It could have been the pefect lazy Friday. Spent last night in my friend's amazing apartment in the soon-to-be Hilton drinking whisky (a lot of whisky) on her balcony overlooking the Nile. Should have been able to sleep in until noon, read my book, watch TV, then go see Clash of the Titans in 3D with my brother and the same friend tonight. Unfortunately, I couldn't relax enough to enjoy a lazy day.
I was actually awakened around ten by this creeping, claustrophobic feeling that my apartment was the dirtiest hole on the planet. And on a planet that includes a city as dirty as Cairo, this is saying something. My roommate, who is moving out next week if all goes well, makes the strangest messes. Last week, she was chewing gum, poured herself a bowl of chocolate granola, then STUCK HER GUM ON THE KITCHEN COUNTER to eat her granola. The gum stayed there for a day, then she put it IN the bowl on top of the inch of leftover granola where it stayed over the four day weekend. Thomas and I did not clean it up just on principle and when she came back from her Nile Cruise, instead of scraping the chocolate paste with gum topping into the garbage, she PUT WATER IN IT and left it for another three days. This kind of thing happens all the time, such that the usual messy roommate behaviors like not taking out the garbage or leaving your clothes on the line for a week pale in comparison. I don't even notice anymore when I wash her dishes because I am distracted by having to clean up entire fourteen ounce bottles of hair mask she drops in fluffy pink swathes of GOO on the bathroom floor and leaves when she goes out for the night with friends.
So today I resorted to my new friend (and a longtime acquaintance of Melanie's), CLOROX and scrubbed down most surfaces in the apartment. The corner of the room where the puppy pees and poops on newspapers because my roommate can't be bothered to walk the fifteen minutes home from her office during the day to take her out to go, was infested with ants feasting on cashew speckled turds (the dog got into my roommate's plate of nuts she left too close to the edge of the table) so I had to spray Raid and THEN mop it up because if the smell makes me ill, I can't imagine what it does to little puppy lungs.
So for the last few hours, I have been basking in my squeaky, sparkly haven of my own creation and have actually enjoyed the lazy afternoon that should have stretched all day. She just got back from work though, so my bleachy, ABC gum-free party is over.
For those of you who enjoyed the mystery haikus, I enclose the following hot, steamy romance haikus in the hopes, again, of being discovered and offered a multimillion dollar advance to write for five minutes a day until I retire at 35.
Enjoy!
Perfect connection.
Long distance relationship.
We are breaking up.
(two cell phones)
Six pressed together.
Hard, slick skin, steams and shimmers.
Sweat beads, drips, pulses.
(cold six pack out in the hot sun)
I was made for you.
I fit inside perfectly.
I twist, you open.
(key, lock)
We fold together
Tight, firm, one. Spent and sweaty,
I shower with you.
(socks)
You are softer now
Than when we met. We wrinkle,
age, joined at the hip.
(two rotting bananas)
Friday, May 7, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Jinx
I am cursed this week. I can feel it. Too many good things are happening. A big bad is coming.
My karma antenna first started jangling on Monday when I went out to run errands and actually got everything I needed at the first place I stopped for each item. I dropped pants off at the tailor and he didn't even need to measure the pair I needed hemmed, he just compared the inseam to the pair I needed hemmed so I didn't have to try anything on. Dropped my shirt at the dry cleaner, who is the sweetest Egyptian lady with very beautiful English who always holds my hand and tells me to say hello to my brother.
I got an extra set of keys made in case I manage to find a maid this week, since our last maid's sister got married and the whole family had to move out of the building to go do something about the animals demanded by the groom's family. The guy who made the keys was the guy who changed our lock for us when our old one was sticking and he remembered me. I got his phone number in case I ever have lock problems again and he looked over my shoulder as I typed in his name and insisted I put "Locksmith" in the last name box on my phone. Like some foreigner had taught him this word and he was so proud of it. His shop is a wooden shelf covered by two shutters on the side of a store that sells tupperware.
I went to a stationery store and bought the standard form contract foreigners use to rent furnished apartments in case my landlord came this week (which he did, but I'll get to that in a minute) because my roommate is moving out and I wanted to be the only one on the lease (right now the girl who used to live here is still on it). They actually had a bilingual Arabic-English copy of the contract!
On my way back to my apartment, in the space of two short blocks, I saw the brother of our maid, who used to live in our building and he waved and said he was happy to see me and wished me a nice evening. And I saw our plumber, who likes to rail against corrupt politicians who are stifling his dreams (he is an engineer, his friend who works as an office boy in a phone company is also an engineer, and his friend's garbage man got his degree in the Faculty of Investment and Trading), and who I might need to call again soon because the interior of our toilet tank is cheap Chinese-made plastic crap that he literally used a knife heated on the stove to melt back together the last time he came over.
So basically I started to feel like part of the community. And it really freaked me out. After being unemployed for so long, getting not-great grades, losing my health insurance, etc. I haven't been a big believer this year in good things happening to me. Okay, so I was never really an optimist of any stripe but now I'm downright suspicious when things start to go well. So I told my roommate I thought I was headed for disaster and she told the puppy I was being ridiculous.
The thing is, I am bad at guessing what will go wrong and if something big enough has gone wrong for the looming danger to have passed and karmic balance to be achieved again.
For example, I went through two laptops this week at work and then FOUR today. The first one, which I've had for five months with no problems started freezing early in the week. Then it started shutting off by itself with no warning. IT thought they'd fixed it, gave it back, and it crashed again losing several hours of work. So IT gave me another laptop while they worked on mine overnight and on into the morning. The new one shut off three times before noon. They told me it was just the normal process of installing updates and since I hadn't actually lost any work, because by then I was saving compulsively, I didn't insist on a new laptop...
Until it crashed another three times after lunch.
I called IT and they absurdly insisted it was just normal updates. I asked why there were so many updates and why the computer shut off without warning when a) most computers ask you if you want to install updates and b) when it was shutting off it wasn't actually installing the updates, it would turn back on and there they'd be!!! The guy told me the laptop hadn't been updated in several months because it was a spare. I asked, "you mean I gave you my laptop because it was shutting off without warning and I was losing work and you gave me this laptop in its place KNOWING IT WOULD SHUT OFF REPEATEDLY WITHOUT WARNING?!?!" And there was this long pause on the phone and he goes, "I bring you another."
So the third laptop, which IT hilariously calls a "floater," was fine for about four hours, when, yep, it turned off without warning. Since it had been good for most of the afternoon, I was lured into a false sense of security and had slacked off on my bi-minutely saving regimen and so lost another hour's work. I yelled at IT again and they brought me computer number 2, supposedly all updated, around 5:30.
But I'd learned my lesson. By then I'd given up on saving at all and didn't do any work on the computer for the rest of the day.
Was plowing through four computers, all my goodwill with IT, and losing four hours of work bad enough to have been the big bad I sensed coming? I didn't think so.
In my heart of hearts what I truly dreaded was the meeting with the landlord tonight. We had to tell him 1) that Marisol, who he has known for two years, is moving out of the apartment, 2) that I, who he only met a few months ago, wants to stay for at least another year at the same rates and conditions he gave Marisol, and 3) that Marisol's dog ate a Marisol's dog-sized hole in the couch last weekend. I just knew he was going to say no to everything and I was going to get stuck paying for a ton of dog damage or have to find a new place out of the blue or something.
Nope, totally normal. He agreed to everything, accepted Marisol's offer to have a furniture repair place GLUE a "piece of material" over the hole, then sat and had a beer with us, chatted, gave us some phone numbers to call if anything goes wrong in the apartment since he lives in Alexandria, and kissed our cheeks when he left. No big deal at all. So that wasn't the big bad either.
But there is one more REALLY bad possibility.
My firm has been working on this case for years. Now there are seven attorneys on it full time (five of us little guys and two senior associates). But technically the tribunal still hasn't awarded jurisdiction. It is totally normal to do this much work before the tribunal says a peep but then, yesterday, they peeped by sending a really cryptic letter that has about five different interpretations ranging from "swiss arbitrators are anal retentive about regulatory housekeeping details" to "you are the weakest link, good-bye!" Despite how much we all don't want to be working on just this one case anymore, the letter has everyone on edge and we might not find out for days or weeks what it all means.
