Yesterday we did Arabic in the morning and then ran errands—post office (in a warren of cramped, flaking-paint, dirty government offices), bank, and bookstore to find a guidebook to help us make the most of our extended stay here. We ate lunch at Pizza Hut, a welcome little spot of Americana, although here it’s kind of a posh feeling place. Ruth noticed that none of the employees was wearing a hijab! The wait staff adored our babies and even took Isaac back to the kitchen to meet the manager. We’re completely used now to the mobile phones being whipped out to take photos and videos of Isaac and Nora.
We had planned to go to a nice restaurant for dinner, but a tandem temper tantrum as we were leaving dissuaded us. Instead, we spent the evening preparing lessons and talks for church tomorrow.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Illiterate in Arabic
We've been trying to figure out meaningful ways to spend our lengthening time in Cairo. One thing we’ve been doing is putting renewed effort into Arabic study. Individually, we listen to the Pimsleur CD Arabic course, an oral course that aims to give you tools to function daily in colloquial Arabic. I’m finding that every day I can add a bit more to what I can say to shopkeepers and taxi drivers—and yesterday I even understood something I overheard on the street (“It’s here”). As a group (well, actually, it’s mostly the kids while I baby-wrangle and wash out laundry in the bathroom sink), we sit on the floor in front of the laptop with notebooks and textbook and use the Alif Baa Classical Arabic program to work on reading and writing (as well as understanding spoken) classical Arabic. We’re not yet to the point that we can look at any word in Arabic and pronounce it, but we can find letters in almost any word that we know. With the Roman alphabet, typefaces are almost transparent to me—I have no problem telling the letter “A” whether it is in Helvetica, Times New Roman, or Edwardian Script. With the Arabic alphabet, though, different typefaces confuse me. Do I really recognize an alif in this word or is it merely a typographical flourish? Makes me wonder when I first learned to manage the Roman alphabet so facilely—I have no memory of being confused by typeface (other than cursive vs. manuscript).
Our other idea was to find a way to volunteer while we’re in Cairo. We found online information about charitable programs run from All Saints’ Cathedral in Cairo, so a couple of days ago, we made our way there. It’s not terribly far from our hotel, on an island in the Nile, Zamalek, that is known as the leafy-green expat quarter and the site of an exclusive Cairo country club. While not far, the walk there proved slightly hair-raising, involving crossing roads with speed-fixated drivers. We made it safely, though, and quickly found the cathedral. We learned that most of their charitable operation has shut down for a week and a half while they attend a conference, but they did have a gift shop open. It’s filled with items made by Sudanese refugees and by students at Cairo’s blind and deaf schools and goes to support them.
Yesterday, Lucy and Ed and Isaac and Nora and I got up early to head into Zamalek to take Isaac to a music/dance class for pre-schoolers that we had seen on the bulletin board at All Saints’ Cathedral. Remembering our hair-raising walk, we took a taxi. Unfortunately, while the taxi driver understood “Zamalek,” he didn’t understand “All Saints’ Cathedral” and we got left in an unfamiliar part of the island. Nobody that we stopped to ask directions understood “All Saints’ Cathedral” either and I knew only the English name of the street it was on (26th of July street) and I had absolutely no idea how to translate into Arabic (even the sign over the church had been in English!). We wandered for half an hour, but eventually we found the place. And the wandering wasn’t unpleasant. Zamalek really is tree-filled and shady, and while the country club is surrounded by high fences, you can see and enjoy the foliage as you walk around it.
We had missed the pre-school dance class, but the sign on the gift shop door said it should have opened five minutes before. We sat down to wait in the cathedral courtyard and finally, after twenty minutes, decided to ask the concierge at the front gate if it was going to be opening. He said it would be another hour—the elastic definition of time is something I’m going to have to get used to in Africa, I think.
So, we took a walk around the neighbourhood. Bought water and cookies at a grocery store. Spent some time in a wonderful mostly-English bookstore. It had a picture book called, “Good-night Cairo” with the narrator saying good-night to distinctively Cairene things, the Pyramids and Sphinx, cats prowling in the souk, and—my favourite—to the dented-up cars. After I read that, I started noticing that every car I see on the streets here is dented. I think I’ve seen maybe 2 cars without dents since I started looking!
When we went back to the gift shop, it was open. Lucy picked out three sets of earrings, each about 1 Euro, and Ed picked out a silk-screened tote bag the right size for a CD player and CDs. I, however, was on the troll for toys. Isaac has been remarkably patient with our unsettled and shrunken situation. He and Ed make and fly paper airplanes. He cuts paper until it’s lacy. He plays hide and seek relentlessly (in our one fairly bare hotel room!). And he has heard the picture books we have along so often that he now insists on reading them to us or reciting them as we walk along the streets (not an unwelcome development—I’m glad he is absorbing interesting and beautiful language with all its rhythms and playfulness). The hardest time of the day for him is when the big kids are all studying Arabic and he wants somebody to play with. So I decided that, despite our airline-dictated weight constraints, I would buy him some toys even if we have to abandon them at the airport. And what could be better than buying toys and supporting refugees at the same time?
We bought a wooden trailer truck, driven by 2 wooden peg people (dubbed Fred and Lifesaver by Isaac--!) and filled with blocks. It’s a wonderful toy with lots of play possibilities—the drivers issue stentorian orders as they take their load around the hotel room. The blocks themselves, of course, are great playthings, and have been built into, so far, towers, airplanes, and mosques. But the thing that surprised me is that one of Isaac’s very favourite things to do, and the most time-consuming, is to put the blocks away. They exactly fill the truck’s trailer. You don’t have to put them in in any particular order, but you do have to make sure that you put them in snugly without gaps. Our little puzzle-lover Isaac works and works at it until not even one extra piece is left.
We took a taxi back to the hotel without any problem. Whenever we get in a taxi now, the first thing Isaac asks is, “Does this guy know where he’s going?” A question we all wonder about.
