Food Network But No Food

On Thursday night, I noticed the fridge was leaking. It could have just been time to defrost, since our freezer ices over every two weeks or so to the point that the door stops sealing and eventually must be held closed with a chair pressed against it, the way sinister villains lock their victims in their bedrooms in old movies. But it didn’t seem iced over enough to be causing that level of leakage. My landlady was over at the time, supervising the repainting of Marisol’s moldy wall and I showed her the fridge leak. Like she believed me to be some coddled idiot who has never lived on her own, she gently pulled out the plug with a Vanna White “Ta-daaaaahhh!” gesture and told me that I should put a towel on the floor and a pot in the fridge to catch the extra water and the next day to plug it back in and all will be well. Duh.

Only all was not well. When I plugged the fridge back in the next morning, the remaining ice in the freezer continued to melt all during the day and turning the cooling level up did nothing to stop the glacial catastrophe. Friday afternoon I asked Marisol if she had anything in the freezer that would go really bad because no repairmen will work on Fridays so we definitely wouldn’t get anything fixed until Saturday at the earliest. She said she had lamb in the freezer and that when it defrosted she would just cook it (which she did by boiling it, which I’ve never heard of) but she forgot about the OPEN BAG of calamari that had been in the freezer for over a month. She had simply slit it down the side and pulled out the calamari fillets she was going to use that night and then popped the bag right back into the bottom of the freezer, where it froze solid into the base layer of ice and was forgotten like the cavemen cadavers occasionally uncovered by avalanches. Of course it didn’t stay frozen.

It rotted as it melted and then the bag filled with the water that had been ice. The freezer filled, then overflowed into the catching tray beneath the freezer, which also overflowed. The oily, fishy foam coated the inside of the fridge, then the floor, and I went from mopping normal water with nothing worse than the scent of old ice off the floor, as in a normal weekend defrosting adventure, to mopping rotten calamari goo. I tried to pull out the overflow tray but there was at least a pound of water in it, much of which sloshed onto the floor, my feet, legs, and my awesome and super essential Chaco flip flops before I got anywhere near the sink. Everything smelled like rotten calamari, which is an oddly industrial smell, like one of the strong bases you use in high school chemistry that you suspect is silently corroding the glass beaker at a rate too slow for human eyes to track. I washed everything in hot bleachy water (ironic because bleach I think is also a corrosive base, right?), which gave the calamari a dunked-in-chlorine aftertaste.

The repairman that was supposed to come last night didn’t show up and even our landlord, who is never particularly dedicated to uniting us with efficient repairman was a little appalled at this guy’s total lack of communication. We’ve rescheduled for tomorrow, which means I am on my third straight day of eating only eggs, which don’t need to be refrigerated here, and warm apple juice. I’m not feeling too hot.

Sadly, neither is Marisol’s puppy. I’m not sure if he, like me, still smells rotten calamari when he exhales because the insides of his lungs and nasal passages are coated in calamari oil, or if he accidentally lapped up some of the lethal brew before I mopped it up, or if it is related to his first rabies shot, which he got on Thursday, but he’s had diarrhea and nausea all day. I swear puppies actually somehow make themselves cuter (see photo) when they are sick or sleeping so our protective instincts are even stronger.

Into our stinky apartment, we welcomed the satellite guy, who gathered all fifteen or so of our English language channels from the several thousand available channels, and moved them into the first row of easy to find channel slots so we don’t have to search far and wide for channels now. We uncovered some buried gems, too. We could not find my beloved Al Jazeera English even after nearly a half hour of effort (though we found Al Jazeera Children in Arabic!) but we found Nickelodeon, BBC English and, pearl of all hidden pearls, THE FOOD NETWORK! It is actually an Arabized version called Fatafeat (which means crumbs), and is like the Food Network for viewers with ADD. It skips from show to show staying with each host and each set for only one recipe, then leaping compulsively onward, from Giada De Laurentiis to an Arabic stew cooked outdoors, to ceviche with Martha Stewart to tomato feta salad with the Barefoot Contessa. It didn’t even follow a theme or ordered progression from appetizers to soup to first course, etc. I was sort of dizzy by the time I turned it off to go to bed but I think I could get used to it, and by get used to it, I mean spend hours watching it every day and never leave my apartment again (as soon as it stops smelling like calamari).

In fact, I am going to try to teach my body to live off a steady diet of Food Network. No more eggs and warm apple juice, just Rachel Ray and Sara Moulton and Mario Batali and that Arab woman who made stew on her patio with an assistant who looked like she was wearing a graduation robe. I might even stop breathing, since the air only further coats my lungs and nose in calamari particles, and pump Food Network goodness straight into my bloodstream. I will have to develop special Fatafeat gills.

I go home to the US in just one week so all of this nonsense has to get fixed ASAP!

Cairo commerce

On a taxi ride to the train station I passed:

1)Three stores all on the same block - none more than eight feet tall, five feet wide, and six feet deep in from the street - that sold NOTHING but bright red fire extinguishers in various sizes, and
2)A clothing shop entitled in ENORMOUS lettering (like 3 feet per letter): GOLDEN MAN STORE

and I thought to myself, "I want one of those" (a golden man, not a fire extinguisher).

Crossroads

I got the job with the international commercial arbitration firm. I got the offer yesterday while I was in Alexandria for a conference on the Human Right to Peace (keep your eyes peeled, fans of utopic, toothless international law, for the Alexandria Declaration on the Human Right to Peace due out this week…I was there when it was drafted!). I have accepted so I will start January 10th, right after my cousin and some friends head home from their visit earlier in the month.

I am nervous because I do not know anything about international commercial arbitration and now have to do a ton of reading in the next month to start filling in the gaping holes in my knowledge of all things legal and practical. I am also nervous because, although it is physically located in Egypt, this firm promises to be just as grueling and competitive as any American law firm and I just don't know if I am cut out for the pace and emotional stress of that kind of environment. I am a kind and easy going person and I worry that in my first weeks there I will watch my sensitive soul slowly crushed like a ticklish muppet under a steam roller.

In other news, in a moment that totally made my day, a coworker came into my office this morning to clarify something with the English speakers. She had expressed some concerns about something to a representative from the US government who replied "its on our radar screen." She knew it was an idiom but thought it sounded vaguely military and wanted to make sure it actually meant something good, like they were taking her comments seriously, rather than that they were about to attack us. I never paused to consider how disturbing that expression could be when sent to a perfectly innocent Arab NGO!!!

Deal or no deal?

For a three day week, this one has been strangely exhausting.

I went to Dahab, on the Red Sea for the Feast of the Sacrifice weekend, a five-day vacation in which Egyptian extended families gather at the biggest house in the family, sacrifice an animal, usually a lamb, sheep, or goat, and then eat and socialize all weekend. It is to commemorate Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac on God's command, though I'm told in the Islamic faith the Isaac character in the story is Ishmael instead, Abraham's firstborn son by his wife's servant Hagar. Anyway, while the Egyptians were doing this in Cairo and elsewhere, the foreigners were relaxing on the beaches of the Sinai and SCUBA diving in the Red Sea, or at least this one was.

Diving in the Red Sea is incredible. Underwater cameras cost a fortune here so unfortunately I have no pictures for you all but the landscape is very three dimensional, with huge bulges and chunks of coral looming out from coral cliffs and up from the white sand and coral-covered ocean floor. Schools of BRIGHT orange, electric blue, and neon yellow fish no bigger than my thumb cost in the current just near the surface so when you look up these long blue coral walls to the sky you really do see perfect rays of sun, tropical fish, and blue blue blue blue everything.

I can't wear a wetsuit because I'm allergic to neoprene and since most dives are between 40-60 feet and can last more than an hour, I would get pretty cold by the end. My lips would be blue by the time I got out of the water and I'd be shivering in the wind while trying to take my gear apart and one of the other divers would always make a comment about how they can't believe I dive without a suit. Dahab is one of the few places I've gone diving (Vietnam was another) where I was sure I would find a way to dive, and it would be worth it, even if I were allergic to water.

My friend Myriam was the perfect travel buddy for this kind of trip. As you know, I'm not much of an out-all-night partier roaming the abandoned streets at 2am in search of liquor and karaoke. I'm more of a put-on-PJs-pass-out-at-ten kind of girl. On this trip, partly because her antibiotics were making her a little nauseous, so was Myriam. We'd roll out of bed around nine at eat the huge breakfast platter included with our hotel. Then we'd read until 12:30, dive at 1, shower around 3:30 or 4, read or nap until 6, eat dinner, then watch a movie in our hotel room, read some more, then fall asleep around 11. We did this for four days and then watched the Amy Poehler sitcom Parks and Recreation for like four of the nine hours we spent on the busride back (the rest of the time was spent…you guessed it…reading).

I had one free day in Cairo to catch up on laundry and get acquainted with the DOG that my roommate purchased while I was away (a black and white Pekinese/Griffon mix named Galleta, which means Cookie in Spanish). And then I went back to work. But in addition to work, Marisol and I are looking for apartments so we saw two crappy places on Monday night that for some reason we couldn't get in to see until nearly 11pm (soooo far past my bedtime). This gave me a jet lagged feeling for most of Tuesday that no amount of Nescafe could cure but there was no rest for the weary and we had two more apartment viewings lines up for Tuesday night when the WEIRDEST thing happened.