So I have decided, as a vocational back-up, to become a mystery writer. Only I don't have the attention span to write novels. WAAAAY too long. And honestly, short stories are usually like 20 pages. That's not short at all! So I've opted for mystery haiku. But I could only scrape together a handful before I lost interest. Seventeen syllables wear a girl out.
Thus, I sign out with the following opus in the hopes that big time publishers are reading this blog while fanning themselves with extra cash they can't think of how to spend. And, knowing that my readers have a similar attention span to my own (especially so far down a long blog post), I've included the answers to the mysteries right below each poem.
The killer stabs through,
Distributes me piece by piece
With a shiny spade.
(pie)
I am crushed, smothered,
Drowned, evidence washed away.
Skid-marks the sole clue.
(poo)
My blood runs freely,
Stabbed with a sharp spear, tortured
In flames and hot oil
(kebab)
Systematically
We are counted, added, and
BURNED… to your delight.
(calories)
I am broken, breached,
Violated, compromised,
Rendered null and void.
(construction contract)
Whew, that was sooooo nerdy. Random House, you know where to find me!
My karma antenna first started jangling on Monday when I went out to run errands and actually got everything I needed at the first place I stopped for each item. I dropped pants off at the tailor and he didn't even need to measure the pair I needed hemmed, he just compared the inseam to the pair I needed hemmed so I didn't have to try anything on. Dropped my shirt at the dry cleaner, who is the sweetest Egyptian lady with very beautiful English who always holds my hand and tells me to say hello to my brother.
I got an extra set of keys made in case I manage to find a maid this week, since our last maid's sister got married and the whole family had to move out of the building to go do something about the animals demanded by the groom's family. The guy who made the keys was the guy who changed our lock for us when our old one was sticking and he remembered me. I got his phone number in case I ever have lock problems again and he looked over my shoulder as I typed in his name and insisted I put "Locksmith" in the last name box on my phone. Like some foreigner had taught him this word and he was so proud of it. His shop is a wooden shelf covered by two shutters on the side of a store that sells tupperware.
I went to a stationery store and bought the standard form contract foreigners use to rent furnished apartments in case my landlord came this week (which he did, but I'll get to that in a minute) because my roommate is moving out and I wanted to be the only one on the lease (right now the girl who used to live here is still on it). They actually had a bilingual Arabic-English copy of the contract!
On my way back to my apartment, in the space of two short blocks, I saw the brother of our maid, who used to live in our building and he waved and said he was happy to see me and wished me a nice evening. And I saw our plumber, who likes to rail against corrupt politicians who are stifling his dreams (he is an engineer, his friend who works as an office boy in a phone company is also an engineer, and his friend's garbage man got his degree in the Faculty of Investment and Trading), and who I might need to call again soon because the interior of our toilet tank is cheap Chinese-made plastic crap that he literally used a knife heated on the stove to melt back together the last time he came over.
So basically I started to feel like part of the community. And it really freaked me out. After being unemployed for so long, getting not-great grades, losing my health insurance, etc. I haven't been a big believer this year in good things happening to me. Okay, so I was never really an optimist of any stripe but now I'm downright suspicious when things start to go well. So I told my roommate I thought I was headed for disaster and she told the puppy I was being ridiculous.
The thing is, I am bad at guessing what will go wrong and if something big enough has gone wrong for the looming danger to have passed and karmic balance to be achieved again.
For example, I went through two laptops this week at work and then FOUR today. The first one, which I've had for five months with no problems started freezing early in the week. Then it started shutting off by itself with no warning. IT thought they'd fixed it, gave it back, and it crashed again losing several hours of work. So IT gave me another laptop while they worked on mine overnight and on into the morning. The new one shut off three times before noon. They told me it was just the normal process of installing updates and since I hadn't actually lost any work, because by then I was saving compulsively, I didn't insist on a new laptop...
Until it crashed another three times after lunch.
I called IT and they absurdly insisted it was just normal updates. I asked why there were so many updates and why the computer shut off without warning when a) most computers ask you if you want to install updates and b) when it was shutting off it wasn't actually installing the updates, it would turn back on and there they'd be!!! The guy told me the laptop hadn't been updated in several months because it was a spare. I asked, "you mean I gave you my laptop because it was shutting off without warning and I was losing work and you gave me this laptop in its place KNOWING IT WOULD SHUT OFF REPEATEDLY WITHOUT WARNING?!?!" And there was this long pause on the phone and he goes, "I bring you another."
So the third laptop, which IT hilariously calls a "floater," was fine for about four hours, when, yep, it turned off without warning. Since it had been good for most of the afternoon, I was lured into a false sense of security and had slacked off on my bi-minutely saving regimen and so lost another hour's work. I yelled at IT again and they brought me computer number 2, supposedly all updated, around 5:30.
But I'd learned my lesson. By then I'd given up on saving at all and didn't do any work on the computer for the rest of the day.
Was plowing through four computers, all my goodwill with IT, and losing four hours of work bad enough to have been the big bad I sensed coming? I didn't think so.
In my heart of hearts what I truly dreaded was the meeting with the landlord tonight. We had to tell him 1) that Marisol, who he has known for two years, is moving out of the apartment, 2) that I, who he only met a few months ago, wants to stay for at least another year at the same rates and conditions he gave Marisol, and 3) that Marisol's dog ate a Marisol's dog-sized hole in the couch last weekend. I just knew he was going to say no to everything and I was going to get stuck paying for a ton of dog damage or have to find a new place out of the blue or something.
Nope, totally normal. He agreed to everything, accepted Marisol's offer to have a furniture repair place GLUE a "piece of material" over the hole, then sat and had a beer with us, chatted, gave us some phone numbers to call if anything goes wrong in the apartment since he lives in Alexandria, and kissed our cheeks when he left. No big deal at all. So that wasn't the big bad either.
But there is one more REALLY bad possibility.
My firm has been working on this case for years. Now there are seven attorneys on it full time (five of us little guys and two senior associates). But technically the tribunal still hasn't awarded jurisdiction. It is totally normal to do this much work before the tribunal says a peep but then, yesterday, they peeped by sending a really cryptic letter that has about five different interpretations ranging from "swiss arbitrators are anal retentive about regulatory housekeeping details" to "you are the weakest link, good-bye!" Despite how much we all don't want to be working on just this one case anymore, the letter has everyone on edge and we might not find out for days or weeks what it all means.
So I have decided, as a vocational back-up, to become a mystery writer. Only I don't have the attention span to write novels. WAAAAY too long. And honestly, short stories are usually like 20 pages. That's not short at all! So I've opted for mystery haiku. But I could only scrape together a handful before I lost interest. Seventeen syllables wear a girl out.
Thus, I sign out with the following opus in the hopes that big time publishers are reading this blog while fanning themselves with extra cash they can't think of how to spend. And, knowing that my readers have a similar attention span to my own (especially so far down a long blog post), I've included the answers to the mysteries right below each poem.
The killer stabs through,
Distributes me piece by piece
With a shiny spade.
(pie)
I am crushed, smothered,
Drowned, evidence washed away.
Skid-marks the sole clue.
(poo)
My blood runs freely,
Stabbed with a sharp spear, tortured
In flames and hot oil
(kebab)
Systematically
We are counted, added, and
BURNED… to your delight.
(calories)
I am broken, breached,
Violated, compromised,
Rendered null and void.
(construction contract)
Whew, that was sooooo nerdy. Random House, you know where to find me!
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Vacation poisoning
I am suffering from a terrible case of vacation poisoning.
Lest anyone think that this is an actual gastrointestinal disorder or that "vacation" is also the latin name of some sort of amoebic parasite, let me put your mind at ease: I am talking about the pit-of-the-stomach anxiety that comes from having to go back to work after two nearly back to back vacations at resort towns on the Red Sea.
My brother arrived in Cairo about four weeks ago and we immediately left on a six day trip to the Sinai Peninsula town of Dahab for some SCUBA diving and relaxing. Thomas was coming from a month in Brazil and had the kind of tan you'd expect from such an adventure. I on the other hand was the exact color of his butt.