The kids and I talked about the possibility of going somewhere else in Egypt, but to my surprise, they’re very happy here and appreciate the familiarity (instead of being driven up a wall by it). So, we’re becoming Cairo experts. One thing that all of them had expressed interest in was going swimming, a very welcome idea on these hot, hot days. I can’t find a public swimming pool, so I had started calling hotels to see if they allow day use. First I called the big hotels, but I was staggered by he prices they quoted me—fifty US dollars a person (and this in inexpensive Egypt!), but yesterday I had the brainstorm of looking for other hotels with pools online. I got phone numbers and Ruth and I went to the pay phone outside the bakery on the corner to make phone calls. One hotel I called put me on hold for a very long time, letting me listen to their looped music tape which was playing “Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and “O Come All Ye Faithful.”
We found a hotel in the city that would let us swim for about 5 US dollars apiece (I was very proud of my sleuthing work in finding it!), so we took a taxi there (successfully! And I even gave the initial directions completely in Arabic). It’s in a part of town we’d never been before. I think it’s a mostly residential area, though its traffic was just as noisy and its buildings just as high as this neighbourhood. The swimming pool was on the 13th floor with some great views across Cairo. It wasn’t big, but it was big enough. Eleanor wasn’t sure about the whole swimming thing—she burst into tears the first 2 times we put her in the pool—but everyone else loved it. The kids are great with Isaac, and he had a lot of fun. I took him out for a while, too, and they played Marco Polo and jumped in and played other swimming games. We had a fun afternoon.
It took time for us to make our way back to the hotel, and by the time we got there, Sam and Ed and Lucy were all feeling headachy and sick. Ruth, who reads Runner’s World religiously, told us about an article she had read that said you had a one hour window after vigorous exercise in which to rehydrate and refuel. Her assessment was that we had missed the window with the three of them. Sure enough, later in the evening, after resting and eating, all three were fine. Chalk one up for Runner’s World!
Our other idea was to find a way to volunteer while we’re in Cairo. We found online information about charitable programs run from All Saints’ Cathedral in Cairo, so a couple of days ago, we made our way there. It’s not terribly far from our hotel, on an island in the Nile, Zamalek, that is known as the leafy-green expat quarter and the site of an exclusive Cairo country club. While not far, the walk there proved slightly hair-raising, involving crossing roads with speed-fixated drivers. We made it safely, though, and quickly found the cathedral. We learned that most of their charitable operation has shut down for a week and a half while they attend a conference, but they did have a gift shop open. It’s filled with items made by Sudanese refugees and by students at Cairo’s blind and deaf schools and goes to support them.
Yesterday, Lucy and Ed and Isaac and Nora and I got up early to head into Zamalek to take Isaac to a music/dance class for pre-schoolers that we had seen on the bulletin board at All Saints’ Cathedral. Remembering our hair-raising walk, we took a taxi. Unfortunately, while the taxi driver understood “Zamalek,” he didn’t understand “All Saints’ Cathedral” and we got left in an unfamiliar part of the island. Nobody that we stopped to ask directions understood “All Saints’ Cathedral” either and I knew only the English name of the street it was on (26th of July street) and I had absolutely no idea how to translate into Arabic (even the sign over the church had been in English!). We wandered for half an hour, but eventually we found the place. And the wandering wasn’t unpleasant. Zamalek really is tree-filled and shady, and while the country club is surrounded by high fences, you can see and enjoy the foliage as you walk around it.
We had missed the pre-school dance class, but the sign on the gift shop door said it should have opened five minutes before. We sat down to wait in the cathedral courtyard and finally, after twenty minutes, decided to ask the concierge at the front gate if it was going to be opening. He said it would be another hour—the elastic definition of time is something I’m going to have to get used to in Africa, I think.
So, we took a walk around the neighbourhood. Bought water and cookies at a grocery store. Spent some time in a wonderful mostly-English bookstore. It had a picture book called, “Good-night Cairo” with the narrator saying good-night to distinctively Cairene things, the Pyramids and Sphinx, cats prowling in the souk, and—my favourite—to the dented-up cars. After I read that, I started noticing that every car I see on the streets here is dented. I think I’ve seen maybe 2 cars without dents since I started looking!
When we went back to the gift shop, it was open. Lucy picked out three sets of earrings, each about 1 Euro, and Ed picked out a silk-screened tote bag the right size for a CD player and CDs. I, however, was on the troll for toys. Isaac has been remarkably patient with our unsettled and shrunken situation. He and Ed make and fly paper airplanes. He cuts paper until it’s lacy. He plays hide and seek relentlessly (in our one fairly bare hotel room!). And he has heard the picture books we have along so often that he now insists on reading them to us or reciting them as we walk along the streets (not an unwelcome development—I’m glad he is absorbing interesting and beautiful language with all its rhythms and playfulness). The hardest time of the day for him is when the big kids are all studying Arabic and he wants somebody to play with. So I decided that, despite our airline-dictated weight constraints, I would buy him some toys even if we have to abandon them at the airport. And what could be better than buying toys and supporting refugees at the same time?
We bought a wooden trailer truck, driven by 2 wooden peg people (dubbed Fred and Lifesaver by Isaac--!) and filled with blocks. It’s a wonderful toy with lots of play possibilities—the drivers issue stentorian orders as they take their load around the hotel room. The blocks themselves, of course, are great playthings, and have been built into, so far, towers, airplanes, and mosques. But the thing that surprised me is that one of Isaac’s very favourite things to do, and the most time-consuming, is to put the blocks away. They exactly fill the truck’s trailer. You don’t have to put them in in any particular order, but you do have to make sure that you put them in snugly without gaps. Our little puzzle-lover Isaac works and works at it until not even one extra piece is left.
We took a taxi back to the hotel without any problem. Whenever we get in a taxi now, the first thing Isaac asks is, “Does this guy know where he’s going?” A question we all wonder about.
The kids and I talked about the possibility of going somewhere else in Egypt, but to my surprise, they’re very happy here and appreciate the familiarity (instead of being driven up a wall by it). So, we’re becoming Cairo experts. One thing that all of them had expressed interest in was going swimming, a very welcome idea on these hot, hot days. I can’t find a public swimming pool, so I had started calling hotels to see if they allow day use. First I called the big hotels, but I was staggered by he prices they quoted me—fifty US dollars a person (and this in inexpensive Egypt!), but yesterday I had the brainstorm of looking for other hotels with pools online. I got phone numbers and Ruth and I went to the pay phone outside the bakery on the corner to make phone calls. One hotel I called put me on hold for a very long time, letting me listen to their looped music tape which was playing “Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and “O Come All Ye Faithful.”