Myriam's boyfriend had just gotten an offer from a Cairo law firm specializing in international commercial arbitration. She had said they were looking for people who were members of a bar, so on a lark I sent in a resume and cover letter around four in the afternoon. At four TEN I got a call from the office asking if I could come in for an interview at 7:30 THAT NIGHT. Apparently they were in the middle of recruitment decisions and wanted to give me the opportunity of at least a face to face meeting. So I sprinted back to Zamalek (my neighborhood, which is no longer under full siege by the riot police following the Egypt Algeria World Cup qualifier, but still has a haunting police and armored car presence on my street), met Marisol to look at an apartment, which we both like and agreed to take (more on this in a minute), then ran home, put on my ONLY suit jacket in Cairo and shoes that didn't match, then jumped in a cab for the law firm's offices.

I wound up having to wait 40 minutes for the attorney to finish interviewing someone in Arizona via videoconference for a much higher up position (CFO maybe?) but had the privilege of sitting on the ultra modern black leather furniture in the beautiful waiting room. High, white ceilings, interesting architecture-based photography, silver mesh and black lamps winding up from the floor like futuristic plants, and the Bloomberg financial news channel kept me company (shout out to the HUGE fight that is about to ensue over the Comcast purchase of NBC, antitrust lawyers get your laptops!). When I was finally shown into the office, the office assistant (every office of any kind in Egypt has at least four office boys who do the most random things, from ordering food to making personalized teas and coffees for individual workers to photocopying) made us espresso, which by then I REALLY needed.

The attorney that owns and runs the firm did the interview and it was actually quite fun. He is smart in a quick on his feet kind of way but also very honest and direct so there wasn't a whole lot of game playing as is usually the case in interviews. I was really honest about knowing nothing about int'l commercial arbitration, which was obviously not ideal, but was okay with him. His main concern was that the firm didn't spend a lot of time and resources training me only to have me bolt in a year or two. He asked no fewer than three times if I could make a five year commitment and all three times I very honestly answered I haven't done this kind of work before and couldn't make a firm commitment to something I don't know if I'll like. He asked hypothetically if I had a job where I was happy and the work was interesting and the pay was good (he brought this up, not me)… and I agreed that although I wouldn't promise anything, if all those things were true, then I wouldn't have any pressing reason to leave that hypothetical job (duh).

Even after I totally refused to commit, and after I admitted I had no experience at all in international commercial arbitration (or business law of any type), he said that they would consider my resume "sympathetically" at the meeting following my interview. And then he said "and by 'sympathetically,' I mean you'll get an offer." And I about snorted espresso through my nose.

I am supposed to hear back from them with a firm offer, including salary by email this week but this week only has one hour and thirty six minutes left in it before the weekend starts so I am beginning to think I hallucinated the whole thing.

Leaving the office in a confused days, I counted the zeros in my future salary all the way home, only to find that Marisol had seen another apartment after the one we'd seen together (I knew about the appointment but couldn't make it because of my interview so we just agreed that if she thought it was amazing I'd see it later). She said it was the most amazing place ever, that we had to get it, etc. etc. Remember: we'd already told the earlier place we wanted to take it.

So I went to look at this new apartment around 10, after my interview. I was exhausted to be sure, but this is not why I hated it. There were mirrors on every surface, including the doors (where half the mirrored squares covering each door were not only mirrors, but PINK mirrors), there were no fewer than 18 chairs in the living/dining room area, most of them upholstered in pink and tan, two lamps were shaped like DOLPHINS, the bathroom was tiny and plastic and ugly, and the kitchen was exactly the width of one person. Marisol thought it was beautiful and I really didn't and so we turned it down but we turned down the place we'd agreed to earlier as well and went back to square one in an exhausted, contrary funk.

Thankfully our degenerate landlord's father, the one who REALLY owns the building (who we've never met because he works in Saudi Arabia and his son manages the place), came by last night and apologized for the delay getting our phone fixed, promised he had paid the outstanding bill (and showed us the receipt, which his son had refused to do) so it would be working today. He found out we were thinking of leaving and didn't even ask why (he knew, I think, that his wife and son had been totally unresponsive to any of our requests for help with things falling apart in the place since the girl I took over the room from still owed them a little bit of money…but they have her contact info, she's still in town, and the problem has nothing to do with Marisol or me so holding it against us has really not been fair). He just said we shouldn't leave, that we should write down everything that needs to be fixed and he would have it all fixed this week, including adding wireless internet soon. Plus, although he's legally allowed to raise the price by up to ten per cent, he agreed to keep the price the same even though he could get a lot more on the open market right now.

So we get to keep our apartment, which will hopefully no longer be coming down around our ears by the end of next week, we don't have to spend the money to move our stuff and redecorate a new place, and now that we know we're staying in this place longer, we feel comfortable committing a little time and funds to sprucing it up a little more. Plus, we have the daddy landlord's name now and can communicate with several other members of the family (mom, dad, and sister) in order to avoid dealing with the son. It was like the family must have agreed we were worth keeping around (because we are clean, quiet, pay rent on time, and pay for improvements to the place) so they made a policy shift in their dealings with us and are no longer holding us accountable in their minds for what the former tenant owes them. We are nervous this won't pan out in the end but if we don't see improvement by the end of December, we don't have to sign a new contract. It is at least a reprieve from the exhaustion of apartment hunting!

Damn. Now the week is only an hour and 17 minutes from ending and still no offer email! Going back to watching the pot not boil…otherwise known as hitting refresh on my Gmail inbox for an hour and 17…er…16 minutes.

Under Siege

After a troubling weekend, I feel particularly connected to the abstract and omnipresent anxiety that seems to have become the hallmark of my generation, both in Egypt and at home. However, as I read the news coverage of the weekend, and of the post-World Cup riots in particular, I have the depressing feeling that the international press does not recognize, or at least isn't reporting on, my claim to that hard-earned angst.

What coverage there has been has focused mainly on the soccer game itself, in Sudan, and has centered on the debate of whether or not there actually was violence perpetrated against Egyptian fans at the levels reported. Coverage of the riots has mentioned how the Egyptian government seemed to encourage this outlet for popular frustration at first since it was, happily, not aimed for once at the Egyptian government. Then, journalists concede, the government realized all this protesting was more destructive (of storefronts) than productive, and called in the riot squads to quell the disturbance.

What the newspapers have not mentioned so far is that although nothing has happened in Zamalek since Thursday night (possibly due to the huge contingent of riot police cordoning off every ingress to my street, or possibly due to a falling lack of interest in attacking the Algerian embassy), the police barricades remain in full force. Hundreds of officers in full riot gear pose an intimidating obstacle to the performance of even the most basic tasks such as grocery shopping and catching a cab (the above photo is shot out my apartment building door and shows the road I would normally walk to the grocery store).

To do either, I must walk at least a block in any direction under the stares of dozens of loitering young men in imposing black uniforms. They leer and call out in Arabic, which happily I don't understand, and in English, which unfortunately I do, and in the universal language of lewd gestures, in which I am also fluent. The sudden increase in concentration of gross young men this weekend has changed the tenor of my neighborhood, which is generally upscale and inhabited primarily by foreigners and wealthy Egyptians. Normally, the office boys, market stockboys, currency exchange workers, etc. who hang out on the sidewalks of Zamalek, step out of my way to let me pass, often avert their eyes from mine, and generally keep a respectful distance. However, the crowds of shouting, whispering, giggling, and sometimes groping soldiers seem to have granted permission to the local workers' basest behavior. Men who have seen me pass their shops and used to greet me as a customer, now leer as I pass and young men who would have jumped out of my path now hold their ground and mutter at me as I hurry by.

This government-sponsored filling of the streets with poorly-supervised, poorly-mannered young men has created a claustrophobic, siege-like feeling that kept me in my apartment most of the weekend and compelled me to travel with a friend when I did venture out. I, thankfully, have not experienced any physical harassment, but it is happening. As his contingent slid the heavy metal pole barricade fences aside to let her pass, one of them reached out and grabbed my friend's roommate on the ass. This is a crime in Egypt which, if reported to police, is punished by a mandatory three years in prison. But to whom, exactly, do you report sexual harassment, when it is perpetrated by a police officer in full view of twenty other police officers? You don't report it. You hurry home.

Which is exactly what I wish the government would order the hoard of creepy men in Zamalek to do today: GO HOME.

The anxiety that I and the other women in my neighborhood felt today when we saw that even after two uneventful nights the riot police have maintained their positions, and their suggestive grins, is visceral and real. The stress of police occupation, and particularly, sexually aggressive male occupation, is tangible in Zamalek today. My friends in and around Brazil St. are sleeping poorly, dressing conservatively, not wearing makeup to work, and, in some cases, not going to work to avoid having to pass through the police barricade. Those of us that did go to work are already dreading having to return home at dusk, a time of day which women in Egypt already recognize as emboldening harassers by lending the cover of semi-darkness to their stares, whispers, and touches. Zamalek could use some protection from our protectors. Some spotlights, literal and figurative, would help.

Hey Reuters, NY Times, AP and Co.: Can we get some reporters down here please?

Riots and Lambs

On Wednesday night, Egypt lost to Algeria 1-0 in the World Cup qualifier. Afterwards, Algerian fans, some of whom supposedly brought KNIVES to the match (though it is not certain that this is actual footage of the match, Egyptians BELIEVE it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA_pwTdJIPk), attacked Egyptian fans, causing quite a few injuries. Algeria then ordered the Egyptian ambassador out of Algeria and today the Egyptian government followed suit, kicking out the Algerian ambassador…right…because this situation needs LESS diplomacy.