My week in Dahab and the following weekend in the far snootier resort town of Sharm el Sheikh as given me a toasty glow but my brain now rejects the mundane tasks I'm assigned like work as if I am now allergic to office-induced boredom. I keep pretending my pen is a hand grenade and energetically pull off the cap again and again.
We are now reviewing the comments we wrote as we went through our correspondence review. We are reviewing our review. Which, although it is less boring, as promised, is only marginally less boring when I think we were all hoping for significantly less boring. Another highlight of my day was correcting punctuation. You know how tables and graphs often have a line or two beneath them listing the source of the data? I was correcting those mini-paragraphs for extra spaces, missing commas and the occasional hyphen. Good thing I got that expensive law degree.
Keeping my life interesting are the people in my office, and of course my brother.
Thomas has picked up three volunteer jobs with three different refugee aid organizations here in Cairo while he waits (ahem...on a mattress on my bedroom floor...indefinitely) for the Sudanese "elections" to peacefully resolve. Unfortunately, for the elections to conclude, they have to actually begin, which they seem to be having trouble doing. Voting for Bashir (since the primary opposition candidate withdrew two weeks ago) was extended for two days because by the day the elections were suppose to end, they had not even begun yet in some areas. It is possible that the US is supporting these "elections" and that the Southern candidate withdrew as part of a deal with Khartoum to get the promised referendum for Southern independence on the ballot next year and uphold the terms of the 2005 ceasefire. But it is also more than possible that the Sudanese people are not in on the deal and conditions could be too unstable for Thomas to safely go to Sudan.
In other news, my German coworker accidentally adopted an owl yesterday. The boys in her supermarket found it on the street, a helpless lost baby, and took it in to show off to customers and generally parade around as an oddity. They weren't taking care of it though and it seemed distressed and frightened so my coworker took it away from them but now she is stuck with an owl. A FREAKING BABY OWL!!! She tried to feed it small pieces of veal last night but it seemed more interested in pecking at her thumbs. Do baby owls eat living food? Do their mothers descend to their nexts with squiggling baby mice? Or thumbs?
Lest anyone think that this is an actual gastrointestinal disorder or that "vacation" is also the latin name of some sort of amoebic parasite, let me put your mind at ease: I am talking about the pit-of-the-stomach anxiety that comes from having to go back to work after two nearly back to back vacations at resort towns on the Red Sea.
My brother arrived in Cairo about four weeks ago and we immediately left on a six day trip to the Sinai Peninsula town of Dahab for some SCUBA diving and relaxing. Thomas was coming from a month in Brazil and had the kind of tan you'd expect from such an adventure. I on the other hand was the exact color of his butt.
My week in Dahab and the following weekend in the far snootier resort town of Sharm el Sheikh as given me a toasty glow but my brain now rejects the mundane tasks I'm assigned like work as if I am now allergic to office-induced boredom. I keep pretending my pen is a hand grenade and energetically pull off the cap again and again.
We are now reviewing the comments we wrote as we went through our correspondence review. We are reviewing our review. Which, although it is less boring, as promised, is only marginally less boring when I think we were all hoping for significantly less boring. Another highlight of my day was correcting punctuation. You know how tables and graphs often have a line or two beneath them listing the source of the data? I was correcting those mini-paragraphs for extra spaces, missing commas and the occasional hyphen. Good thing I got that expensive law degree.
Keeping my life interesting are the people in my office, and of course my brother.
Thomas has picked up three volunteer jobs with three different refugee aid organizations here in Cairo while he waits (ahem...on a mattress on my bedroom floor...indefinitely) for the Sudanese "elections" to peacefully resolve. Unfortunately, for the elections to conclude, they have to actually begin, which they seem to be having trouble doing. Voting for Bashir (since the primary opposition candidate withdrew two weeks ago) was extended for two days because by the day the elections were suppose to end, they had not even begun yet in some areas. It is possible that the US is supporting these "elections" and that the Southern candidate withdrew as part of a deal with Khartoum to get the promised referendum for Southern independence on the ballot next year and uphold the terms of the 2005 ceasefire. But it is also more than possible that the Sudanese people are not in on the deal and conditions could be too unstable for Thomas to safely go to Sudan.
In other news, my German coworker accidentally adopted an owl yesterday. The boys in her supermarket found it on the street, a helpless lost baby, and took it in to show off to customers and generally parade around as an oddity. They weren't taking care of it though and it seemed distressed and frightened so my coworker took it away from them but now she is stuck with an owl. A FREAKING BABY OWL!!! She tried to feed it small pieces of veal last night but it seemed more interested in pecking at her thumbs. Do baby owls eat living food? Do their mothers descend to their nexts with squiggling baby mice? Or thumbs?
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
White Taxi Blues
So this morning I waived down a cab at my usual spot, took the usual route, arrived at my usual destination in front of my office and got charged over 1/3 the usual price. Now, granted, I should have been paying closer attention on my ten minute ride to work. I shouldn't have relaxed and read my book. I should have compulsively checked the meter and told the driver immediately when I noticed the cost was rising at 130% its normal rate. But silly me, I assumed my driver was an honest guy and his meter hadn't been tampered with and didn't notice the cost "adjustment."
I pay 10 pounds on a 7 pound bill every day to and from work because I'm a nice girl and know drivers are poor so I tip well. Still without noticing the meter, I asked if the driver had change for a twenty and he said he didn't. This is absurd because most rides are at least 5 pounds so the idea that he didn't have ten pounds already by ten in the morning just from fares is impossible, not to mention he had to have his own money on him separate from his fares. So, still assuming the meter was the usual price, I gave him the seven pounds I had and walked off. He started honking and screaming at me like crazy and I, still not realizing the meter price was way high, walked back to see what his problem was, after all, I'd paid the cost of the ride, just not the tip I usually give because I was pissed he wouldn't give me change.
So then we got in a big fight out in front of the bank across the street from my office. Two guards came over to help and I said that I wanted to pay ten but he wouldn't give me change and they said I should go into the bank to get change. This is total bullshit, as the custom dictates that the driver is the one who has to get change, since it is his job, but still, I'm flexible, so I agree to go into the bank. In that instant two things happen. A very nice, adorable (he looks like Woddy from Toy Story as a teenager) Egyptian lawyer who works in my firm came over to ask what the problem was, and the driver pointed out that I owed him 10.95 pounds, not 10. I was horrified because not only was this way over what I normally pay, it is also not possible on a working meter since they go up in increments of .25.
Plus it was embarrassing that I was having this argument over about 80 cents in front of the lawyer from my firm but he and the guards didn't believe the meter was rigged. Every foreigner I know has experienced a rigged meter at least once. The white taxis are part of a government initiative to get the ancient and probably dangerous black and white taxis off the streets but the meters give the driver a lower rate than they could probably negotiate with tourists (i.e. white people) in their old black and white cabs. So they get the meter "fixed" so they can hit a button during the ride and increase the rate of the meter. Drivers don't do this to Egyptians so Egyptians don't believe it happens. The lawyer I know translated what I said to the guards at the bank and they all had a good chuckle and said "He'd be very smart if he could do that." Right. Like the same mechanics who keep black and white taxis working day after day for over 30 years with nothing but coathanger wire, tape, and a copy of the Koran holding them together couldn't also rig a white taxi meter.
So the lawyer gave HIS 20 pounds to the driver who went into the bank and gave him 10 in change and I paid him back. But THEN I got a little lecture about how if I think the driver is cheating me, I should tell him right away (again with the whole watch the meter and recalculate the fare every kilometer to make sure you're not being cheated on your whole ride to work scenario). This despite the fact that when you tell a driver his meter isn't working he says "it's fine, if you don't like the fare, talk to the government." The lawyer also told me that if I wanted the price to be negotiable, I could always take a black and white taxi, which I often do, but I pay them the same ten pounds I pay the white taxi. There's no "negotiating" about it because it is a very good price and much more than an Egyptian would pay for the same ride. Finally, despite the fact that the whole fight in the street had been in Arabic, including me telling the guards that the meter was too fast, that I take the same route every day and never have to pay more than ten pounds, etc. he also said "and you should speak a little Arabic." I know he just doesn't want to see me have problems in his country and he is saying these things because he wants the best for me, but right then I wanted to smoosh his adorable, carefully coiffed head!