We found a hotel in the city that would let us swim for about 5 US dollars apiece (I was very proud of my sleuthing work in finding it!), so we took a taxi there (successfully! And I even gave the initial directions completely in Arabic). It’s in a part of town we’d never been before. I think it’s a mostly residential area, though its traffic was just as noisy and its buildings just as high as this neighbourhood. The swimming pool was on the 13th floor with some great views across Cairo. It wasn’t big, but it was big enough. Eleanor wasn’t sure about the whole swimming thing—she burst into tears the first 2 times we put her in the pool—but everyone else loved it. The kids are great with Isaac, and he had a lot of fun. I took him out for a while, too, and they played Marco Polo and jumped in and played other swimming games. We had a fun afternoon.
It took time for us to make our way back to the hotel, and by the time we got there, Sam and Ed and Lucy were all feeling headachy and sick. Ruth, who reads Runner’s World religiously, told us about an article she had read that said you had a one hour window after vigorous exercise in which to rehydrate and refuel. Her assessment was that we had missed the window with the three of them. Sure enough, later in the evening, after resting and eating, all three were fine. Chalk one up for Runner’s World!
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Hanging out in Cairo
Sam watched World Cup till 1:00 AM. I woke up about 12:30 worrying about where he was (and I told him he could go to KFC tonight to watch—it’s not showing on our hotel’s TV stations). I got up and made sure he was OK and then couldn’t get back to sleep. I’m amazed at the cacophony of streets here at 1:30 in the morning.
Today and yesterday the kids did Alif Baa, our Arabic DVD, together. They finished the first unit today. I kind of did it with them yesterday, in between doing laundry in the bathroom sink and distracting the babies, but today I didn’t even make any pretense of it. They were getting to the part that I haven’t done, and I couldn’t keep up only half-watching. Instead, I ran interference with Isaac and Nora. This afternoon, Sam and Ruth and Ed all did Pimsleur, our Arabic audiotapes, too. Lucy didn’t.
After we’d finished Alif Baa, we walked to Zamalek. As we left our neighbourhood, Sharif, the teenager who stands on the corner near our hotel, ran after us to say goodbye to Isaac.
It was a fairly long walk and at one point we were stranded on a curb with lanes of freeway-speed traffic speeding by us on both sides. We eventually made it to safety, though. Zamalek is a nice area, much quieter and less bustling than where we are.
We had lunch at a pizza restaurant. Eleanor still isn’t eating much. Her diaper managed to come off in the middle of the lunch, but I think I was pretty discreet in getting it back on her. After lunch we strolled down the street and peeked in stores. There was a very nice bookstore with huge English and French sections. We spent quite a bit of time there. There were several toy stores that we checked out, looking for something to amuse Isaac while we study. We found a foam puzzle with the alphabet that I think you can also make cubes out of for a couple of dollars, so we bought that, and the man gave him a bottle of bubbles as a gift. So tomorrow he’ll have something to do.
We took a taxi home. I didn’t even haggle over the price. Just loaded the kids in. At least he didn’t ask for more than the price he originally quoted when I got out!
Sam and Lucy and Ed and Isaac walked to the kushari place and got us dinner to go. We ate it here at the hotel.
Today and yesterday the kids did Alif Baa, our Arabic DVD, together. They finished the first unit today. I kind of did it with them yesterday, in between doing laundry in the bathroom sink and distracting the babies, but today I didn’t even make any pretense of it. They were getting to the part that I haven’t done, and I couldn’t keep up only half-watching. Instead, I ran interference with Isaac and Nora. This afternoon, Sam and Ruth and Ed all did Pimsleur, our Arabic audiotapes, too. Lucy didn’t.
After we’d finished Alif Baa, we walked to Zamalek. As we left our neighbourhood, Sharif, the teenager who stands on the corner near our hotel, ran after us to say goodbye to Isaac.
It was a fairly long walk and at one point we were stranded on a curb with lanes of freeway-speed traffic speeding by us on both sides. We eventually made it to safety, though. Zamalek is a nice area, much quieter and less bustling than where we are.
We had lunch at a pizza restaurant. Eleanor still isn’t eating much. Her diaper managed to come off in the middle of the lunch, but I think I was pretty discreet in getting it back on her. After lunch we strolled down the street and peeked in stores. There was a very nice bookstore with huge English and French sections. We spent quite a bit of time there. There were several toy stores that we checked out, looking for something to amuse Isaac while we study. We found a foam puzzle with the alphabet that I think you can also make cubes out of for a couple of dollars, so we bought that, and the man gave him a bottle of bubbles as a gift. So tomorrow he’ll have something to do.
We took a taxi home. I didn’t even haggle over the price. Just loaded the kids in. At least he didn’t ask for more than the price he originally quoted when I got out!
Sam and Lucy and Ed and Isaac walked to the kushari place and got us dinner to go. We ate it here at the hotel.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
No air conditioning and a screaming baby
A very, very hard day. The toilet’s finally fixed (after 2 ½ days) and now the air conditioner is acting up. It got unbearably hot last night, and it’s already terribly hot tonight. The air conditioner won’t stay on for more than 2 minutes. Eleanor just screams, and I think it’s because she’s hungry, but I can’t figure out what I have the resources to feed her that will satisfy her. She nurses really hard and then bites in frustration and cries some more. We try to feed her what we’re eating, but she usually just cries. I’m tempted to move back to the Novotel where the toilets work and the air conditioner works. I still don’t know what I’d feed Ellie, but maybe I’d be better equipped to deal with things.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Taking Taxis
Our plan was to catch a bus at a nearby midan (or plein, as Sam explained to Lucy who was having a hard time understanding our plans), but when we got there, we couldn’t figure out where to catch a bus. So we stopped a taxi and he said he’d take us for 10 pounds, which we figured would be about the same as the bus.