Last night, my street, which also houses the Algerian embassy down the block, filled with angry protesters armed with drums, car horns, whistles, and loud clapping hands, who shouted, chanted, and yelled until around 4:00am. This, supposedly, to protest the violence of the Algerians at the match, though the protest itself dissolved into a riot, no doubt with the help of the riot police, and several storefront windows in the neighborhood were broken as I walked to this café to use the internet this evening. Riot police in groups of twenty or so have ever entrance to my street blocked off (see photo), using their full body plastic shields and sometimes huge sliding metal barricade fences, which they kindly slid aside to allow me to go shopping earlier today. They are expecting riots again though I hope the crowds are smaller, or at least quieter, tonight so I can sleep better.

I’m on the eighth floor of my building so I don’t feel I’m in any danger but the Thanksgiving dinner I was going to tonight, also in the riot zone, got bumped to tomorrow and all the stores on my block are closed so I can’t buy things like eggs so more than anything I’m annoyed by the inconvenience rather than feeling any actual fear. Honestly, the police officers kind of creep me out, though, since police officers are notorious for sexual harassment and every time I have to slip past a barricade I get treated to comments, fairly tame so far, like “I love you,” and smooching sounds.

In other news, at the grocery store today, in preparation for the upcoming “Big Feast” celebration this weekend, the meat counter hosted a small pen of little lambs awaiting their doom. It was so depressing to walk by them, sitting in their straw, with their miserable tear-smeared eyes, not even bleating but just sort of resigned to their fates. It must take real balls, or else no heart at all, to order your rack of lamb for the weekend barbeque while LOOKING AT THE LAMBS!

Speaking of dinner, if I can get through the riot police back to my apartment, I have sweet potato and ginger soup awaiting me. Egypt is slowly turning me vegetarian.

My panacea of choice: cold-removal implements and an angry email

I am sick sick sick. I’m on my fourth day of it and seem to be on the rebound though now what started as a headcold with a sinus compression headache so bad I couldn’t even force my ears to pop, has moved down into my chest and I am coughing up all sorts of lovely green bits. As I lie in my bed, too weak to move, I listen to my audiobook about life in ancient Egypt, written by one of my favorite mystery writers.

I also imagine the perfect cures to my truly disgusting cold. Am I thinking up novel antibiotics? Nope. I don’t imagine medicines. I imagine tools. Mostly different kinds of hooked scrub brushes. I think about a softer version of a car jack that I would use to crank my jaws all the way open so they lay flat on their hinges, then a pair of rubber-tipped pliers which would grip the hangy ball in the back of my throat (I know, I know, it is called a uvula, bleh!) and gently unscrew it from its base, lift it out of my mouth and place it in a shallow basin full of warm water and antibacterial soap (in my scrubby fantasy, the soap smells like Irish Spring – fresh and disinfectanty at the same time). Disembodied heavy duty rubber gloves, like the kind used to handle uranium, gently but firmly attack the equally disembodied hangy ball with a series of flex-headed toothbrushes with the brand new bristles of the softest grade until the hangy ball is thoroughly disinfected and practically glitters with cleanliness. At which point high intensity waterpicks, like at the dentist’s office, spray down the rest of my mouth and throat, suctioning as they go, as the hangyball is carefully reattached.

I have also come up with innovative cures for cleaning out my sinuses and straining the gunk from my lungs but I’ll spare you.

In addition to these clever, if somewhat redundant, imaginings, I have also watched quite a few movies, though these are more difficult since they require me to breathe and listen at the same time. This proved nearly impossible in the case of Inglorious Basterds. After several months of wanting to see it, I finally scored a bootleg DVD for about $4 only to find that it was filmed in a RUSSIAN movie theater rather than in an English-speaking country. The company that puts out this particular brand of bootlegs, usually pretty high quality, adds Arabic subtitles, but only to English dialogue (I assume it is like one English and Arabic speaking guy alone in his Russian basement).

Thus, in my copy of Inglorious Basterds, which includes stretches of French and German sometimes up to fifteen minutes long, only the English conversations are subtitled: in Arabic and Russian. All the place names and dates that act as headings before each scene are in Cyrillic writing and are not subtitled in Arabic, which I may have actually been able to understand since foreign place names are usually transcribed phonetically into Arabic. Therefore, besides the few scenes where it is just the Basterds talking among themselves in English, the only part I understood is when Brad Pitt and two other Americans pretend to be Italians and get out-Italianed by one of the German officers (I don’t think that ruins anything for anyone, you can kind of see it coming).

This whole pathetic sick weekend actually started with great potential. I got an invite for a job interview on Friday at 1:00 East Coast time, which would have been 8:00pm here. I could already feel myself getting sick by about 3 but made great efforts to tough it out. After a day trip I had already planned before the interview was scheduled (and, in hindsight, should have skipped since it turned out to run from 7am to nearly 5pm and didn’t include lunch or even time for lunch), I picked up my computer at my apartment and turned right around to hit the internet café for some research into the position and the organization. The org is one I’ve followed for awhile, an anti-sexual violence non-profit in D.C. The position was basically what I’m doing now, only with less responsibility and since it required only a B.A. and 2 years of general office experience, I suspect it wouldn’t pay a living wage for D.C. but I wanted the phone interview to find out.

I realized even before we scheduled the interview that the interviewer was getting cold feet when I explained the time zone difference, for the purpose of scheduling, and she seemed surprised and dismayed I was in Egypt, a fact I made quite clear in my cover letter. She told me she was hoping to fill the position within two weeks and I said my travel plans were quite flexible…anything to get to the interview and find out about the salary (by my current calculus of poverty, a job that paid in the high 20K’s in D.C. wouldn’t be worth leaving my middle class salary in Egypt for…but a job in the high 30’s in D.C. would put me closer to paying at least SOMETHING on my loans, and would therefore be worth moving earlier than I’d intended).

So we arranged to talk at 1pm on Friday, I did my pre-interview research and made some notes on good answers to questions I could reasonably expect (like why I was interested in leaving my job in Egypt after just a couple months, etc.), and then I waited for her call (despite metnioning twice in our email conversation that I’d be willing to call her and absorb the international charges and the difficulty of calling internationally), she did not give me her phone number. Although I Googled her before the interview time and jotted down her number just in case we were disconnected or something, I assumed her decision not to give me her number meant she would call me. I waited and waited. At 8:15 I was both really sick (the cold had come on in a rush at the end of the day, my nose stuffing and throat hurting and I was managing the pain and congestion with medicine until I could collapse in bed after the interview) and really anxious and I dialed her number for the first time.

Straight to voicemail. I didn’t leave a message. I waited another five minutes, then called my dad at home in Oregon to ask him to check my email (I don’t have email in my apartment here) to make sure that she hadn’t written to postpone (ah, my naïveté) the interview and also to confirm that the time zones were as I thought they were. I was correct on the time, she was over twenty minutes late, and had not written an email in the hour between my internet research and our scheduled appointment. At 8:30, a half-hour past our appointed time, I called got voicemail again, and left a message, repeating my phone number with country code, and offering to reschedule if something had come up. At 8:45, I called again, got voicemail again, and hung up again without leaving a message. My forehead had compressed into my skull and was getting friendly with my brain by this time and I was keeping my nasal passages open by wedging toothpicks into them like they do on cartoons (kidding). I needed to sleep but was too freaked out! What was going on? Had she forgotten the interview? How was that possible? I’d written back confirming the time at what would have been around 9am East Coast time that morning so it would have been among first emails she received on coming into the office. Maybe she didn’t come in that day and that’s why I kept getting her voicemail? But why would she ask me to interview at 1pm and then not come into the office without letting me know?

At 9:05pm, I couldn’t stay awake any longer. My body and my nerves were spent. I called, got voicemail immediately again, and left a second message stating that I was still interested in the position, knew she was on a deadline and would therefore be available for another couple hours (I somehow thought that if she called just after I’d fallen asleep the adrenaline would help me rally enough to get through the interview) if she still wanted to do the interview that day. I said if she wanted to reschedule, I’d make myself available anytime, just shoot me an email. Finally, I collapsed into sleep, breathing gape-mouthed and chapped-lipped for twelve straight hours (after which, I brushed my teeth IMMEDIATELY).

I slept all day Saturday, then called in sick to work on Sunday and slept all day that day too. Late Sunday afternoon, I called my mom, who dutifully checked my email (I can’t believe my parents put up with me like they do) and reported that my would-have-been interviewer wrote that she had just received the message I had sent at about 2:30 on Friday afternoon East Coast Time (so I guess she wasn’t in the office?!) and that unfortunately she’d decided she needed to fill the position by this Wednesday and that she would require an in-person interview. Therefore, I was not eligible for the position (which she never should have scheduled since if she’d read my cover letter, which she clearly didn’t, there was never any question I am IN EGYPT) but my resume and cover letter looked great and she has a good feeling that good things are headed my way.

I of course went ballistic and sent her an email today about how it was her prerogative to decide to interview only in-person candidates but that once she made that decision she had a responsibility to inform me by email or phone before our appointment and that her failure to do so showed a lack of professional courtesy and consideration for my time and my feelings. I did not say that I totally blame her for making me sick, but if they ever develop a hangy-ball transplant surgery, I am getting it and leaving my grime-covered discarded hangy-ball in her bed like the horse head in The Godfather. Booyah.

Learning from my mistakes

I ate ants yesterday. They were in my cereal box and I poured them into yogurt with my corn flakes. I didn't notice until the last two bites that I had sprinkled in an extra protein source. There were three ants in those last two bites so my guess is that I ate 3-10 ants in total.