Karmic justice - the driver, by being dishonest, cheated himself out of the feeling of getting a good tip. Because if he'd charged me the 7.5 pounds he was supposed to, and given my the correct change like he was supposed to, he would have driven off happily with ten pounds, freely and peacefully given. Instead, because he got my tab up to almost 11, he has the bad feeling of having almost got caught cheating, on top of the bad feeling of, in his mind, having been cheated out of that one pound he didn't earn in the first place.
Angry angry angry.
I pay 10 pounds on a 7 pound bill every day to and from work because I'm a nice girl and know drivers are poor so I tip well. Still without noticing the meter, I asked if the driver had change for a twenty and he said he didn't. This is absurd because most rides are at least 5 pounds so the idea that he didn't have ten pounds already by ten in the morning just from fares is impossible, not to mention he had to have his own money on him separate from his fares. So, still assuming the meter was the usual price, I gave him the seven pounds I had and walked off. He started honking and screaming at me like crazy and I, still not realizing the meter price was way high, walked back to see what his problem was, after all, I'd paid the cost of the ride, just not the tip I usually give because I was pissed he wouldn't give me change.
So then we got in a big fight out in front of the bank across the street from my office. Two guards came over to help and I said that I wanted to pay ten but he wouldn't give me change and they said I should go into the bank to get change. This is total bullshit, as the custom dictates that the driver is the one who has to get change, since it is his job, but still, I'm flexible, so I agree to go into the bank. In that instant two things happen. A very nice, adorable (he looks like Woddy from Toy Story as a teenager) Egyptian lawyer who works in my firm came over to ask what the problem was, and the driver pointed out that I owed him 10.95 pounds, not 10. I was horrified because not only was this way over what I normally pay, it is also not possible on a working meter since they go up in increments of .25.
Plus it was embarrassing that I was having this argument over about 80 cents in front of the lawyer from my firm but he and the guards didn't believe the meter was rigged. Every foreigner I know has experienced a rigged meter at least once. The white taxis are part of a government initiative to get the ancient and probably dangerous black and white taxis off the streets but the meters give the driver a lower rate than they could probably negotiate with tourists (i.e. white people) in their old black and white cabs. So they get the meter "fixed" so they can hit a button during the ride and increase the rate of the meter. Drivers don't do this to Egyptians so Egyptians don't believe it happens. The lawyer I know translated what I said to the guards at the bank and they all had a good chuckle and said "He'd be very smart if he could do that." Right. Like the same mechanics who keep black and white taxis working day after day for over 30 years with nothing but coathanger wire, tape, and a copy of the Koran holding them together couldn't also rig a white taxi meter.
So the lawyer gave HIS 20 pounds to the driver who went into the bank and gave him 10 in change and I paid him back. But THEN I got a little lecture about how if I think the driver is cheating me, I should tell him right away (again with the whole watch the meter and recalculate the fare every kilometer to make sure you're not being cheated on your whole ride to work scenario). This despite the fact that when you tell a driver his meter isn't working he says "it's fine, if you don't like the fare, talk to the government." The lawyer also told me that if I wanted the price to be negotiable, I could always take a black and white taxi, which I often do, but I pay them the same ten pounds I pay the white taxi. There's no "negotiating" about it because it is a very good price and much more than an Egyptian would pay for the same ride. Finally, despite the fact that the whole fight in the street had been in Arabic, including me telling the guards that the meter was too fast, that I take the same route every day and never have to pay more than ten pounds, etc. he also said "and you should speak a little Arabic." I know he just doesn't want to see me have problems in his country and he is saying these things because he wants the best for me, but right then I wanted to smoosh his adorable, carefully coiffed head!
Karmic justice - the driver, by being dishonest, cheated himself out of the feeling of getting a good tip. Because if he'd charged me the 7.5 pounds he was supposed to, and given my the correct change like he was supposed to, he would have driven off happily with ten pounds, freely and peacefully given. Instead, because he got my tab up to almost 11, he has the bad feeling of having almost got caught cheating, on top of the bad feeling of, in his mind, having been cheated out of that one pound he didn't earn in the first place.
Angry angry angry.
Friday, March 12, 2010
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!
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!
Friday, February 26, 2010
A lazy Prophet's birthday at home
Sleepy puppy unconsciously burrowing closer to my left buttcheek? Check.
A good spy thriller? Check.
Comfy Brooklyn sweatshirt? Check (thanks Uncle Charlie!).
Cappuccino and a piece of chocolate cake DELIVERED TO MY DOOR? Check!
It is pretty much a perfect Friday afternoon. The maid (who lives downstairs) failed to show up for the third time last night (think we’re getting a new maid) so Marisol and I cleaned the apartment. Not really well, since we’ll eventually get a pro in here but well enough that I’m not cringing every time I put my foot down on something dusty or squishy or something that used to be a delivery menu I wanted to use but is now a pile of tiny pieces of paper covered in puppy saliva. Marisol swept (and I’m considering mopping tonight as well, I know, big plans!) while I de-slimed the stovetop and washed every dish and stick of silverware we own. So I can get into the kitchen now, though I haven’t gone grocery shopping this week there is really no need. Nothing to cook.
It might have to stay that way until tomorrow to. Today is the Prophet’s birthday so it is an official government and religious holiday weekend. Not many stores are open. I have errands to run besides the grocery shopping. My brother is coming to visit in a couple weeks and I need to pick up a mattress and a phone for him to use while he’s here. Also, I promised myself a bookshelf after payday as a reward for getting through the month.
There have been big shakeups at my office in the last few weeks so it has been a difficult month. I think I absorb more ambient stress than I realize because even though I don’t really know the people involved it was still really difficult to concentrate on my work. I went from reading an average of 220 letters a day to struggling to make 100. It is better now. One of our senior attorneys left the firm and left the LAW to follow a more spiritual path of studying reiki and teaching yoga. She did this after centering our entire correspondence review procedure around the way her mind needed it to work in order to process the information and draft our Statement of Claim, the central document we will submit explaining our client’s case. I’m glad she’s off to do something that will hopefully be really fulfilling and, after less than two months in a firm I can definitely understand how you could run yourself into the ground doing this for a lifetime, but since the whole system of information gathering was set up under the assumption that she was writing the SOC, she is kind of leaving us in the lurch.
We have rallied surprisingly well. She was only my supervisor for a week so I never experienced this but rumor has it she could be moody and, though a good teacher and friend when in a good mood, she could be unkind and somewhat maniacally ruthless in a bad mood. The tension in the office now that she is gone has palpably decreased. The other senior attorney working on the case has less management experience but he has definitely rallied. There was another scare last week when he had to leave for Canada for the whole week on emergency family leave but he is back and seems to be solidly picking up the slack where the other attorney left off. It is a little terrifying to feel so unprepared for what is coming when we finish the correspondence review in the next couple weeks, but also exciting because we will all get to do the kind of work we normally wouldn’t get to do until after we’d been at the firm for a year or so.
I am learning a lot more about how construction contracts work, which is a good thing, because it helps me do my job better and feel more invested in the work of the firm, but it is also a bad thing, since I honestly don’t really care how construction contracts work beyond the barest veneer of purely academic interest. In my soul, I am not a construction lawyer.
I am starting to wonder if in my soul I am a lawyer at all. I had an annoying conversation last night with a woman I work with that has picked open this old question in my brain that I thought had finally scarred over after I found happy employment and now it is festering again. She is incredibly smart and very intense about her work. Her brightest dream is to become an arbitrator of the highest degree and sit down with a cup of coffee to pour over two brilliantly written claims and determine who is right and what they are entitled to under the law. When she talks about the day she will get to do this, her eyes light up with actual joy at the thought of reading legal arguments. My eyes glaze over.