The taxi drove an amazing route, through little tiny, twisty streets. It looked nothing like the Cairo we are staying in. There were even stores with live chickens (and later in the day Ruth noticed another butcher shop selling cute little furry rabbits)! After a while, the taxi driver started leaning out of his window and asking people the way. “Why doesn’t he know the way?” Isaac asked. We weren’t sure. We drove around, pretty obviously lost for a while, but at last we ended up where we wanted to be. I paid him and he said I should pay him five more pounds! I gave him a couple more, but in retrospect, we should have just gotten out of the car and left.
We were at the Citadel, a fourteenth century castle fortress built by Saladin, the great warrior who drove the Crusaders out of Egypt. It’s up on a bluff overlooking the city, a great defensive position. Saladin modelled it after the Crusaders’ castle fortresses—crenellated walls and all, but inside there are big beautiful mosques. We visited a couple of them, one very old with most of the interior decorations worn off, but the second one was built in the nineteenth century and is still very much in use. Its huge interior floor, in fact, is covered with carpets. In both of them, we took off our shoes. Ruth and Lucy and I were happy to see that, while many Western women were given big green capes to put on over their immodest clothing (sleeveless shirts, shorts), everybody was fine with what we were wearing.
The mosque was really beautiful—stained glass windows with vivid colors, beautiful woodwork, and lovely inlaid mosaics. The courtyard, where you wash before you pray, was also beautiful, with lovely arched walkways. The fountain in it reminded us a lot of Bosnian mosques. There were a few people inside praying, especially close to the Eastern Mecca-wards wall, but mostly it was tourists, about half Western and half Egyptian, sitting quietly on the carpets looking around. Three women, two of them wearing veils and none of them speaking any English, came and sat near us with a very small baby girl, maybe two or three months old, and her sister, probably four or five years old (whom Ruth noticed was wearing make-up—eye shadow and everything!). They were enchanted by Eleanor and took lots of pictures of her and their baby as well as a very sweet one with Isaac and Eleanor together holding their baby. We took one of those pictures too. We couldn’t say anything to each other—well, they spoke to us in Arabic and we spoke to them in English--but it was a very sweet encounter.
We were all very glad we got to go into the mosque. It seemed to encapsulate so much of what is central to this culture, just as visiting cathedrals in Europe seemed to capture something about those cultures.
From one of the terraces inside the castle, there were sweeping views of Cairo. We could even make out, through the haze of air pollution, the three pyramids on the horizon. Ed pointed out that, while the people in the mosque were praying towards the East, all of the many, many satellite dishes we saw on the rooftops of Cairo were pointing to the West. In more ways than one. They were so consistently turned in the same direction that they looked like a field of huge, metallic sunflowers.
The real adventure of the day turned out to be getting back home. We didn’t know where to catch a bus back, so we decided to take a taxi, but the first two taxi drivers (who were at the tourist taxi stand) suggested what to us sounded like exorbitant prices, and they were unwilling to bargain. So we decided we’d take a bus, but as we walked down the hill, another taxi driver agreed to ten pounds, so we got in. We’d gone only a few meters, though, when he started asking drivers around him (while they drove!) the way! “Why doesn’t he know where to go?” Isaac asked. He stopped and looked at our map and seemed befuddled by it, and I decided I wasn’t up for that much of an adventure. So I gave him a token amount of money (he’d at least driven us down to the bottom of the bluff), and we got out.
We were right by what looked like a bus station without the building—minibuses (Volkswagen and Toyota Hiace vans) and big buses were zipping by. There were some produce stands nearby, so we went and bought bananas and oranges and mangos from a lady missing her front tooth. A tourist police officer told us the number of the bus we wanted. Several people tried to engage us in conversation (or sell us something?) but we couldn’t make out what they were saying and they couldn’t understand us, so we just sat down on the edge of a wall under a tree and ate some bananas while we watched for our bus number. It was great practice in reading Arabic numbers. The kids are much better at it than I am. We never did find it, so we finally decided to try a taxi again. This time a black Skoda with a Slavic language taxi meter stopped for us! The driver seemed unflapped when we told him where we wanted to go and offered to take us for fifteen pounds. We’d been hoping for ten, but at that point I wasn’t willing to argue and lose our ride, so we piled in.
“Does he know where he’s going?” was Isaac’s first question. And it appeared he did. We zoomed away on major city streets and pretty soon all of us recognized where we were from some of our previous jaunts around the city. When he got close to the end, he asked one taxi driver the way, but by then we could have even gotten out and walked. And he didn’t ask for extra money when we paid him at the end of the ride!
As he was driving us through downtown, we heard a siren. Six big huge blue vans with little tiny ventilation windows—paddy wagons—came barrelling through the traffic. We could see people’s faces pressed against the bars of the windows but, most remarkably, we could hear the people, prisoners?, inside chanting slogans. Everyone on the sidewalks stopped to stare. The six vans were followed by an open truck filled with army men with their guns at the ready. We felt very bad that we couldn’t speak enough Arabic to figure out what was going on. It was exciting.
We had the taxi driver drop us at a new midan because we wanted to try a new restaurant. Our hotel is in a good location for being a tourist, but I have often thought that if I were to live in Cairo, I would never ever want to live here in this neighbourhood. We were only about four long blocks from our hotel, but the feeling of this neighbourhood was completely different. There was a road blocked off to be a pedestrian walkway, so it was a little bit quieter, there were people eating and chatting at sidewalk tables, and there were produce and bread stands all around. It felt like a place people lived instead of a place people shopped. It was nice.
We found the restaurant recommended by our guidebook. It had a menu only in Arabic and none of the staff spoke any more English than we spoke Arabic, so we just told the waiter we wanted what the guidebook had recommended. He suggested some other things, we had no idea what, so I just agreed to them. We were a little worried because it was the same thing we had had for breakfast—fuul and ta’amiyah, but we discovered that the restaurant’s was much tastier than our hotel’s! And he brought a lot of wonderful accompaniments to go with it—cooked potatoes marinated in vinegar, and a potato/carrot/pea salad, and a baba ganoush that Sam and I absolutely adored. Ruth announced that she thinks ta’amiyah would be a good replacement for hamburgers, a similar food but a lot tastier. There were also French fries, almost all of which Isaac consumed by himself. They had brought us forks because we’re not Egyptians (the people at other tables just used their bread to pick things up), so Eleanor stood on a chair by herself (she does like being grown-up) and stuck the fork in the fuul and ate that. She also charmed both the waiter and the cook. At one point the waiter whisked her away to the hatchway between the dining room and the kitchen so they could take a picture of her (and he had won her over enough that she didn’t even cry!). He showed me the picture of her. It was very cute. Because we couldn’t understand the menu, we didn’t know how much it was going to cost. We were happily surprised that the entire charge was 33 pounds, or about 5 dollars.