So I freaked out, threw up, sprayed the holy hell out of the kitchen with a huge bottle of RAID, then went to work and dumped a half liter (see how I'm trying to throw in metric terms?!) of cappuccino into my belly to burn the suckers in acidic coffee goodness.

This morning, even though I'd sprayed every twitching, crawling inch of my kitchen and opened a brand new box of corn pops (they were out of flakes) last night, I carefully inspected the inside and outside of the box for invaders BEFORE I added any protein to my breakfast this time. Sure enough, the ants had braved the remnants of the RAID and were exploring my BRAND NEW BOX of cereal! A whole box of corn pops totally wasted! But my newfound strategy to look before I eat saved the yogurt from a similar fate and I was able to mix in some cornflakes from the box I keep at work as a backup.

I am going to my first Egyptian dentist appointment tonight. I swear if the doc finds ants in my teeth, I'm moving home.

Things I Saw Yesterday

Things I saw yesterday (in chronological order):

Smog:

The air has been terrible this week. Since I only have two pairs of shorts and I just joined a gym, I've done laundry several times this week. I wash the clothes at night and hang them out on our eighth floor clothesline. I wake up in the morning and the desert air has dried them even in the dark. Unfortunately, the morning smog also gets at the clothes, coating even the clothespins in a brown dust the color of everything in Cairo. When I looked out at the city yesterday, I saw only a light brown smudge where the city should be.

Bag of blood:

Seriously. Stepping up onto the curb as I got out of my taxi, I passed a clear plastic bag, knotted at the top with maybe eight to ten ounces of blood in it. I spent last week reading articles about how Egypt is one of the top five locations in the WORLD for organ trafficking and organ tourism (there is no law against taking someone's organ without permission...if a case can be made at all, it is only a crime of simple assault). So a bag of blood on the street at nine in the morning was both surprising and not particularly surprising. I tried to imagine someone the night before running out of meat in his small café and buying some extra to get through the remaining customers…then pulling the meat out with his hands, neatly tying the plastic bag full of blood and dropping it on the street. Okay, that probably isn't what happened but I'm not willing to consider the alternatives.

Mean people:

I went to a meeting at the European Commission's offices in Egypt. CIHRS had been invited to discuss a project we are conducting as a junior partner with the European Organization for Human Rights. The EC instructed us to come ready to present on our part of the project and to bring a member of the accounting staff to answer questions if necessary. We arrived at the meeting and my supervisor introduced our junior accountant. The two women we were meeting shook their heads and said in their French accents that since we are the junior partner in the project, and their contract is actually with EOHR, all questions had to go through EOHR and that we could neither ask nor respond to questions in the meeting. They were very rude.

Second-largest "Medium" cappuccino I've ever seen:

Necessary to cope with the hurt feelings of the EC meeting.

This:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2QX9sMV5xI
Awesome.

That trainer again:

The trainer who could not stop looking at my belly when I was first introduced to him on my first evening at the gym came by my treadmill to tell me that an abs class was starting. Sure, he told everyone in the cardio room so I assume he was just trying to fill his class, but instead of saying "If you want to come…" he said "YOU WANT TO COME." It is common among people with okay but not great English here to never use the conditional, "if." Doesn't matter, call me unforgiving, but I still maintain that this guy sucks.

The largest cockroach IN THE WORLD:

Seriously. I saw this guy one other time and was so ambivalent about what the proper course of action should be (step on him with my sandal? Go change into hiking boots to step on him? Knock him off the counter and then step on him? Try to kill him where he stood? Spray him with ant spray? Break a glass bottle over his head?) that I wound up merely watching in frozen horror until he scrambled back under the sink and into the pipes from whence he came. He became my Moby Dick. I winced every time I turned on the kitchen light for a week hoping I would not see him on the ground because then I'd have no choice but to step on him and in my flip flops I am pretty sure I'd just slip right off his nuclear winter-proof back causing no damage. This was a month ago and it wasn't until last night that he again reared his ugly…well, the whole damn thing is ugly. Lucky for me, he revealed himself by FALLING OFF THE COUNTER behind me as I stood at the stove and landing helplessly on his back, tiny double jointed evil-haired legs flailing. I beat him over the head with the full garbage can several times, then with a full water bottle, then folded a plastic bag (not filled with blood) into a thick hand-sized pad and scooped him into the garbage can. With plastic bags on both my hands, I tied the garbage bag securely and put it in the dumpster.

Nerve damage in my ear:

Okay, so I didn't exactly see this. But I have a tingling, creeping sensation just inside my right ear. Has been there for about a week. The internet tells me this is nerve damage and I probably have either myocardial infarction (heart attack) or multiple sclerosis. Ugh. I am going to treat it by skipping the gym tonight (no coincidence, I'm sure, that the nerve damage started around the time I started the gym!) and drinking beer with a friend instead.

Aero Folklore

Tuesday started weird and ended weirder.

Like every day, my taxi was sitting in traffic in Cairo's central Tahrir Square, an enormous traffic circle in front of the Egyptian Museum that houses King Tut's tomb and the Mogamma, the huge government building where I went to renew my visa. A white-uniformed traffic cop armed with a walkie-talkie had just waved on oncoming traffic. There are traffic lights in the square but since everyone ignores them, the traffic police are needed to literally stand in the street and direct traffic. After starting the flow of oncoming vehicles passing in front of us, the officer wandered off to a distant part of the square to chat with friends. Usually this only happens after the officer charged with directing traffic at a certain intersection has been replaced by another officer in a shift change.

Not yesterday.

I guess the guy just lost interest and gave up on manning his spot, leaving my taxi and the other hundreds of cars backed up behind us to sit and groan as car after car continued to pass in front of us blocking our way forward. Finally, after several minutes, the cars in front of us just nosed out into traffic until the oncoming cars were forced to stop to avoid collisions, then zoomed ahead, permission be damned.

This wasn't really the weird part. Things like this happen all the time. The cops are extremely lazy and unreliable. It is a job that men take when they can't pass any tests to get other jobs. And traffic is notoriously arbitrary in Cairo. People just drive where they want when they want, people get angry, then distracted from their anger by something else, then get angry at someone new. Whatever. The weird part was my taxi driver's reaction. "That guy!" he shouted to me, vaguely glancing at the road as he steering the car in a wobbly circle toward our street. He pointed in indignant surprise out the window at the officer who had wandered away from his post. "That guy just left, did you see? He waved them on, then walked away!" He was actually surprised, I realized. He could not believe someone would do that. "Really?" I thought to myself, "This is a shocker?" "You drive a cab in a country with no traffic laws or enforcement and a cop forgetting to change traffic directions still gets your blood pressure up?" But he was absolutely aghast, shaking his head, eyes wide. "Egypt!" He shouted. "Egypt," I agreed wholeheartedly.


The second weirdness of my day came in the evening. I went to join a gym near my apartment. I already knew the exact plan I wanted, how much it would cost, and that the gym takes MasterCard so it shouldn't have taken more than a few minutes to fill out the paperwork, pay, and get my photo taken for my ID card. I had also been warned ahead of time by two different people that although I get 3 free weeks with a personal trainer as part of my membership, I should decline.

Apparently the "head coach," or trainer, told each of these young women, both quite thin, that they really needed to lose a lot of weight, that this would require many hours in the gym, and then wrote workouts that would demand two and a half hours in the gym every night. My friend insisted she could only do an hour a few times a week and he said that that would never be enough to lose ALL THE WEIGHT she needed to lose (she's about 5'4" and maybe 120 lbs.). She asked him to write her a workout that would only take an hour. He agreed, then wrote another 2.5 hour workout. She told him she didn't want to take advantage of any more free personal training, but he'd still come hang out at her elliptical and criticize like an uninvited drill sergeant. Sure enough, our conversation went like this:

Him: (with a totally straight face) Have you ever done any exercise? Ever, in your life?
Me: You're asking me if I've ever exercised before? In my entire life?
Him: (nods)
Me: Um…yeah, I was a pretty serious athlete when I was younger and I've always been a swimmer. I do yoga and was running pretty regularly this summer.
Him: Hmmm. Do you have any goals (looking meaningfully at my belly…or maybe at my boobs, not sure)?
Me: I want to run on the treadmill for an hour a day.
Him: You don't have a fitness goal? Maybe you want to (pausing to look at my belly again) become in good shape? Or (really staring at belly now, but pretending not to) lose some pounds?
Me: My goal is to run on the treadmill for an hour a day.
Him: For my training to really work it is better to have a goal.
Me: I just want to run on the treadmill for an hour a day. I've decided not to take advantage of the free personal training sessions. Thank you.
Him: Well, that is your choice. It is free, but you can choose to do whatever you like. (in a tone that suggested I'd just chosen to die with dignity).
Me: Thank you.

He looked at my belly again, sighed, and left. My friend reports that he used to stare at her belly all the time too. She does not have a belly to stare at. I can't imagine the hours of fascination mine will offer.

