Garbage, snot, and shopping.

The garbage man just came to the door. We are supposed to either pay our doorman (actually a family of teenagers headed by what appears to be a single mom) or pay the zabaleen, the very poor, very old men who sweep the garbage from the streets and take it away. We aren’t supposed to have to pay both and we’ve been paying the door-family but I just can’t bring myself to tell the garbage man. The zabaleen are the closest thing Cairo has to a recycling/waste management system, as they pick through the garbage by hand and find every item with a potential use or value. The organic garbage used to be fed to pigs but last year the authorities killed all the pigs out of fear of swine flu. Pigs are unclean in Islam and in a country without healthcare for the poor, swine flu created quite a bit of paranoia that the government resolved by convincing people that the pigs were the source of the danger. Kill the pigs and the flu goes away. Unfortunately, now organic trash goes with the leftover inorganic trash (the stuff with no use or value to the zabaleen) to the outskirts of Cairo where the very, very poor live in plastic villages made out of tarps and garbage and stink. We pay the man who came to my door ten pounds ($2) per month. I will keep paying him because I can’t tell him I’m already paying someone else. What’s $2 a month to me?


I was hanging out my laundry the other night when I heard a short, loud whooshing noise in the dark above me and to my right. It happened again and again and I felt a little cloud of dampness on my cheek. My upstairs neighbor was blowing his nose farmer’s style off his balcony! “Hey!” I yelled. “SNOOSH” came again. I stepped back a little out of range and yelled again. “HEY!” “Oh!” came the startled reply (he didn’t know he had an audience). “Sorry. Sorry.” He said twice and then hurriedly stepped back to what was apparently an apartment bereft of Kleenex, toilet paper, paper towels and rags of all types. In the morning, I noticed that although his balcony was set off to the right of mine and that therefore my newly hung laundry missed the brunt of the snot shower but the apartment below me has a balcony that lines up perfectly with Mr. Snotty McSnotfest upstairs. And the woman who lives downstairs had her laundry out too!


The constant stress of living in Cairo is having a surprising effect on my health. I’ve lost around twenty-five pounds. Unfortunately, I’m still too big to wear most off the rack clothes at the mall but I am now a little too small to buy off the rack in the XXL shops either. Which means I go naked most of the time. No. Kidding. I still go to the mall, it just takes me forever to find clothes. I had a particularly Egyptian shopping experience last weekend when my roommate and I walked into a store on our way to H&M (the only H&M in Egypt is more expensive even than in Europe, but the clothes don’t have weird frills, sequins, mirrored buttons, build in “bodies” (these are skin-tight long-sleeved shirts women wear under what would otherwise be Vegas showgirl outfits to make them acceptable to wear out and about), or any other Egypt-fashionable accessories).

A young employee who obviously works on commission saw two foreigners stroll in and rushed over to help us, which meant demanding our size whenever we paused to look at an item and then looking through each one on the rack until he either found our size or didn’t. Basically what we would do if we were permitted to shop on our own. I was looking for basic dress shirts, a surprisingly elusive target, and extra frustrating since most of the men’s shirts here look like women’s shirts. They’re often pink or lavender, slightly tailored in at the waist and just generally seem to be rubbing it in that there are no women’s dress shirts that don’t seem to come complete with gills or lizard-like ribbed collars. Anyway, I digress. So I pause in front of a white, collared button-down shirt with black pinstripes, the only flaw of which was spherical shiny black buttons, that I could get my tailor to replace. The boy asked what my size was and I told him 48. His eyes went wide like he didn’t even know sizes went up that high. “No, no 48,” he said, without even checking through the rack. Then, he sort of roused himself from his shock and thumbed unenthusiastically through the few shirts. “No 48,” he said again, “44.” He actually made a counter-offer! Like we were going to negotiate about what size shirt I wear and inevitably compromise on 46. If only my pot belly would go along with the plan, we (my belly and I) could have made a killer deal!