After lunch, we went to the produce stand and bought some more bananas since we’d eaten most of them and Isaac and Ed had accidentally sat on the rest in the taxi. The apricots looked so luscious. We think maybe tomorrow we will buy some and try peeling them—laborious but maybe worth it. On the way home we passed a second branch of the wonderful bakery near our hotel, and Isaac suggested ice cream. Ed and I had mango and honeydew melon, Sam had vanilla and chocolate, Lucy had strawberry and chocolate, Ruth had mango, and Isaac had mango and chocolate. We got a spoon and gave Ellie tastes all around. We were surprised, when we walked home, how close this other neighbourhood is to our hotel. The kids are starting to worry that we have too many food places to take David in the one day that he will be here with us.
Isaac looks like a war refugee. He has several mosquito bites, and he is having a hard time avoiding scratching them, so I have put band-aids over the ones that he can get to most easily—the ones on his face. Then, this evening he and Ellie were playing and he slipped and fell and cut his head. We couldn’t figure out how to put a band-aid on the back of his head, so we tied a bandana around his head. Poor little guy.
We had a quiet late afternoon/evening here. We washed out some clothes in the bathroom sink, read, did Arabic studying, and played Sims (oh my; I think I will always associate Cairo with the Sims). For supper we ate oranges and bananas and mangos and leftover bread and almonds and raisins and ta’amiyah. Ruth and Ed and Lucy ventured out to the bakery and bought us more luscious chocolate cake for dessert. We managed to get Isaac and Nora in bed and asleep by 8:30 (of course, neither of them had napped). A good day.
The taxi drove an amazing route, through little tiny, twisty streets. It looked nothing like the Cairo we are staying in. There were even stores with live chickens (and later in the day Ruth noticed another butcher shop selling cute little furry rabbits)! After a while, the taxi driver started leaning out of his window and asking people the way. “Why doesn’t he know the way?” Isaac asked. We weren’t sure. We drove around, pretty obviously lost for a while, but at last we ended up where we wanted to be. I paid him and he said I should pay him five more pounds! I gave him a couple more, but in retrospect, we should have just gotten out of the car and left.
We were at the Citadel, a fourteenth century castle fortress built by Saladin, the great warrior who drove the Crusaders out of Egypt. It’s up on a bluff overlooking the city, a great defensive position. Saladin modelled it after the Crusaders’ castle fortresses—crenellated walls and all, but inside there are big beautiful mosques. We visited a couple of them, one very old with most of the interior decorations worn off, but the second one was built in the nineteenth century and is still very much in use. Its huge interior floor, in fact, is covered with carpets. In both of them, we took off our shoes. Ruth and Lucy and I were happy to see that, while many Western women were given big green capes to put on over their immodest clothing (sleeveless shirts, shorts), everybody was fine with what we were wearing.
The mosque was really beautiful—stained glass windows with vivid colors, beautiful woodwork, and lovely inlaid mosaics. The courtyard, where you wash before you pray, was also beautiful, with lovely arched walkways. The fountain in it reminded us a lot of Bosnian mosques. There were a few people inside praying, especially close to the Eastern Mecca-wards wall, but mostly it was tourists, about half Western and half Egyptian, sitting quietly on the carpets looking around. Three women, two of them wearing veils and none of them speaking any English, came and sat near us with a very small baby girl, maybe two or three months old, and her sister, probably four or five years old (whom Ruth noticed was wearing make-up—eye shadow and everything!). They were enchanted by Eleanor and took lots of pictures of her and their baby as well as a very sweet one with Isaac and Eleanor together holding their baby. We took one of those pictures too. We couldn’t say anything to each other—well, they spoke to us in Arabic and we spoke to them in English--but it was a very sweet encounter.
We were all very glad we got to go into the mosque. It seemed to encapsulate so much of what is central to this culture, just as visiting cathedrals in Europe seemed to capture something about those cultures.
From one of the terraces inside the castle, there were sweeping views of Cairo. We could even make out, through the haze of air pollution, the three pyramids on the horizon. Ed pointed out that, while the people in the mosque were praying towards the East, all of the many, many satellite dishes we saw on the rooftops of Cairo were pointing to the West. In more ways than one. They were so consistently turned in the same direction that they looked like a field of huge, metallic sunflowers.
The real adventure of the day turned out to be getting back home. We didn’t know where to catch a bus back, so we decided to take a taxi, but the first two taxi drivers (who were at the tourist taxi stand) suggested what to us sounded like exorbitant prices, and they were unwilling to bargain. So we decided we’d take a bus, but as we walked down the hill, another taxi driver agreed to ten pounds, so we got in. We’d gone only a few meters, though, when he started asking drivers around him (while they drove!) the way! “Why doesn’t he know where to go?” Isaac asked. He stopped and looked at our map and seemed befuddled by it, and I decided I wasn’t up for that much of an adventure. So I gave him a token amount of money (he’d at least driven us down to the bottom of the bluff), and we got out.
We were right by what looked like a bus station without the building—minibuses (Volkswagen and Toyota Hiace vans) and big buses were zipping by. There were some produce stands nearby, so we went and bought bananas and oranges and mangos from a lady missing her front tooth. A tourist police officer told us the number of the bus we wanted. Several people tried to engage us in conversation (or sell us something?) but we couldn’t make out what they were saying and they couldn’t understand us, so we just sat down on the edge of a wall under a tree and ate some bananas while we watched for our bus number. It was great practice in reading Arabic numbers. The kids are much better at it than I am. We never did find it, so we finally decided to try a taxi again. This time a black Skoda with a Slavic language taxi meter stopped for us! The driver seemed unflapped when we told him where we wanted to go and offered to take us for fifteen pounds. We’d been hoping for ten, but at that point I wasn’t willing to argue and lose our ride, so we piled in.