By now I was wondering what on EARTH was taking the receptionist dude so long to run my credit card. Left alone in the office, I leaned out to see what he was doing. He was holding the little handheld visa machine, talking on his cell phone and the landline at the same time. Not good. Apparently, he had run the credit card but the machine only had enough paper to print the receipt without the signature line. He couldn't find new paper (hence the cell to call his boss) and didn't know how to reprint the transaction for me to sign the receipt without double charging me (hence the landline to call Visa). Then the handheld ran out of power and another boy had to go find what looked like a computer cord to plug the device into the wall so both boys had to crouch beside it as they frantically pushed buttons as instructed by the Visa rep and their boss. The receptionist would periodically notice me and say "so sorry, one moment, no problem" which is the Egyptian way of saying "I don't really know what is happening, this could take hours, you are totally screwed." He was so frazzled he was sweating, even in the severe air conditioning of the gym and he did seem sincerely sorry and embarrassed, so I left him alone, gave myself a little tour of the gym, read some signs on the walls, listened to my audiobook, texted my friend and examined the list of aerobics classes.

Which is where I encountered my favorite line of English text so far in Egypt. Apparently there is an instructor named HAPPY (in all caps, despite the fact that the other instructors named things like Dina and Ahmed were in lower case). Even weirder, whereas Dina, Ahmed and the others teach recognizable classes like Yoga, Pilates, and Spinning, HAPPY teaches an aerobic class on Wednesdays and Sundays called "Aero Folklore." Let me say that again: AERO FOLKLORE. I am absolutely DESPERATE to know what ON EARTH that is.

Slightly less weird but still worthy of note is a class called mysteriously "Fight Club" (I thought the first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club?! Can you put it on a laminated list of aerobics classes?) and another one called "Go Boyin' " Huh?

After nearly an hour, they came up with the solution of having me sign the bottom of the receipt he'd printed when I first arrived in the empty space at the bottom rather than on an actual signature line. Really? I waited an hour for THIS? Whatever. I am now a proud (okay, not yet) member of the very same gym where the contestants on the Arabic version of the Biggest Loser work out. I guess the head coach I met is the patronizing, steroidal, uber-masculine version of Jillian Michaels. So basically the Jillian Michaels version of Jillian Michaels. And tonight I will meet my complex fitness goal of running on the treadmill for an hour. I hope Jillian isn't there to keep a disapproving eye on my belly as I run. Urg.

Good bye, self-esteem…fitness, here I come!

Wrecked weekend plans

As some of you may have seen from my Facebook status, my totally awesome trip to the remote oasis town of Siwa was cut depressingly short early Saturday morning. About four hours into a ten hour bus ride, some idiot in a van decided to flip a U-turn and head back toward Cairo. What he didn’t realize was that the highway away from Cairo and the highway toward Cairo were separated by a 50 foot stretch of sand. He was heading the wrong way down the highway at 3am in dense fog. Our tour bus hit him head-on.

No one was seriously hurt, or at least not as seriously as we could have been. The driver went into the windshield, as did my friend Karim, whose tour company organized the trip. The driver went to the hospital right away, obviously in shock and possibly with a broken arm. Karim stayed with the group over the next few hours, as ambulances took us all to a nearby police station where we waited for another bus to take us back to Cairo.

When we finally got back, Karim underwent a complicated surgery to repair a deep cut to his cheek and might have to have another surgery in the next couple days, but beside the wound to his face, he is also okay (though he said if he has to have another surgery, he’s flying back to Canada for it . The only other bad injury was a kid who didn’t wake up right away after the accident and who couldn’t remember certain things like where we had been going and what Siwa was for a few minutes afterwards. It turned out he had snapped his clavicle and had a concussion, which we were pretty certain of, but he also waited until we were back to Cairo to go to the hospital.

I had taken a sleeping pill around 11 so by 3 I was totally zonked, a long scarf triple-wrapped around my face and eyes and my noise cancelling headphones blaring Sugarland. I was sitting sideways in my seat, which was a single, across the aisle from the double seats. A few people shouted right before we hit and someone yelled “Car!” Even as out of it as I was, I pulled into a little ball, lifting my knees to my chest, ducking my head, and protecting my head and neck with my arms to make a kind of a frame. When we hit, the impact threw me into the seat in front of me so that I now have a big bruise on my right thigh and right bicep but I was definitely one of the least injured people on the bus. It is true that you hurt even more the next day and even this morning, I was still finding new sore spots in my back and neck but I’ve loosened up since then and will go into work tomorrow.

The bus itself was a total wreck. The luggage rack on top was torn completely off and every seat inside snapped at the hinges where the back meets the seat from the people behind slamming into the seats in front of them. The windshield was completely shattered but stayed intact so there wasn’t much loose glass around (good thing because a lot of people ran off the bus barefoot because we weren’t sure oncoming traffic could see the bus broken down in one lane in the fog) but there was a big pool of oil that leaked on to the highway. The front of the bus under the windshield was inset about a foot from the impact but the van we hit was in good enough condition for the guy to make a run for it after he made sure everyone was more or less okay.

In Egypt, the person responsible for the accident has to pay for everything, vehicle damage, property damage, hospital bills, medicine, etc. and there is no such thing as auto insurance so it comes out of pocket. I imagine that the guy who learned he just about killed 20 or so foreign tourists was scared to death. He didn’t get too far though because someone had taken his plate number down and, too much in shock to keep driving, he had to pull over at a rest stop a little ways down the road.

I took the day off work and am recovering quickly, with just some bruises and soreness in my abs and back. If anyone is planning to survive a similar wreck, I do recommend the curling into a ball idea, but if possible, try to keep your abs relaxed so they don’t get pulled out of whack…laughing and sneezing are both killers right now.

I am really disappointed we didn’t get to go to Siwa, but, eternal optimist that I am, I did take note that I have never been in a car accident before. So although this was not the weekend adventure I signed up for, it was a new experience nonetheless.

Walid's Betrayal

Walid's betrayal hurt my heart all the more because he was so nice about it.

Yesterday morning, I realized that my bedroom and one of the bathroom outlets had no power. I tried flipping the fuse switches to no avail. Weirdly, the air conditioner in my bedroom still worked fine, as did one light and power outlet in the bathroom. Whatever. I dried my hair in the living room, where things were working fine and went to work, not noticing that the kitchen power was also out, leaving our refrigerated items defenseless.

When I returned home around six, there was no change. I'm not sure why this was surprising, as if our apartment had somehow assured me it would rewire itself during the day and then failed to follow through. My roommate and I called the bowab, the doorman/handyman that the tenants in our building pay to hang around and be available in such circumstances. Ali, the bowab, came up to the apartment and, unsurprisingly, flipped the fuse box switches with no success. He informed us we neededn electrician, which we already knew since only about a third of the available lights in our apartment actually work and even those require tricks like jiggling switches, pressing the bulb until it turns on, etc. We didn't think we'd be able to get someone after six on such short notice but Ali called around and found Walid.

The first thing we noticed about Walid is that he spoke English. Not just a few words related to his trade like "light" and "cord" and "on" but he really spoke English and understood what we said, even the jokes. This was disconcerting and Marisol and I switched to Spanish a couple of times so we could discuss him and our electrical woes more privately.

Walid spent over an hour and a half in our apartment. He fixed all the lights, leaving twice to buy replacement parts. He rewired the fuse box, replacing an entire switch at one point, installed a light in the ceiling of my room, and popped the light switches off in my bedroom and the kitchen, and the air conditioning switch in the living room, to tighten things up. Room by room, Walid revived our apartment and kept saying, "if you have anything else, you'd better tell me now," and again and again we'd come up with just one more thing that we realized had either stopped working or had never worked.

Finally around 9:30, Walid charged us 77 pounds, the equivalent of $14.00 for parts and services. We tipped him to even out the total at 100 pounds, or $20 and he left happy and exhausted. Marisol and I reveled in our well-lit apartment, wandering dreamlike from room to room staring at the glowing bulbs until we had to blink the burning spots from our eyes. We both retired to our rooms, she to read, me to do yoga, now that we could see what we were doing in that part of the apartment.

Which is when the trouble began.

A half hour after Walid left, the fuse overloaded again and clicked off the lights in my room, Marisol's room, half the bathroom, and the whole kitchen. The same line of wiring that had tripped the fuse and blacked out in the morning. Marisol was in the shower so I had to wait to mess with the fusebox for fear of picking the wrong switch and leaving her in total darkness (remember that one of the two lights in the bathroom was on a different circuit and still worked). When she came out of the bathroom, I went to the fuse box, found the right switch and switched it back and forth. The lights came back on and Marisol and I went back to our respective reading and workout.

The fuse tripped again. I switched it back on again. It switched off again almost immediately. Marisol tried her hand at the fusebox but the lights did not come back on. I tried and they did flip on again. Things seemed to stabilize for twenty minutes or so. I wound down my workout and Marisol's boyfriend Megid came over to hang out. Marisol was showing him our well-lit, if finicky apartment, and I was about to get in the shower, when the lights went out again. This time for good. No amount of fusebox tampering, switch flipping, and frustrated cursing could bring the power back.

The lights going out at 10:45 has a different meaning than the lights going out at 5:30. After my shower I was headed to bed and Marisol and Megid were planning to turn in before long as well. So at first it didn't seem we needed to demand that Walid return immediately, though we did call him to tell him that the problem we'd originally called him to solve was back in full force. He reluctantly confirmed that he would come back if we made him despite the late hour because electrician's ethics demanded that he finish what he started. We told him it was okay if he come back the next day, today, after work hours, instead. As soon as we hung up, however, we remembered the fridge.

The fridge had been out the entire day yesterday, though we did have a good number of frozen items in the freezer that has kept the rest of the fridge cold during the day, even as they thawed out. One of these items was a full package of chicken breasts that was already suspect after partially thawing, then refreezing on Monday when the maid defrosted the fridge. By 11pm, when we said goodnight to Walid for good, the frozen items were thoroughly thawed and the fridge was starting to warm up, risking the health and safety of everything inside.