Anyway, she gave me a ride home last night during the biggest, longest thundering rainstorm I have seen since I’ve been in Cairo. Supposedly it actually HAILED out in Maadi, a neighborhood about 30 minutes away. People actually emailed the listserve about it in wonder. In my neighborhood it was just rain but since Cairo never gets rain there aren’t really any street gutters to speak of so the streets fill with deep puddles that run for ten, even fifteen yards and cover the entire width of the street. Cars that roll in too quickly or too slowly can lose traction and float a few feet before drifting to the other side and since no one knows how to drive in the rain this was happening everywhere last night. Also, it is not typical to drive with your headlights on in Cairo and windshield wipers are decorative only so most cars didn’t have the kind of visibility you want them to have so you can sprint across the street in your flip flops and reach the sidewalk alive. Weaving among the drifting cars and soaked Cairenes, my friend asked me when I knew I wanted to be a lawyer and I said I still don’t know that for sure, which is the wrong answer to give to someone who is so passionate about the law herself and someone, I forgot to mention, who is the WIFE OF MY BOSS, the lawyer who started the firm and hired me back in November.
Oh well, if she ever decides to rat me out for my wavering commitment, I can always spread the word to our coworkers that she called our boss something that sounded like “schnooky mouse” on the phone.
A good spy thriller? Check.
Comfy Brooklyn sweatshirt? Check (thanks Uncle Charlie!).
Cappuccino and a piece of chocolate cake DELIVERED TO MY DOOR? Check!
It is pretty much a perfect Friday afternoon. The maid (who lives downstairs) failed to show up for the third time last night (think we’re getting a new maid) so Marisol and I cleaned the apartment. Not really well, since we’ll eventually get a pro in here but well enough that I’m not cringing every time I put my foot down on something dusty or squishy or something that used to be a delivery menu I wanted to use but is now a pile of tiny pieces of paper covered in puppy saliva. Marisol swept (and I’m considering mopping tonight as well, I know, big plans!) while I de-slimed the stovetop and washed every dish and stick of silverware we own. So I can get into the kitchen now, though I haven’t gone grocery shopping this week there is really no need. Nothing to cook.
It might have to stay that way until tomorrow to. Today is the Prophet’s birthday so it is an official government and religious holiday weekend. Not many stores are open. I have errands to run besides the grocery shopping. My brother is coming to visit in a couple weeks and I need to pick up a mattress and a phone for him to use while he’s here. Also, I promised myself a bookshelf after payday as a reward for getting through the month.
There have been big shakeups at my office in the last few weeks so it has been a difficult month. I think I absorb more ambient stress than I realize because even though I don’t really know the people involved it was still really difficult to concentrate on my work. I went from reading an average of 220 letters a day to struggling to make 100. It is better now. One of our senior attorneys left the firm and left the LAW to follow a more spiritual path of studying reiki and teaching yoga. She did this after centering our entire correspondence review procedure around the way her mind needed it to work in order to process the information and draft our Statement of Claim, the central document we will submit explaining our client’s case. I’m glad she’s off to do something that will hopefully be really fulfilling and, after less than two months in a firm I can definitely understand how you could run yourself into the ground doing this for a lifetime, but since the whole system of information gathering was set up under the assumption that she was writing the SOC, she is kind of leaving us in the lurch.
We have rallied surprisingly well. She was only my supervisor for a week so I never experienced this but rumor has it she could be moody and, though a good teacher and friend when in a good mood, she could be unkind and somewhat maniacally ruthless in a bad mood. The tension in the office now that she is gone has palpably decreased. The other senior attorney working on the case has less management experience but he has definitely rallied. There was another scare last week when he had to leave for Canada for the whole week on emergency family leave but he is back and seems to be solidly picking up the slack where the other attorney left off. It is a little terrifying to feel so unprepared for what is coming when we finish the correspondence review in the next couple weeks, but also exciting because we will all get to do the kind of work we normally wouldn’t get to do until after we’d been at the firm for a year or so.
I am learning a lot more about how construction contracts work, which is a good thing, because it helps me do my job better and feel more invested in the work of the firm, but it is also a bad thing, since I honestly don’t really care how construction contracts work beyond the barest veneer of purely academic interest. In my soul, I am not a construction lawyer.
I am starting to wonder if in my soul I am a lawyer at all. I had an annoying conversation last night with a woman I work with that has picked open this old question in my brain that I thought had finally scarred over after I found happy employment and now it is festering again. She is incredibly smart and very intense about her work. Her brightest dream is to become an arbitrator of the highest degree and sit down with a cup of coffee to pour over two brilliantly written claims and determine who is right and what they are entitled to under the law. When she talks about the day she will get to do this, her eyes light up with actual joy at the thought of reading legal arguments. My eyes glaze over.
Anyway, she gave me a ride home last night during the biggest, longest thundering rainstorm I have seen since I’ve been in Cairo. Supposedly it actually HAILED out in Maadi, a neighborhood about 30 minutes away. People actually emailed the listserve about it in wonder. In my neighborhood it was just rain but since Cairo never gets rain there aren’t really any street gutters to speak of so the streets fill with deep puddles that run for ten, even fifteen yards and cover the entire width of the street. Cars that roll in too quickly or too slowly can lose traction and float a few feet before drifting to the other side and since no one knows how to drive in the rain this was happening everywhere last night. Also, it is not typical to drive with your headlights on in Cairo and windshield wipers are decorative only so most cars didn’t have the kind of visibility you want them to have so you can sprint across the street in your flip flops and reach the sidewalk alive. Weaving among the drifting cars and soaked Cairenes, my friend asked me when I knew I wanted to be a lawyer and I said I still don’t know that for sure, which is the wrong answer to give to someone who is so passionate about the law herself and someone, I forgot to mention, who is the WIFE OF MY BOSS, the lawyer who started the firm and hired me back in November.
Oh well, if she ever decides to rat me out for my wavering commitment, I can always spread the word to our coworkers that she called our boss something that sounded like “schnooky mouse” on the phone.
Friday, February 12, 2010
"Malesh" indeed
Crazy Landlady Saga Part Two:
As I jokingly predicted in my last post, I really did wind up spending most of the evening of January 30th sitting on an island of my belongings outside our former apartment holding my roommate’s dog while the landlady, her sister (who, it bears noting, we had never even met before this) and her “lawyer” (the patent licensing neighbor from downstairs) screamed their heads off at my roommate and her boyfriend (not at me because I was holding the cute puppy and wouldn’t have understood them anyway) and the police stood around looking like they might be getting migraines from the shock of it all.
They day before, we thought we had finally struck a deal, not a very good one for ourselves, but one that would allow us to leave with over half our deposit and the feeling that we’d stuck up for ourselves at least a little bit. The landlady had eventually offered half our deposit back, or 1750LE (around $350), when we owed her at most 700LE for a new mattress they’d bought for the girl who had my room before me that wasn’t written into the contract and for some air conditioning repairs. Her son called us separately and said he would fork over another 250LE from his own pocket just to smooth things over with us because he didn’t want the relationship to end badly. We didn’t care how the relationship ended, we just wanted it over and us out so we agreed to take the 2000LE and be out by the night of the 30th, giving them an extra day to show the apartment (because we had been refusing to let them in to show it while we were still there and while they were still insisting on keeping our full deposit). We didn’t trust them at all that this deal would stick, however, so we were clear that the movers were coming at 6pm on the 30th, (a Saturday, and therefore a week night since Sunday is the first day of the workweek here) to start packing up our stuff and so we needed the money before 6pm or the deal was off.
Sure enough, the landlady showed up at 5:15, practically threw the 2000LE at us and then crossed her arms and sat down on the couch in a huff and announced she was going to stay there until we moved out at 6. We explained that although the movers were coming at 6, it would take them a couple hours to pack up our stuff and since trucks aren’t allowed into my neighborhood until after 8, we wouldn’t actually be leaving the apartment for a few more hours yet. She huffed a little and when it seemed she really was going to sit there for three hours we couldn’t figure out what she wanted. At first we suggested she check the apartment to assure herself we were actually moving and that we weren’t stealing any of her hideous gold-painted furniture. She sniffed indignantly that she didn’t want to check the apartment, which didn’t surprise us since she’d kept so much of our money that even if we’d taken the walls with us when we left she could have had them rebuilt and still had cash (our cash!) to spare. So then we offered to give her our keys right then, since we already had our deposit (what we were getting of it), and then she could go home knowing that even if we reneged on the deal she could get into the apartment to get us out.