“Does he know where he’s going?” was Isaac’s first question. And it appeared he did. We zoomed away on major city streets and pretty soon all of us recognized where we were from some of our previous jaunts around the city. When he got close to the end, he asked one taxi driver the way, but by then we could have even gotten out and walked. And he didn’t ask for extra money when we paid him at the end of the ride!
As he was driving us through downtown, we heard a siren. Six big huge blue vans with little tiny ventilation windows—paddy wagons—came barrelling through the traffic. We could see people’s faces pressed against the bars of the windows but, most remarkably, we could hear the people, prisoners?, inside chanting slogans. Everyone on the sidewalks stopped to stare. The six vans were followed by an open truck filled with army men with their guns at the ready. We felt very bad that we couldn’t speak enough Arabic to figure out what was going on. It was exciting.
We had the taxi driver drop us at a new midan because we wanted to try a new restaurant. Our hotel is in a good location for being a tourist, but I have often thought that if I were to live in Cairo, I would never ever want to live here in this neighbourhood. We were only about four long blocks from our hotel, but the feeling of this neighbourhood was completely different. There was a road blocked off to be a pedestrian walkway, so it was a little bit quieter, there were people eating and chatting at sidewalk tables, and there were produce and bread stands all around. It felt like a place people lived instead of a place people shopped. It was nice.
We found the restaurant recommended by our guidebook. It had a menu only in Arabic and none of the staff spoke any more English than we spoke Arabic, so we just told the waiter we wanted what the guidebook had recommended. He suggested some other things, we had no idea what, so I just agreed to them. We were a little worried because it was the same thing we had had for breakfast—fuul and ta’amiyah, but we discovered that the restaurant’s was much tastier than our hotel’s! And he brought a lot of wonderful accompaniments to go with it—cooked potatoes marinated in vinegar, and a potato/carrot/pea salad, and a baba ganoush that Sam and I absolutely adored. Ruth announced that she thinks ta’amiyah would be a good replacement for hamburgers, a similar food but a lot tastier. There were also French fries, almost all of which Isaac consumed by himself. They had brought us forks because we’re not Egyptians (the people at other tables just used their bread to pick things up), so Eleanor stood on a chair by herself (she does like being grown-up) and stuck the fork in the fuul and ate that. She also charmed both the waiter and the cook. At one point the waiter whisked her away to the hatchway between the dining room and the kitchen so they could take a picture of her (and he had won her over enough that she didn’t even cry!). He showed me the picture of her. It was very cute. Because we couldn’t understand the menu, we didn’t know how much it was going to cost. We were happily surprised that the entire charge was 33 pounds, or about 5 dollars.
After lunch, we went to the produce stand and bought some more bananas since we’d eaten most of them and Isaac and Ed had accidentally sat on the rest in the taxi. The apricots looked so luscious. We think maybe tomorrow we will buy some and try peeling them—laborious but maybe worth it. On the way home we passed a second branch of the wonderful bakery near our hotel, and Isaac suggested ice cream. Ed and I had mango and honeydew melon, Sam had vanilla and chocolate, Lucy had strawberry and chocolate, Ruth had mango, and Isaac had mango and chocolate. We got a spoon and gave Ellie tastes all around. We were surprised, when we walked home, how close this other neighbourhood is to our hotel. The kids are starting to worry that we have too many food places to take David in the one day that he will be here with us.
Isaac looks like a war refugee. He has several mosquito bites, and he is having a hard time avoiding scratching them, so I have put band-aids over the ones that he can get to most easily—the ones on his face. Then, this evening he and Ellie were playing and he slipped and fell and cut his head. We couldn’t figure out how to put a band-aid on the back of his head, so we tied a bandana around his head. Poor little guy.
We had a quiet late afternoon/evening here. We washed out some clothes in the bathroom sink, read, did Arabic studying, and played Sims (oh my; I think I will always associate Cairo with the Sims). For supper we ate oranges and bananas and mangos and leftover bread and almonds and raisins and ta’amiyah. Ruth and Ed and Lucy ventured out to the bakery and bought us more luscious chocolate cake for dessert. We managed to get Isaac and Nora in bed and asleep by 8:30 (of course, neither of them had napped). A good day.
Monday, June 19, 2006
Beans for breakfast and pyramids!
The hotel offers either an Egyptian breakfast or a continental breakfast (bread with butter and jam), but you have to pre-order the Egyptian breakfast. I kept forgetting to order it, but last night Sam did it for me. The Egyptian breakfast was fu’ul, pureed beans, kind of like refried beans, and ta’amiyah, like falafel patties but made with fava beans instead of chickpeas, and whole wheat pita bread. Eleanor and Isaac weren’t thrilled with it, but the rest of us loved it. I’m feeling very grateful to have such adventurous eaters along with me, especially because sitting there on the tray it didn’t look much like breakfast. But everyone dug in with an adventurous spirit. They all want it again tomorrow!
Last night we talked to the desk clerk and another guest here about their advice about the pyramids, as well as looking at our book and checking out the Rough Guide online site. We walked to a metro station and took the metro to Giza. The cars were quite crowded. The front two cars are reserved for women only, but since I had my big strong boys along, we got on one of the last cars. It was pretty crowded, but one of the few women on the car, heavily veiled and carrying a shopping bag, insisted on giving me her seat because I was holding Isaac.
We weren’t sure where to find taxis at the Giza metro stop, but a taxi driver found us. I bargained with him! He suggested 20 pounds, I countered at 10, and we settled at 15. We all crammed into his tiny black Fiat (what else!) taxi and started off. I was a bit worried because he had been working on the engine when he stopped to talk with us, but the engine turned out not to be the problem. Part of the way there, he suddenly pulled over to the side of the road, jacked up the car (with all of us in it), and changed a flat tire! I think it took him a total of about 3 minutes. Very impressive. It was very exciting, as we drove, to suddenly come upon the pyramids, right there at the side of the road.