We also had the problem of Marisol and Megid being confined to the living room because there was no light in Marisol's room. This is when Marisol's genius kicked into high gear. For a while we joked about cooking all of my chicken, and the ground beef, shrimp, and calamari Marisol had in the freezer, all at the same time. She suggested mixed meatballs. I suggested stew. None of us could think of the recipes for too long without shuddering or gagging. Marisol had joked about planning to solve one problem at a time, then set about in all seriousness to actually doing it. First, she ran an extension cord from the bathroom to a lightbulb on a cord we'd been using to light the kitchen before Walid fixed the central ceiling light in that room. The lightbulb she ran to a curtain hook in her room and poof! bedroom mood lighting.

Then, she had Megid and I help her slide the refrigerator away from the wall in its corner of the kitchen and turn it around so its back faced the corridor between the kitchen and the bathroom. She unplugged the extension cord from the lightbulb in her room and ran it in the opposite direction to plug in the fridge. I heard her bemoaning the fact that she had only one extension cord and only one working plug in the bathroom and saying if only she had a splitter for the outlet she could solve both problems at once. I did have a splitter and soon we had a working fridge and light in Marisol's bedroom. I'm pretty sure the chicken is too far gone to use, or at least to use safely, but everything else in the fridge will be safe until Walid can bring juice back to the affected areas this evening. Just in time for me to leave for the weekend. I plan to throw out the chicken and the last Tupperware of some shrimp chow mein I made earlier in the week right when I leave so that if the bowab doesn't throw it out right away, I won't be around to gag at the growing stink in the stairway garbage can outside our apartment. Insert evil laugh here.

I am going on a whirlwind trip to Siwa this weekend. I leave at 11pm tomorrow night, drive through the night [hopefully] sleeping on the bus, spend the day Friday doing tourist activities, camp out Bedouin style (no showers or bathrooms) Friday night, sandsurf the day away (or in my case, photograph others sandsurfing while reading and improving my tan) on Saturday, then drive back all night Saturday getting back into Cairo around three in the morning in time for work at 9am on Sunday. I am hardcore.

If I survive the trip, I will report on Siwa in detail when I regain consciousness next week.

Classic Margaret

I just bought a BRAND NEW 250 mL bottle of olive oil for $6, a small fortune in Cairo, and then KNOCKED IT OFF THE COUNTER immediately after unpacking it from the grocery bag. It SHATTERED across my kitchen sending green glass slivers in all sizes and waves of green goo EVERYWHERE. Took forever to clean up. Ugh.

Technical Difficulties

Nothing works in this country. Correction, nothing works exactly as it is supposed to. Elevators, for example. None of them have internal doors so you see every floor as it passes and if you lean over far enough you can see through the crack between the elevator floor and where the door ought to be you can see all the way to the ground floor. The one in my building only stops on odd numbered floors. The one in my building at work can only be called to go up, which means at the end of the day when all you want to do is go DOWN to the street to go home, you have to go up to the seventeenth floor first, then head back past the tenth, where I work, and finally down to street level. The one in my friend’s building rests inside a shaft of heavy wire like if chickenwire were used to make prisons. The cage door on her floor is so heavy, I actually couldn’t open it for a minute the other day and had to call her from about five feet from her door to announce “I’m stuck in your elevator.” Neither of us was much surprised.

Another example: my entire office is moving to new digs downtown. A whole new address so all the shelves, doors, etc. CIHRS has added to its current office over the last few years needed to be disassembled, transported about 10 minutes away, and put up in the new office. Same with internet, phones, furniture, etc. An American office would simply move stuff a little at a time starting with the non-essentials like storage cabinets, the shelving and contents of the library, etc. Then either a moving crew would be hired over the weekend or staff would be enlisted to transport all the essentials and set up the office in time for the new workweek. Not in Egypt.

I am now in my second day of “working from home” because even though the move supposedly started after work on Thursday, there are currently no computers, phones, office furniture, or internet in the new office. They are not in the old office either, which begs the question of where exactly in the time-space continuum these items ended up. Unfortunately, my entire job depends on me being able to surf the internet for new grant opportunities and access web-based applications for the projects I’m already working on. And I don’t have internet at home, so this “working from home” thing has turned in to two days of me reading novels. Which is great for my mind but kind of tough on the neck and shoulders since I am famous in my family for my awkward reading posture.

Worried I might read myself into a migraine, I took a field trip from my apartment and bought some internet time at Cilantro, the Cairo equivalent of Starbucks. Actually, Starbucks, I suppose, is the Cairo equivalent of Starbucks, since they do exist here, but Cilantro is more common, even though their iced mochas are a little more watery and made w/ lower quality chocolate.

My roommate and I joke that we are WAY more tired than we should be at the end of a normal workday because just getting through eight hours and the trip to work and home requires so much more mental and physical energy in Cairo than it would take in our home countries. Cobblestones missing from sidewalks and curbs that actually seem to rise to meet the street, sometimes almost two feet high demand that we constantly watch our feet or risk a bad fall. Unfortunately, omnipresent young Egyptian men known for near-constant sexual harassment also require us to watch the street at least twenty feet ahead to avoid coming within arm’s reach of anyone who looks a little too smug or eager to see us. The safest bet is actually to walk in the street, though this means that every car will honk at you as it passes by, either to tell you it is there, in the case of private cars, or to ask if you want a ride, in the case of taxis, which account for about 80% of vehicles. So between all this honking, close driving and narrowly-missed vehicular collisions, watching the feet with one eye and assessing threats in the street ahead with the other, turns a normal day into a mental marathon.

Rather than coming home to the relaxing, spotless, cozy, air-conditioned palace that we deserve, we have had constant problems with the plumbing, electricity, and landline (which we need to get internet in the apartment). The plumbing is finally fixed except a few wayward drops in the bathroom and the fact that we have to crank the cold water handle in the kitchen about twenty turns before the water EXPLODES out of the faucet with frightening force that rebounds and splatters everywhere before finally running smoothly. We’ve decided to postpone the electrician until we both get paid at the end of the month, which means that for the next two weeks we have only a red plastic flower-shaped nightlight as the sole source of illumination in the kitchen and I need to stand on a chair to reach up and PRESS my tube-shaped fluorescent bulb into the wall socket above my door until it flickers on (about 20 seconds) each time I want to turn on the light. Now, I just don’t turn it on during the day. Still not sure what is wrong with the land line, but once we finally get it operable, to get internet, we need to rent a router from the GOVERNMENT, turn in copies of our passports to get SECURITY CLEARANCE and permission to have the internet, then wait SIX WEEKS for someone to bring the router and plug it into the phone cord.

These same sorts of labyrinthine bureaucratic procedures rule everything in Egypt, with similarly spectacular results. In addition to human rights education, my NGO does projects on democracy and freedom of expression. We are specifically preparing for next year’s parliamentary election and 2011’s presidential election. Yet only ONE woman in my office of nearly 30 employees is registered to vote. Not even the director is registered. Why? Because you can only register to vote for two weeks out of the year and it requires filling out paperwork and presenting your ID for inspection at the POLICE DEPARTMENT, where they tell you several times to come back in a few days until you either get so sick of coming back that you refuse and are denied your voter ID or until you run out of time in the two week registration period, or until you miraculously are added to the voting registry.

In other news, I was asked by JURIST, the Webby award winning legal news website to write a commentary on private military and security companies and human rights violations. I finally turned it in and their editor said it didn't look like it would require much tweaking before publication. I'll let everyone know if/when it eventually makes it onto the site.

Also, in my own gloating, competitive, American way, I am proud Obama won the Nobel. Now I can say to other foreigners, "Yes, but does YOUR president have a Nobel?!" But in my Hillary-supporting heart of hearts, I am dismayed and annoyed that this award comes when he has promised everything but done nothing. Not "done very little," but actually done nothing. We are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. We still have not extended the rule of law to contractors that commit crimes abroad. We still have hundreds of thousands of immigrants without legal status. Drug companies and insurance companies are still kicking citizens around. I still can't get health insurance or a job in my own country. If they are handing out Nobels for the simple act of NOT BEING GEORGE W. BUSH, then I will take mine gift-wrapped, please.

The internet connection I purchased at my dear Cilantro is, unsurprisingly, phasing in and out so I had better post before it, like everything else in Egypt, stops working for the day. Rest assured, however, that this is not a depressed or negative post. I am taking everything in stride and all the hassle, so far, at least, for the most part rebounds right off my ironclad sense of humor.

Immigration Schmimmigration!

Got back last night around one from another exhausting trip designed by my new friend Karim, an Egyptian-Canadian who, at 24, runs four international businesses ranging from tourism to internet marketing. His tour company offers partially-subsidized trips to foreigners in Egypt when they need to send their photographer to take updated photos of different tourist sites. This trip was to St. Catherine’s monastery and Mt. Sinai (where Moses received the Ten Commandments), and Dhahab, a tiny resort town on the Red Sea known for incredible snorkeling and SCUBA diving.