This was acceptable and we handed her our two keys (and didn’t mention the third we’d had made as an extra – we’re not stupid and we knew by then these people were not to be trusted). She was on her way out when she decided she DID want to check the apartment. We said of course, check away, then immediately called Marisol’s boyfriend, Maged, to come help us because we knew at that moment she was going to try to get more money.
The landlady started walking around jiggling loose drawers (all drawers are loose in Egypt), turning on light switches, and generally frowning and clucking and shaking her head in feigned dismay. Sure enough, she soon discovered the remote control for the air conditioning in my bedroom had stopped working sometime since the last time I used it in early October. There also wasn’t a remote for the AC in the living room, though the remote for the one in Marisol’s bedroom was the same brand and we’d always just used that one to set the temperature, then turned the AC on and off with the wall power switch. The landlady demanded another thousand pounds ($200) to replace the broken and missing air conditioner. Marisol told her we would walk down to Radio Shack ourselves and replace them and the landlady, a little disappointed we weren’t fighting with her on this, gave us one of our keys back and huffed back to her apartment.
Unfortunately, Radio Shack didn’t have any universal remotes that would work for air conditioners. They said we’d have to go to the tech mall downtown, which was at least a half hour drive in a taxi both ways. Since the Radio Shack manager said they would only cost 50LE maximum ($10) each, and the landlady already had so much of our money, we decided to go home and finish packing instead. The movers, three big, fairly uneducated but generally polite guys showed and started taping our stuff into boxes. I had carried my own things the two blocks to our new place earlier that day but Marisol’s stuff and all our kitchen things and three pieces of furniture were still in the apartment and needed to be packed, taped into boxes, carried down 16 flights of stairs (only some of it would fit in the elevator, not things like Marisol’s treadmill), packed into a truck that would come at 8, then driven to the new apartment and carried up another six flights of stairs and packed into the new living room. As they got to work, the landlady came back to see her new remote controls. We told her what Radio Shack had said, and that they would only cost 50LE and not 500LE each, as she’d estimated, but that we weren’t going to go downtown to get them and that she could check back with Radio Shack in a few days to see if they’d restocked.
The landlady promptly lost her shit. She started screaming at Marisol that she had given us our deposit back in good faith (she’d forgotten the half she was keeping for herself for no reason) and this was how we were treating her, etc. etc. Marisol was still packing and not really paying attention to this batshit screaming lady in her room but the shrill light fixture rupturing volume of it was upsetting the dog AND ME so I called Maged again only to find out he was still fifteen minutes away (normally when an Egyptian says “fifteen minutes” it means an hour but this time it turned out to be two hours because of traffic).
The movers were horrified. They picked up their pace significantly and, as a result of this stressful environment, they wound up packing an open carton of milk (milk comes in a box here and although some brands have a plastic flip top, the smaller boxes I use for coffee creamer are all cardboard and you make a little snip in the corner to pour) into the packing box with Marisol’s food from the fridge (yes, they even pack your vegetables!) and I spent a half hour at 1:30 in the morning rinsing milk off rotten eggplant and carrots because of course Marisol hadn’t cleaned the fridge before the guys had packed it so they packed everything, edible or not. When we told them the landlady already had 1500LE of our deposit and wanted more, they made the Egyptian equivalent of the finger spiraling “she’s crazy” loops beside their heads to say this was not normal behavior. They kept telling us not all Egyptians were like this and when Maged finally showed up, they told him how glad they were that we had someone to stick up for us in Arabic because we seemed like nice people.
They charged us about twice what moving should have cost but we couldn’t really blame them because they had to take a three hour break in the middle of their job when the landlady started physically blocking them from taking boxes out of our apartment. That’s about when she called her sister and the lawyer. Then everyone was there to scream at us and scream at the movers (who got everything into the hallway outside the apartment, but were too intimidated by the screaming to start taking it downstairs until the situation was resolved), and generally bring the moving process to a standstill. Maged still hadn’t arrived, Marisol had started to say some pretty rude things in response to the repeated screaming in her face, and the puppy was literally trembling in my arms.
My proudest moment, and really the only contribution I made at all, was when the landlady triumphantly told the lawyer that we had broken the air conditioning in the living room. He was holding the two remotes, the broken one for my room and the functional one from Marisol’s room. I noticed the power switch was on for the living room AC and I asked in Arabic “you said it’s broken?” And she said “well, I can’t turn it on so how do I know it isn’t broken?” And I gestured to the remote from Marisol’s room in the lawyer’s hand and mimed hitting Power. The lawyer, who typically alternated between yelling at us, demanding money, and telling his “client” not to swear and scream at Marisol in front of witnesses because swearing can be a criminal offense here aimed the remote at the air conditioner in front of me, Marisol, the landlady, her crazy sister, and all the movers (who all heard her claim it was broken) and voila the AC purred to life, all the buttons on the front lit up in green for Go to hell. The lawyer quickly turned the AC off and didn’t turn it on again the whole night.
Maged called around nine thirty to say he was almost there and that he had called the police and they were on their way and Marisol and I picked up our purses, the only things of ours left in the apartment and walked out the door without saying anything to each other or anyone. Inside the apartment, the argument could be made that we were trespassing (even though since it was still January, we were technically still legally tenants, having paid rent) but outside the apartment, and with not a sliver of our belongings inside, we were legally in the clear.
Shortly after the police arrived, I retired to the staircase with the puppy, who had by that time been in my arms for hours and was thoroughly traumatized. Not speaking Arabic, I had done all I could by showing my American passport and quietly asking the junior officer if I should call my embassy (of course he said no, but I spent a few minutes after that speaking earnestly to no one on the phone just to make him nervous). I called my friend and she and her roommate did us a huge favor by coming to pick up the dog and take her to the new apartment so she could have some peace, I could have the use of my arms again, and so we wouldn’t run the risk of her peeing on something and costing us another 1000LE.
The police did basically nothing for about four hours. They pinched the bridges of their noses, they rubbed their temples, they asked the lawyer to ask his client and her sister to stop screaming, they told Maged they wanted to hear our story directly from Marisol and I but they didn’t speak English well and we couldn’t get out more than a sentence or two before the lawyer would shout over us (and into our abused eardrums). Eventually we stopped trying and let the Egyptians yell at each other. The landlady kept demanding 1000LE to replace the air conditioner remotes, we kept repeating in hoarse whispers that she wasn’t asking for only 1000LE, but rather 1000LE MORE since she’d already kept 800LE from our deposit that she had no right to, and Maged kept speaking to the senior officer and the lawyer in a reasonable, if tense, tone, to try to work out a deal. The officer at one point offered 200LE from his own pocket to resolve the issue but the landlady said she wanted US to pay and that it wasn’t enough.
The most frustrating thing to me is that there wasn’t actually anything stopping us from leaving except that the movers wouldn’t take the stuff downstairs. They were legally allowed to. It was our stuff and we were outside the apartment. Our belongings weren’t in dispute. But the landlady would scream at the movers whenever they tried to move a box and the police declined to clarify to these poor confused guys that they had every right to take the stuff downstairs. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe us, but they were scared, and eventually went downstairs to smoke and hang out where there were fewer hysterical women.
If we could have filed a police report, we could have legally stayed in the apartment until the case went to court (usually around three months) without paying a cent in rent and we likely would have won because the landlady’s behavior was so out of proportion and because she’d already kept so much of our money. But to file a police report, we would have had to go to the police station. And to go to the police station, we would have had to leave our stuff in the hallway. The landlady had already made a move to grab one of our rolling suitcases and force it past Marisol back into the apartment just before the police arrived (because of the rule that if we had anything in the apartment we could be considered trespassing). This wasn’t just to boost her argument for when the police arrived. She still thought we didn’t have a key to the apartment anymore so by moving our bags inside, she thought she could locking them in and us out if worse came to worse. Marisol had to literally tear bag out of her hands. So we couldn’t leave our stuff to make a police report and the police would neither let us take them downstairs nor station an officer to watch them.
So our boxes stayed in the hallway and the fight ranged from around them to into the apartment and back again attracting the horrified and puzzled stares of our neighbors who kept telling us “malesh” which means, “I am sorry for you.” Because this was all very unusual and irrational behavior for Egyptians who generally appreciate the value of interpersonal relationship and will even sacrifice a good deal or something valuable to avoid grudges and part on good terms. This was why her son had offered the money from his own pocket to smooth things over with us. He and his sister showed up around 11:30 and had the same shocked and appalled faces as the neighbors and never said a word, just stood there like they were watching hyenas eat a baby.
