared screens of the previous flight. First up, a little 30 Rock for me. They must have known I was coming. Bob was happy with cartoons.

This is a picture of the unwashed masses who had to wait in the long customs lines while we skipped through with our diplomatic passports.

And here is where my documentation of our trip failed. This is the only picture I have of our arrival in Egypt. I guess I was too busy experiencing it, huh? From here we went to baggage claim where my smugness at beating the customs wait was replaced by annoyance as we had to wait and wait and wait for our bags — that early arrival in SF ensured our bags were last off the plane.

We were greeted by an expediter named Ahmed who was holding up a sign with our name on it as we came out of customs and the boys all went to retrieve our luggage as I found a place to change the baby before the drive to our house. As I walked in the bathroom, an Egyptian woman motions at me, offering to hold the baby, and I say, “oh, I don’t have to use the bathroom, I’m just changing her diaper.” As I scan the bathroom for an appropriate space, she leads me over to the sinks and points to the counter. I say, “OK, thanks” and then as I pull a diaper out of my bag, the woman starts to undress Camille and take off her diaper. I say, “I’ve got it,” but she just keeps going. And in her defense, she was very sweet and cooing at the baby and making her smile so I wasn’t scared of her, it was just very strange to have this lady take over the diaper changing process.

I let go of Camille for a second to grab the wipes out of my purse and in that split second, the lady picked her up, ran the water in the sink, and started rinsing her privates and behind with her hand! And in the thick fog that was once my brain I realized, “ohh. . . she’s going to want a tip and I have no cash on me. I’m an idiot.” So I try to regain control of the diaper changing situation and as I’m fastening the diaper, she has her hands over mine, “helping” me. And as I pull on the baby’s pants and she takes her from me and pulls them up the rest of the way. Then she coos at Camille, kisses her head and hands her back. Then she puts out her hand and asks, “tips?” I mumbled something like, “sorry, but thank you very much” and hustled out of there, feeling like I failed Traveling the Middle East 101.

Now it’s after 1am and as we exit the airport the air is warm and smells like a mix of cigars, old campfires and sand. It was great. There were masses of men standing at the doors to the airport, all jockeying for position, calling out “Taxi! You need a taxi?” We followed Ahmed through the crowd and he brought us to our driver where we met our sponsor Christy and someone from the embassy. We loaded all our people and our stuff into the car and the van and headed for home.

Within the first 3 minutes I saw 2 cars driving in reverse down the road coming straight at us, but our driver swerved around them without ever taking his foot off the gas. His night time driving technique was interesting. As he would approach intersections he would flash his lights and honk his horn, but never slow down. Considering I couldn’t find the seat belt to my seat, I probably should have been nervous, but I think I was too busy taking it all in . . .