Moses was a STUD, let me just say. The hike up Mt. Sinai is 7 kilometers at sometimes more than a 45 degree angle straight up. Huge boulders and many smaller, sharp, uneven stones pockmark the path and since most visitors climb the trail before sunrise, in order to see the sun come up over the range of rocky cliffs surrounding the mountain, you climb the entire distance in the pitch black dark. We were fortunate to have almost a full moon but many of us still lost our footing and went down several times. I hiked about 2 kilometers before realizing there was no way I could keep up with the majority of our group, who were around 22 years old. I rode a camel the rest of the way up and it is a testament to the truly death-defying nature of the path and the true BADASSNESS of Moses that even the camel nearly fell twice when it lost its footing in the dark. Despite my issues with vertigo, made all the worse on camelback, and the embarrassment of taking the easy way up while the youngsters trekked on their own, I was granted some satisfaction when my gassy, gassy camel emitted literally GUSTS of buttcheek flapping farts into the faces of those exact youngsters with nearly every step.

After about two hours climbing on the “path,” already a horrorshow of false steps, sharp stones, cactuses, camel poop and donkey pee, we had come as far as the camels could go and the rest was up to us. The rest, it turns out, was a switchbacking trail of 750 “steps,” really enormous, uneven boulders arranged one above the other straight up the side of the mountain. By this time the light from the imminent sunrise made it possible to at least see when the boulder you were standing on jerked to one side and sent your foot whooshing into a crevice, turning your ankle. Which of course everyone had the privilege of seeing several times!

The sunset was incredibly beautiful, as was the view. The rocky cliffs jutting straight out of the desert below had a coyote-and-roadrunner scenery feel and the sun lit the stone first pink, then orange as it rose. We stayed only long enough to see the sun itself pop up over the horizon and once it became a full red-orange sphere, it was time to head back down. Though we could have gone back down the “long” way we had come up, and thus had a leisurely stroll complete with the smug triumph of passing all those stones that had tripped us up before, but this time in broad daylight with a nice view and a comfortable downward angle of travel, the majority of the group opted for the “short” way down. It took easily as long as the trip up, but was another series of “steps” – boulders again, set impermanently directly into the mountain side on what was often a FULL VERTICAL ANGLE STRAIGHT DOWN. Each step was over a foot high, sometimes two, making it necessary to cling to the rocks on either side (often pre-treated with cactus and donkey pee), and even sit down before swinging your legs down to the next step.

It was a holy terror on the knees and ankles. Several of the group fell hard and skidded some terrifying distance and nearly over the cliffside before wedging some body part in between the bigger boulders to stop the fall. After two hours, everyone’s legs were shaking so bad that more and more people fell, increasing the danger that one faller above would slip into the row of climbers on the stairs below and cause a crash of dominos down the mountainside. All of this in blazing desert heat.

Dhahab was a welcome change. Our hotel had a pool, which was freezing, and was only about 20 yards from the ocean itself, with near-perfect snorkeling as long as you could navigate your way 15 feet or so over the rocky beach. Five kilometers up the road was the famous “Blue Hole,” a wide hole in the reef over three hundred feet straight down. Skilled divers can go down this hole in the reef, navigate a series of tunnels through the reef, and surface in another location further on but many inexperienced and reckless divers drown every year when they lose their way, panic in the tunnels, or miscalculate their decompression or oxygen figures. I stuck with snorkeling, which was amazing and beautiful, and helped loosen up my sore legs from the climb the day before, but diving in Dhahab is going to be a NECESSITY once I have some savings. Screw the Blue Hole, though, I will stick to lovely shallow reef diving, where the sunlight is bright and perfect and the fish are plentiful and accustomed to tourists. What is the point of diving deeper than an underwater camera can go?!

The other adventure of the last few days was my trip to the Mogamma, the GIGANTIC grey building in the central square of Cairo that DWARFS the Egyptian Museum across the road to get my visa renewed. The tourist visa you can get at the airport lasts only a month and mine expired today. It is a process that gives a whole new dimension to the word “bureaucracy” and puts even the American postal system to shame with its unnecessary complexities and frustrating lack of sense and flexibility. Even so, the ease with which foreigners are allowed to get legal permission to stay in Egypt indefinitely and for absolutely no reason is awe-inspiring compared with how difficult it is for foreigners to enter the U.S. for even a short time for very good reasons.

First, one goes to window 12 to get the visa extension application. You then leave, fill out the application on any nearby flat surface (where you must jostle the sweaty people around you for a few square inches to write on), then return to window 12. You give the woman there your passport, a photo and photocopies of your passport and visa page. She then tells you to go to window 43 and ask for 11 pounds and 10 piasters of stamps. You go to window 43 and, after shoving and being shoved for several minutes, you reach the window and announce “11 pounds, ten piasters!” The woman at window 43, way more adorable and polite than the woman in window 12, gives you four stamps and announces, “four stamps!” You return to window 12 with your hard-earned stamps and she tells you to come back in two hours.

When you come back, you pick your passport up at window 38, buy more stamps at window 43 (yep, the nice little old lady was still there!), go to window 2 (what a hobag!) and get a different application, this one for multiple entries. After you ram your way to the flat surface again and fill in your info, you return the application and your stamps and passport to window 2 and leave again. You then need to wait AN ENTIRE DAY before you can pick up your passport but when you do, you have legal permission to stay in Egypt for six months, for purposes of “tourism” and come and go multiple times during that period.

If only the results of our immigration process were so certain, I’m sure immigrants to the U.S. would put up with equally labyrinthine requirements!

I have slept less than 12 of the last 72 hours and now really need to rally to have a productive afternoon at work. Second wind, where are you?!

Olive oil in my ear...

I have olive oil in my ear. That's what I get for refusing to give in to the temptation to order lunch every day, like most people do in Egypt. Huge meals of insanely non-nutritious foods like fuul (beans) sandwhiches and kosheri (a startling combination of tiny tube pasta, spaghetti, penne, lentils, garbanzo beans, tomato sauce, onion/garlic juice, and hot sauce) which you can get for one or two pounds (20-40 cents) are delivered right to your office by local restaurants. But since there's no way I can eat that much food at one sitting (or even three), and because eating two pounds of carbs in a single daily meal is probably not the best for me, I sautee some vegetables the night before and eat them for lunch on soft Lebanese flatbread. It was just one of these tupperware containers of vegetables, or rather the oil and herbs leftover after I'd eaten the vegetables for lunch on Sunday, that leaked in my backpack directly onto my right headphone earpiece. Stubbornly refusing not to listen to my audiobook this morning, a ritual that helps me forget the chaos of morning traffic and avoid conversation with my cab driver (and subsequent marriage proposals), I now have olive oil in my right ear. Yick.

Apologies for allowing nearly a week to fly by without a blog post. I have been EXHAUSTED since Saturday's trip to Alexandria, which was one long non-stop day of strenuous tourism and socializing from beginning to end. Also, the guy who works next to me has some kind of cold and I think my immune system is spending a lot of energy fighting it off because no matter how much sleep I get, I want more. Unusually, I have also been busy at work, drafting a grant proposal for the Australian equivalent of USAID (appropriately called AUSAID) to fund some human rights educational courses, publication of a couple books, and an ongoing series of Youth Forums for past participants in CIHRS courses to come together and network, and another proposal for the US Institute of Peace for a course on youth advocacy and democratic participation through social media and an accompanying film series. The deadlines sprang up out of nowhere so I went from having nothing to do at work to having a TON to do in very little time.

I will no doubt be more exhausted after this weekend's upcoming trip to St. Catherine's (site of the famous burning bush), Mt. Sinai, and Dahab. I leave Thursday evening straight after work. We drive all night, then climb Mt. Sinai in the dark (and this is a real, hardscrabble hike up a real, hardscrabble mountain, not some casual tourist stroll) in time to catch Friday's sunrise from the summit, then spend all day hanging out in Dahab (no doubt sweaty and dirty from climbing up and down a mountain and marveling at a not-currently-burning bush). We spend what will no doubt me a long, uncomfortable night in a backpacker's hostel (which I once would have been okay with but am now too old and cranky to endure without whining), then spend all day Saturday driving back to Cairo just in time to go to crash for a few hours and go stand in line to get my visa renewed the next morning, or rather, the entire next day if I've learned anything about Egyptian bureaucratic efficiency.

The good news is that after last week's visit by the plumber (the bolt connecting the input hose to the water heater tank exploaded, creating a spraying leak that necessitated turning the entire water main off whenever we weren't using the bathroom and the showerhead fit the water input hose so badly it forced all the water back down the outside of the hose such that we had to hold the middle of the hose to our heads to rinse the shampoo from our hair) and yesterday's visit by the maid and doorman (whose combined efforts changed the single lightbulb in my room, which had been out for three days), we now have a functional shower and light in every room of the apartment. These simple things will make it much easier to function next week when I will most certainly be too tired to think straight.

I close with two comments on recent entertainment news:

First, I saw GI Joe a few days ago and I think that if movies like this could win Oscars, then the sound guys should definitely be up for a sound mixing or sound editing award. Sound mixing at least. I've never heard so many unique kinds of explosions!

Secondly, I am THRILLED that Roman Polanski has been arrested and now faces extradition for the rape charges pending against him for decades. Shame on Whoopi Goldberg for saying it wasn't "rape-rape" because the girl and her mother knew of his reputation with the ladies and went to meet him at Jack Nicholson's home anyway. And shame on the many of Mr. Polanski's colleagues in the film industry for implying that just because he is an artist he should not face trial for his actions. Shame on his friends for calling it "a little mistake 32 years ago" and "an arbitrary arrest." It is irrelevant that the victim has forgiven him and does not want a trial. I'm glad she's received the therapy she's needed and has moved on but this has no bearing on the fact that he broke the law. The math here isn't hard: sex with a drugged, drunk, semi-conscious thirteen year old girl = all kinds of nasty = ILLEGAL= trial. Moreover, jumping bail + fleeing the jurisdiction + avoiding an arrest warrant by hiding out in a foreign country for decades = even more kinds of criminal = trial. I will be really disappointed if the State Department steps in and invalidates the extradition warrant here and I'm even a little disgusted they've agreed to review the case.