Around 12:30am, I made a proposition to the police and to the lawyer. “I will give him 300LE,” I said, “not them,” gesturing to the screaming ladies, “him.” “Then tomorrow or the next day we will buy two air conditioning remotes. We’ll bring him the receipt proving they are only 50LE each and he will give me the change.” This was basically agreeable to all parties and although the lawyer wouldn’t sign anything to that effect, the senior police officer said that we had his word (and Maged said this was the equivalent of the officer promising to enforce the agreement on his honor) that the lawyer would abide by the terms of the deal, otherwise we could call him and he would come personally to sort it out. So I forked over the cash, and we called the movers back. While we waited for them, it was just us and the cops in the hallway for a little while with the door to our apartment closed and all the screaming stopped. The senior officer made the Egyptian symbol for “these people are absolutely batshit nuts” and told us not to think all Egyptians are like that. That one moment made me feel a little better about the whole experience, like this agreement from a person in authority somehow justified how attacked and outraged Marisol and I felt about the whole thing.
We were in our new apartment within the hour. By about 1:30am. And I had work in the morning.
Of course in the cold light of day we realized we’d rather use Ron Jeremy’s belly button as a cereal bowl for the rest of our lives than ever see any of those people ever again. So we just called the 300LE a loss (which means they wound up with $10 over half our original deposit) and never went to Radio Shack or called the lawyer back.
I have had two nightmares since that night in which the landlady tells the plumbers and carpenters in the neighborhood (both of which we need to do some maintenance and build some bookshelves in our new place) that we’re unscrupulous people and not to do business with us.
Our new landlord, Mr. Wagdi called a couple days ago on our landline. We use the landline only for the internet and have never given the number out and I swear when it rang we both had this irrational thought that somehow the old landlady had found us. We hesitated to answer but when Marisol picked up it was just the new landlord calling to make sure we were happy in the apartment, that we didn’t need anything, that we didn’t want someone to come and repaint (this thing about the repainting is an unheard of level of nice for an Egyptian landlord), and that he would call a handyman if we found any problems. He even asked her “how is your family in Mexico, praise God everyone is well.”
We feel very safe and happy here. Our oven and TV are huge and we have a microwave (only the fancy offices have microwaves in Egypt) and an espresso machine. Even the dog is calmer in this apartment…though she eats a lot of paint so I’m not sure her mood is an accurate yardstick of happiness.
In other news, I almost got run over by a cute guy in an SUV yesterday outside my office. He gunned his engine, then braked sharply when he saw me in the street to let me finish crossing. Closest thing I’ve had to a date since I’ve been in Cairo.
As I jokingly predicted in my last post, I really did wind up spending most of the evening of January 30th sitting on an island of my belongings outside our former apartment holding my roommate’s dog while the landlady, her sister (who, it bears noting, we had never even met before this) and her “lawyer” (the patent licensing neighbor from downstairs) screamed their heads off at my roommate and her boyfriend (not at me because I was holding the cute puppy and wouldn’t have understood them anyway) and the police stood around looking like they might be getting migraines from the shock of it all.
They day before, we thought we had finally struck a deal, not a very good one for ourselves, but one that would allow us to leave with over half our deposit and the feeling that we’d stuck up for ourselves at least a little bit. The landlady had eventually offered half our deposit back, or 1750LE (around $350), when we owed her at most 700LE for a new mattress they’d bought for the girl who had my room before me that wasn’t written into the contract and for some air conditioning repairs. Her son called us separately and said he would fork over another 250LE from his own pocket just to smooth things over with us because he didn’t want the relationship to end badly. We didn’t care how the relationship ended, we just wanted it over and us out so we agreed to take the 2000LE and be out by the night of the 30th, giving them an extra day to show the apartment (because we had been refusing to let them in to show it while we were still there and while they were still insisting on keeping our full deposit). We didn’t trust them at all that this deal would stick, however, so we were clear that the movers were coming at 6pm on the 30th, (a Saturday, and therefore a week night since Sunday is the first day of the workweek here) to start packing up our stuff and so we needed the money before 6pm or the deal was off.
Sure enough, the landlady showed up at 5:15, practically threw the 2000LE at us and then crossed her arms and sat down on the couch in a huff and announced she was going to stay there until we moved out at 6. We explained that although the movers were coming at 6, it would take them a couple hours to pack up our stuff and since trucks aren’t allowed into my neighborhood until after 8, we wouldn’t actually be leaving the apartment for a few more hours yet. She huffed a little and when it seemed she really was going to sit there for three hours we couldn’t figure out what she wanted. At first we suggested she check the apartment to assure herself we were actually moving and that we weren’t stealing any of her hideous gold-painted furniture. She sniffed indignantly that she didn’t want to check the apartment, which didn’t surprise us since she’d kept so much of our money that even if we’d taken the walls with us when we left she could have had them rebuilt and still had cash (our cash!) to spare. So then we offered to give her our keys right then, since we already had our deposit (what we were getting of it), and then she could go home knowing that even if we reneged on the deal she could get into the apartment to get us out.
This was acceptable and we handed her our two keys (and didn’t mention the third we’d had made as an extra – we’re not stupid and we knew by then these people were not to be trusted). She was on her way out when she decided she DID want to check the apartment. We said of course, check away, then immediately called Marisol’s boyfriend, Maged, to come help us because we knew at that moment she was going to try to get more money.
The landlady started walking around jiggling loose drawers (all drawers are loose in Egypt), turning on light switches, and generally frowning and clucking and shaking her head in feigned dismay. Sure enough, she soon discovered the remote control for the air conditioning in my bedroom had stopped working sometime since the last time I used it in early October. There also wasn’t a remote for the AC in the living room, though the remote for the one in Marisol’s bedroom was the same brand and we’d always just used that one to set the temperature, then turned the AC on and off with the wall power switch. The landlady demanded another thousand pounds ($200) to replace the broken and missing air conditioner. Marisol told her we would walk down to Radio Shack ourselves and replace them and the landlady, a little disappointed we weren’t fighting with her on this, gave us one of our keys back and huffed back to her apartment.
Unfortunately, Radio Shack didn’t have any universal remotes that would work for air conditioners. They said we’d have to go to the tech mall downtown, which was at least a half hour drive in a taxi both ways. Since the Radio Shack manager said they would only cost 50LE maximum ($10) each, and the landlady already had so much of our money, we decided to go home and finish packing instead. The movers, three big, fairly uneducated but generally polite guys showed and started taping our stuff into boxes. I had carried my own things the two blocks to our new place earlier that day but Marisol’s stuff and all our kitchen things and three pieces of furniture were still in the apartment and needed to be packed, taped into boxes, carried down 16 flights of stairs (only some of it would fit in the elevator, not things like Marisol’s treadmill), packed into a truck that would come at 8, then driven to the new apartment and carried up another six flights of stairs and packed into the new living room. As they got to work, the landlady came back to see her new remote controls. We told her what Radio Shack had said, and that they would only cost 50LE and not 500LE each, as she’d estimated, but that we weren’t going to go downtown to get them and that she could check back with Radio Shack in a few days to see if they’d restocked.
The landlady promptly lost her shit. She started screaming at Marisol that she had given us our deposit back in good faith (she’d forgotten the half she was keeping for herself for no reason) and this was how we were treating her, etc. etc. Marisol was still packing and not really paying attention to this batshit screaming lady in her room but the shrill light fixture rupturing volume of it was upsetting the dog AND ME so I called Maged again only to find out he was still fifteen minutes away (normally when an Egyptian says “fifteen minutes” it means an hour but this time it turned out to be two hours because of traffic).