He drove us past the camel tour operators and the horseback tour operators and let them make their pitch to us, but eventually we got him to leave us at the front gate of the Pyramids complex. We had been warned about all the vendors who follow you around trying to get you to buy things or to buy their services (guiding, horseback or camel riding, etc.), so I was bracing myself for much unpleasantness. It actually wasn’t too bad—there weren’t as many as I had expected, and they tended to take La (no) as their answer. A couple of young women tried to sell us postcards and statues of Egyptian gods, but when we said , “La,” they pulled out their cameras and asked if it would be all right for them to take their pictures with Isaac! So they each held him while the other took a photo. One enterprising man asked, “Do you want a horse ride?” “La.” “A camel ride?” “La.” “An elephant ride?” He made us all laugh.
The Sphinx might have been my favourite thing. It’s a lot smaller than the pyramids, but it’s still huge. We found its tail curved around its body, and I loved the masonry paws. We went into the medium-sized pyramid (all except Ed; we had been warned that it was claustrophobic, and he had no desire to try it). You walk through the original pathway to the tomb room. It’s only about three feet high as it descends deep, so you have to crouch down. At the lowest point it opens up high, but then it starts up again (to the center of the pyramid?) and it’s just three feet high again. The tomb room wasn’t nearly as large as I’d imagined, given the amount of treasure that had been stuffed in it. I think it was about the size of our living room in The Hague. The stone walls of the passageways were beautiful and cut very precisely, smooth and geometric. There were also all sorts of other passageways (blocked) running off the passageway they were in. We all loved imagining how it must have been to be the person who rediscovered the passageways.
Besides going into the pyramid, we visited the Solar Barque museum, where they have displayed a ship for the Underworld that was buried at the edge of the large Cheops museum—it was a fascinating boat, and a huge thing, maybe 40 or 50 feet long, constructed of wood lashed with ropes. It and the museum that held it reminded us a lot of the Viking ships we saw in the museum in Oslo. We also went into the burial chamber, not in a pyramid, of some pharaoh or other. It looked like a squarish-building from the outside, but the very cool thing was that the walls were still covered with incised hieroglyphs. We hadn’t noticed them at first and almost walked back out without looking at them. A helpful Tourist Police officer pointed some of his favourites out to us—some hippopotamuses, including two with their mouths wide open—and encouraged us to take photographs, despite the signs everywhere forbidding photography (we declined). We also saw a hieroglyph of a woman holding a duck in her hand; in the Egyptian Museum we had found a room full of statues of women holding ducks in their hands.
We were all incredibly hot and thirsty there. When we first got out of the taxi, I felt like the air just sucked all the moisture out of my body. The city of Cairo goes right up to the feet of the pyramids—a major road runs along the edge of them, but then behind them it is just desert. It was an amazing sight. We had great views of the city in one direction, and then just sand in another. We quickly drank all 3 liters of water, which we had purchased for 4 pounds at the hotel, we had brought with us. There were water vendors there at the site (surprise!). The man I spoke to was selling 1 liter bottles of water, and he told me they would cost 10 pounds each! I really did walk away then, but he called after and told me it was 2 bottles for 10 pounds. Eventually I agreed to pay 3 pounds for each bottle, but I didn’t have small enough change, so I got the two for 5.50.
We took an air conditioned bus back to downtown. It took quite a while, but the seats were comfortable and it dropped us not far from our neighbourhood, and it was pretty cheap, so we were happy with it. And no flat tires!
We were all exhausted and thirsty, so we decided to go to a sit-down restaurant. We weren’t sure what everything on the menu was, so we fairly arbitrarily selected stuff. We did pretty well because we only ended up with one thing that nobody liked much, and everything else was very good. We got more of the falafel-like things and some kebab meats with rice and some spicy meatballs and a wonderful egg and meat dish. We may have to go back there again now that we know what we like.
Now we’ve come home and collapsed. Sam’s asleep. I threw Lucy off the computer (she was playing Sims) to do Pimsleur and write this letter. Eleanor slept for a long time. Isaac read books and has actually been pretty calm—he’s just now getting wild and starting to agitate for ice cream. Ruth has been reading Eldest and Ed has been reading The Return of the King.
Later
Some things I forgot first time around/more stuff that happened:
Eleanor got so incredibly dirty walking around at the Egyptian Museum that I decided she had better start wearing shoes. Whenever I have tried to put them on her before, she has immediately pulled them off. But today and yesterday, she wore her blue striped shoes all day long! What a big girl.
This morning I had been congratulating myself on how well we’ve been doing avoiding mosquitoes. I have no mosquito bites. Then Isaac woke up. He has about five mosquito bites on his face—cheeks, forehead, ear—and a bunch on his arm and his hand. I was expressing my sadness that he ended up with them, and the other kids all said, “I have mosquito bites, too!” So tonight we’re wearing mosquito repellent.
This afternoon we all wanted fruit but nobody wanted to go out to find it, so I left them inside vegging and went out in search of a produce store. It was very interesting, and not entirely pleasant to be out by myself. The streets of Cairo feel very different as a single woman than as a mother. I’m used to people looking at my babies and talking to them. I kept worrying men were looking at me and some teenaged boys said things to me. I noticed that all of the other women I saw on the street were either with another woman or with a man. I told the kids that from now on I thought somebody would need to go out with me if I went out. Last night we were talking to a woman from Mexico who is here at the hostel about getting to the pyramids. She was trying to assess for us how well different types of transportation would work. “Do you get hassled when you go out?” she asked me. I told her that people always talk to the babies. “Oh, of course,” she said, “they respect you with all your children. You would be all right.” It was an interesting observation.
I eventually did find a grocery store. It had one aisle with cleaning supplies, one aisle with rice and beans, and one aisle with pasta. There was also a cold section with feta cheese and other stuff that I couldn’t figure out. Next door to it was a butcher shop with two huge haunches of meat hanging from hooks in the open space next to the front door. Right underneath them were the baskets of fruit—a sorry collection of wilted grapes, shrivelled apricots, and tiny apples. But there were also melons, so I bought a melon. For dinner we ate the melon (rind cut off and thrown away), bread (Sam bought it from a street vendor), and almonds and raisins (we bought at the bakery; they also sell nuts). After family home evening we had wonderful chocolate cake from the bakery—we bought two kinds, one out of nostalgia because it looked exactly like the kind we used to love at Slasticarna Ramis in Sarajevo. It was delicious and fun.