Okay, the IT guy is doing his best Jimmy Fallon impression instructing me that I am to save my files to the public server rather than to my desktop. He is doing everything except the eye-rolling "MOOOVE!" so I have to transfer my files before I annoy him further.

Best to everyone!

Sarene, you are already missed!

I am having a rough morning. On the one hand, now that Ramadan, and the feast holiday Eid that celebrates the end of the month of Ramadan have concluded, everyone is back in the office, laughing, chatting, and drinking tea and Nescafe. On the other hand, I found out that a close, longtime friend of my mom’s died yesterday. We had known she was sick only a short while so the end seemed to come very suddenly. She made beaded jewelry and beads, being so small, inexpensive, and easy to pack, were always something I would look for in my travels to bring home for her. I had already scouted out a couple Egyptian jewelry shops.

I wish I could be home to give my mom a hug.

I also have a miserable headache from breathing in God-knows-what the last two days. It was just me in the closed office with two smokers yesterday, then last night my roommate caught a hoard of ants mounting a guerilla attack on her cereal box, freaked out, and sprayed a noxious cloud of ant poison around the kitchen floor without any warning (not like I could have run for my gas mask or oxygen tank if I’d known what she was going to do, but I could have opened a few windows). The smell of poison (which at least now I know what poison smells like – bonus!) still lingered this morning, along with the early morning smell of pollution rising from the street 8 stories below my apartment. I think I have developed smoker’s lung in 2 weeks.

My supervisor, Mark, came in today with fire-engine red eyes. He and his wife have adopted a second street kitten that he might be allergic to. Yesterday he wore his glasses but he thought he was better and came in with his contacts today so now that his eyes are burning, he doesn’t have the glasses here to switch to. So basically both of us are cranky and in pain. Going to be an awesome day.

A Morning of Sloth and Filth, An Afternoon of Personal Betterment

The day did not start with a bang. I blinked awake in the bright, BRIGHT morning sunlight (I swear, Egypt is closer to the sun than any place I've ever lived before. Dawn crashes through the window like car headlights an inch from your eyes and the light only gets brighter from there. I ususally sleep with a thick navy scarf over my eyes but it apparently slipped off around 9 and I couldn't get back to sleep.

Today was the third day of a four day weekend celebrating the end of the month of Ramadan and I felt, pathetically, like 9 am was just too early to wake up during a long weekend. So I tried for at least a half hour to get back to sleep, without success, and finally gave up, brushed my teeth and climbed back in bed to read the mystery novel I started yesterday. I then ate breakfast and lay on the couch for three hours watching the news, then went back to reading. Fell asleep again around noon, woke up around 2, and proceeded to watch another 2 hours of news.

At this point, I was overwhelmed by my own ridiculous amount of sloth and the continuing grossness of my surroundings. The material covering our livingroom furniture is necessary, since the furniture dates at least from the '60's and belonged previously to smokers. But the material has never been washed either, which, in addition to the ants in the kitchen and the smudges on the walls grosses me out way more than the dirty floors did when I first movied in.

So, driven by the filth I'd wallowed in all morning, and my total lack of physical activity since I've moved into my new apartment, I rallied, tore the offending material off the couch (it was glued in place) for a good washing, did some yoga on the now-pristine floors of my bedroom, showered for the first time of the day (under the still-broken showerhead), and capped off the productive three hours of my day with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Still one of my favorite shows ever. Right up there with The West Wing.

I've slipped back into my TV watching but I have big plans for the evening: although I have not left the apartment ALL DAY LONG, I hereby pledge I WILL pluck my eyebrows before I go to bed!

Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day – Insert Obligatory “Arrrrr” Here Matey

I’ve let a week slip between blog posts and have received some well-deserved crap about it from some of you. Apologies! Moving into my new apartment has proven difficult, expensive, and sometimes dirty work and internet and free time have only rarely intersected.

First things first. Jose Hernandez:

For those of you who missed the story several minutes ago on CNN International, let me update you on this amazing bio. From the age of 7, Jose Hernandez went to work with his parents as a migrant farmworker harvesting fruit and vegetables in the fields of Stockton, California. His parents wanted him and his brother and sisters to learn the value of hard work. Now, at 41, he has realized his dream of becoming an astronaut and created some recent controversy by giving an interview from space to a Spanish-language TV station in which he mentioned his support of immigration reform. NASA actually backed him stating that although his opinions are his own, he has every right to express them. So cool.

As you may be able to tell, I have committed to some hardcore relaxing this weekend. I am staying home in the air conditioning during the day and making brief expeditions to explore my new neighborhood once it cools off in the evening. I have watched two hours of Al Jazeera and one of CNN International but I may give the TV a rest (so hard when I have access to satellite for the first time in years!) to go try to wash the footprints off my bedroom wall.

Which brings me to the apartment. My new roommate is a very sweet Mexican girl named Marisol. Between Marisol getting sick for a couple weeks, traveling for a week, her roommate moving out, and the maid going MIA during the month of Ramadan (which, thank God, ends this weekend), the apartment has not been cleaned over a month. I spent yesterday catching up as best I could, with extensive floor cleaning, bathroom scrubbing and ant-poisoning in the kitchen. I spent three hours in full on Melanie mode (for those of you who do not know my friend Melanie, Mel is to bleach what King Midas was to gold) and still barely made a dent. We still need visits by a plumber, electrician, and the very much missed maid to bring the place up to speed but I can walk down the hall and back without shoes on now (not recreationally but at least in case of fire or something).

Once the apartment returns to liveable condition, it will be suitable for guests. I have a large bedroom and even have an extra mattress and box-spring so if anyone has always wanted to travel to Egypt and has just been waiting for a friend with a free and convenient place to stay, give me a holler.

I close with some random suggestions to certain parties based on my experiences in Egypt thus far.

Dear Egypt,

Consider decreasing the circumference of your toilet paper rolls and INCREASING the amount of toilet paper on each role. There is no reason to waste cardboard on HUGE toilet paper rolls to give structure to like a meter of the paper itself. If you’re already spinning toilet paper onto the roll, why not just keep spinning another few second and put a health amount of TP onto every roll. It would be weird not to have to buy toilet paper every other day, I know, but I swear you’d get used to it.

Dear Egyptian Taxi Drivers,

I’m not sure where this crazy rumor started, but American women do not fall in love and proposed marriage and immediate immigration to America in the space of a single taxi ride. This is the case even when the driver assures his passenger that he does not already have a wife in America. It is true even when the driver offers to overcharge his passenger by only five pounds instead of by ten pounds. It is the case even when the driver adjusts the rearview mirror to properly and repeatedly stare at his passenger. It is true even when the driver gives his passenger his phone number and promises to come at her beck and call to repeat the whole irritating, harassing procedure. Want to marry an American? Try to be a friend first. This is accomplished through ordinary, non-creepy conversation, not by simply declaring that you are friends, loudly and aggressively. And work on those pick-up lines. Shouting “I no have wife in America” .2 seconds after meeting me doesn’t exactly make me go weak in the knees, you know?

The smell of burning trash? No! The smell of adventure!

I got the job! I am now a Program Development Coordinator at the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. Making a wopping $640 a month. Which is about twice what Egyptian teachers make but not quite what I had asked for so my fingers are crossed the Executive Committee approves a raise for me next year.

And I’ve found an apartment. With a Mexican woman named Marisol who works for an Expedia-like travel company. It is in Zamalek, one of the nicest neighborhoods in Cairo, filled with foreigners, little shops and even bars, but a bit of a walk to my office.

So I am rapidly progressing toward a normal existence. So now if I can only MOVE INTO the apartment, and OUT of my freaking hotel, I will be set.

I did move into a new desk today, instead of sharing the table in the library with the other interns, but whereas the interns were adorable chatty 20-year-olds, and the library was bright and thoroughly air-conditioned, I now share an office with two smokers and an ancient, sputtering air conditioner that rivals the Model T for functionality. I need to think of a tactful way to wear my swine-flu-esque air-filtering facemasks to work or else leave the room whenever either of the two light-up…which is about every half hour.

In other news, I went to the pyramids yesterday. It is true that the Sphinx seems smaller in person, but it is no less amazing. There is something really calming about its posture and expression, like a cat sunning itself. And boy was it sunning itself yesterday! Temperature was easily 100 and although Angelica and I went around 8:30 am and only stayed until noon I swear we both had mild heat exhaustion when we got back home and we were basically useless the whole rest of the day.

Oddly, three different men trying to sell things to the foreigners stumbling around in the sand of the Giza plateau, upon learning we were American, shouted “Welcome to Alaska!” An ironic joke?

The entire taxi ride back was filled with the smell of burning trash along the Nile. I realized that I kind of like the smell of burning trash. When I was a kid, I had two babysitters who lived way out of town, out in the juniper and tumbleweeds, where burn barrells were common. It was what building forts and jumping irrigation ditches smelled like.

I am very nervous about staying in Egypt for the semi-long term, especially on such a low salary but I am excited to finally be doing human rights work and to be learning the development side of things. Hopefully that experience, plus the time to work on my Arabic, will position me for one day paying down my loans.

Off to read my second Grisham book in 2 days. Missing the law, I guess.