The movers were horrified. They picked up their pace significantly and, as a result of this stressful environment, they wound up packing an open carton of milk (milk comes in a box here and although some brands have a plastic flip top, the smaller boxes I use for coffee creamer are all cardboard and you make a little snip in the corner to pour) into the packing box with Marisol’s food from the fridge (yes, they even pack your vegetables!) and I spent a half hour at 1:30 in the morning rinsing milk off rotten eggplant and carrots because of course Marisol hadn’t cleaned the fridge before the guys had packed it so they packed everything, edible or not. When we told them the landlady already had 1500LE of our deposit and wanted more, they made the Egyptian equivalent of the finger spiraling “she’s crazy” loops beside their heads to say this was not normal behavior. They kept telling us not all Egyptians were like this and when Maged finally showed up, they told him how glad they were that we had someone to stick up for us in Arabic because we seemed like nice people.
They charged us about twice what moving should have cost but we couldn’t really blame them because they had to take a three hour break in the middle of their job when the landlady started physically blocking them from taking boxes out of our apartment. That’s about when she called her sister and the lawyer. Then everyone was there to scream at us and scream at the movers (who got everything into the hallway outside the apartment, but were too intimidated by the screaming to start taking it downstairs until the situation was resolved), and generally bring the moving process to a standstill. Maged still hadn’t arrived, Marisol had started to say some pretty rude things in response to the repeated screaming in her face, and the puppy was literally trembling in my arms.
My proudest moment, and really the only contribution I made at all, was when the landlady triumphantly told the lawyer that we had broken the air conditioning in the living room. He was holding the two remotes, the broken one for my room and the functional one from Marisol’s room. I noticed the power switch was on for the living room AC and I asked in Arabic “you said it’s broken?” And she said “well, I can’t turn it on so how do I know it isn’t broken?” And I gestured to the remote from Marisol’s room in the lawyer’s hand and mimed hitting Power. The lawyer, who typically alternated between yelling at us, demanding money, and telling his “client” not to swear and scream at Marisol in front of witnesses because swearing can be a criminal offense here aimed the remote at the air conditioner in front of me, Marisol, the landlady, her crazy sister, and all the movers (who all heard her claim it was broken) and voila the AC purred to life, all the buttons on the front lit up in green for Go to hell. The lawyer quickly turned the AC off and didn’t turn it on again the whole night.
Maged called around nine thirty to say he was almost there and that he had called the police and they were on their way and Marisol and I picked up our purses, the only things of ours left in the apartment and walked out the door without saying anything to each other or anyone. Inside the apartment, the argument could be made that we were trespassing (even though since it was still January, we were technically still legally tenants, having paid rent) but outside the apartment, and with not a sliver of our belongings inside, we were legally in the clear.
Shortly after the police arrived, I retired to the staircase with the puppy, who had by that time been in my arms for hours and was thoroughly traumatized. Not speaking Arabic, I had done all I could by showing my American passport and quietly asking the junior officer if I should call my embassy (of course he said no, but I spent a few minutes after that speaking earnestly to no one on the phone just to make him nervous). I called my friend and she and her roommate did us a huge favor by coming to pick up the dog and take her to the new apartment so she could have some peace, I could have the use of my arms again, and so we wouldn’t run the risk of her peeing on something and costing us another 1000LE.
The police did basically nothing for about four hours. They pinched the bridges of their noses, they rubbed their temples, they asked the lawyer to ask his client and her sister to stop screaming, they told Maged they wanted to hear our story directly from Marisol and I but they didn’t speak English well and we couldn’t get out more than a sentence or two before the lawyer would shout over us (and into our abused eardrums). Eventually we stopped trying and let the Egyptians yell at each other. The landlady kept demanding 1000LE to replace the air conditioner remotes, we kept repeating in hoarse whispers that she wasn’t asking for only 1000LE, but rather 1000LE MORE since she’d already kept 800LE from our deposit that she had no right to, and Maged kept speaking to the senior officer and the lawyer in a reasonable, if tense, tone, to try to work out a deal. The officer at one point offered 200LE from his own pocket to resolve the issue but the landlady said she wanted US to pay and that it wasn’t enough.
The most frustrating thing to me is that there wasn’t actually anything stopping us from leaving except that the movers wouldn’t take the stuff downstairs. They were legally allowed to. It was our stuff and we were outside the apartment. Our belongings weren’t in dispute. But the landlady would scream at the movers whenever they tried to move a box and the police declined to clarify to these poor confused guys that they had every right to take the stuff downstairs. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe us, but they were scared, and eventually went downstairs to smoke and hang out where there were fewer hysterical women.
If we could have filed a police report, we could have legally stayed in the apartment until the case went to court (usually around three months) without paying a cent in rent and we likely would have won because the landlady’s behavior was so out of proportion and because she’d already kept so much of our money. But to file a police report, we would have had to go to the police station. And to go to the police station, we would have had to leave our stuff in the hallway. The landlady had already made a move to grab one of our rolling suitcases and force it past Marisol back into the apartment just before the police arrived (because of the rule that if we had anything in the apartment we could be considered trespassing). This wasn’t just to boost her argument for when the police arrived. She still thought we didn’t have a key to the apartment anymore so by moving our bags inside, she thought she could locking them in and us out if worse came to worse. Marisol had to literally tear bag out of her hands. So we couldn’t leave our stuff to make a police report and the police would neither let us take them downstairs nor station an officer to watch them.
So our boxes stayed in the hallway and the fight ranged from around them to into the apartment and back again attracting the horrified and puzzled stares of our neighbors who kept telling us “malesh” which means, “I am sorry for you.” Because this was all very unusual and irrational behavior for Egyptians who generally appreciate the value of interpersonal relationship and will even sacrifice a good deal or something valuable to avoid grudges and part on good terms. This was why her son had offered the money from his own pocket to smooth things over with us. He and his sister showed up around 11:30 and had the same shocked and appalled faces as the neighbors and never said a word, just stood there like they were watching hyenas eat a baby.
Around 12:30am, I made a proposition to the police and to the lawyer. “I will give him 300LE,” I said, “not them,” gesturing to the screaming ladies, “him.” “Then tomorrow or the next day we will buy two air conditioning remotes. We’ll bring him the receipt proving they are only 50LE each and he will give me the change.” This was basically agreeable to all parties and although the lawyer wouldn’t sign anything to that effect, the senior police officer said that we had his word (and Maged said this was the equivalent of the officer promising to enforce the agreement on his honor) that the lawyer would abide by the terms of the deal, otherwise we could call him and he would come personally to sort it out. So I forked over the cash, and we called the movers back. While we waited for them, it was just us and the cops in the hallway for a little while with the door to our apartment closed and all the screaming stopped. The senior officer made the Egyptian symbol for “these people are absolutely batshit nuts” and told us not to think all Egyptians are like that. That one moment made me feel a little better about the whole experience, like this agreement from a person in authority somehow justified how attacked and outraged Marisol and I felt about the whole thing.
We were in our new apartment within the hour. By about 1:30am. And I had work in the morning.
Of course in the cold light of day we realized we’d rather use Ron Jeremy’s belly button as a cereal bowl for the rest of our lives than ever see any of those people ever again. So we just called the 300LE a loss (which means they wound up with $10 over half our original deposit) and never went to Radio Shack or called the lawyer back.
I have had two nightmares since that night in which the landlady tells the plumbers and carpenters in the neighborhood (both of which we need to do some maintenance and build some bookshelves in our new place) that we’re unscrupulous people and not to do business with us.
Our new landlord, Mr. Wagdi called a couple days ago on our landline. We use the landline only for the internet and have never given the number out and I swear when it rang we both had this irrational thought that somehow the old landlady had found us. We hesitated to answer but when Marisol picked up it was just the new landlord calling to make sure we were happy in the apartment, that we didn’t need anything, that we didn’t want someone to come and repaint (this thing about the repainting is an unheard of level of nice for an Egyptian landlord), and that he would call a handyman if we found any problems. He even asked her “how is your family in Mexico, praise God everyone is well.”
We feel very safe and happy here. Our oven and TV are huge and we have a microwave (only the fancy offices have microwaves in Egypt) and an espresso machine. Even the dog is calmer in this apartment…though she eats a lot of paint so I’m not sure her mood is an accurate yardstick of happiness.
In other news, I almost got run over by a cute guy in an SUV yesterday outside my office. He gunned his engine, then braked sharply when he saw me in the street to let me finish crossing. Closest thing I’ve had to a date since I’ve been in Cairo.
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