When we were ready to do family home evening, Ruth and I started singing “This is the night we’ve waited for…” As usual, Isaac scampered over and climbed up by us. Both of us were delighted, however, to see Ellie, as soon as she heard the song start, turn around, her mouth in a little “o.” She dropped the thing she was holding and ran as fast as her little legs would toddle, held up her arms to us, and smiled a huge smile. We sang “Families can be together Forever” except I accidentally started singing it to the tune of “This is the night…” and Ed collapsed in giggles. Ed had us act out the story of Moses parting the Red Sea while he read the account from the Bible. Isaac was Moses, Lucy was the children of Israel, Sam was the pillar of fire, Ellie and I were the armies of Pharoah, and Ruth was the Red Sea with Lucy’s turquoise scarf. We played “Peep Peep.”
Last night we talked to the desk clerk and another guest here about their advice about the pyramids, as well as looking at our book and checking out the Rough Guide online site. We walked to a metro station and took the metro to Giza. The cars were quite crowded. The front two cars are reserved for women only, but since I had my big strong boys along, we got on one of the last cars. It was pretty crowded, but one of the few women on the car, heavily veiled and carrying a shopping bag, insisted on giving me her seat because I was holding Isaac.
We weren’t sure where to find taxis at the Giza metro stop, but a taxi driver found us. I bargained with him! He suggested 20 pounds, I countered at 10, and we settled at 15. We all crammed into his tiny black Fiat (what else!) taxi and started off. I was a bit worried because he had been working on the engine when he stopped to talk with us, but the engine turned out not to be the problem. Part of the way there, he suddenly pulled over to the side of the road, jacked up the car (with all of us in it), and changed a flat tire! I think it took him a total of about 3 minutes. Very impressive. It was very exciting, as we drove, to suddenly come upon the pyramids, right there at the side of the road.
He drove us past the camel tour operators and the horseback tour operators and let them make their pitch to us, but eventually we got him to leave us at the front gate of the Pyramids complex. We had been warned about all the vendors who follow you around trying to get you to buy things or to buy their services (guiding, horseback or camel riding, etc.), so I was bracing myself for much unpleasantness. It actually wasn’t too bad—there weren’t as many as I had expected, and they tended to take La (no) as their answer. A couple of young women tried to sell us postcards and statues of Egyptian gods, but when we said , “La,” they pulled out their cameras and asked if it would be all right for them to take their pictures with Isaac! So they each held him while the other took a photo. One enterprising man asked, “Do you want a horse ride?” “La.” “A camel ride?” “La.” “An elephant ride?” He made us all laugh.
The Sphinx might have been my favourite thing. It’s a lot smaller than the pyramids, but it’s still huge. We found its tail curved around its body, and I loved the masonry paws. We went into the medium-sized pyramid (all except Ed; we had been warned that it was claustrophobic, and he had no desire to try it). You walk through the original pathway to the tomb room. It’s only about three feet high as it descends deep, so you have to crouch down. At the lowest point it opens up high, but then it starts up again (to the center of the pyramid?) and it’s just three feet high again. The tomb room wasn’t nearly as large as I’d imagined, given the amount of treasure that had been stuffed in it. I think it was about the size of our living room in The Hague. The stone walls of the passageways were beautiful and cut very precisely, smooth and geometric. There were also all sorts of other passageways (blocked) running off the passageway they were in. We all loved imagining how it must have been to be the person who rediscovered the passageways.
Besides going into the pyramid, we visited the Solar Barque museum, where they have displayed a ship for the Underworld that was buried at the edge of the large Cheops museum—it was a fascinating boat, and a huge thing, maybe 40 or 50 feet long, constructed of wood lashed with ropes. It and the museum that held it reminded us a lot of the Viking ships we saw in the museum in Oslo. We also went into the burial chamber, not in a pyramid, of some pharaoh or other. It looked like a squarish-building from the outside, but the very cool thing was that the walls were still covered with incised hieroglyphs. We hadn’t noticed them at first and almost walked back out without looking at them. A helpful Tourist Police officer pointed some of his favourites out to us—some hippopotamuses, including two with their mouths wide open—and encouraged us to take photographs, despite the signs everywhere forbidding photography (we declined). We also saw a hieroglyph of a woman holding a duck in her hand; in the Egyptian Museum we had found a room full of statues of women holding ducks in their hands.
We were all incredibly hot and thirsty there. When we first got out of the taxi, I felt like the air just sucked all the moisture out of my body. The city of Cairo goes right up to the feet of the pyramids—a major road runs along the edge of them, but then behind them it is just desert. It was an amazing sight. We had great views of the city in one direction, and then just sand in another. We quickly drank all 3 liters of water, which we had purchased for 4 pounds at the hotel, we had brought with us. There were water vendors there at the site (surprise!). The man I spoke to was selling 1 liter bottles of water, and he told me they would cost 10 pounds each! I really did walk away then, but he called after and told me it was 2 bottles for 10 pounds. Eventually I agreed to pay 3 pounds for each bottle, but I didn’t have small enough change, so I got the two for 5.50.
We took an air conditioned bus back to downtown. It took quite a while, but the seats were comfortable and it dropped us not far from our neighbourhood, and it was pretty cheap, so we were happy with it. And no flat tires!
We were all exhausted and thirsty, so we decided to go to a sit-down restaurant. We weren’t sure what everything on the menu was, so we fairly arbitrarily selected stuff. We did pretty well because we only ended up with one thing that nobody liked much, and everything else was very good. We got more of the falafel-like things and some kebab meats with rice and some spicy meatballs and a wonderful egg and meat dish. We may have to go back there again now that we know what we like.
Now we’ve come home and collapsed. Sam’s asleep. I threw Lucy off the computer (she was playing Sims) to do Pimsleur and write this letter. Eleanor slept for a long time. Isaac read books and has actually been pretty calm—he’s just now getting wild and starting to agitate for ice cream. Ruth has been reading Eldest and Ed has been reading The Return of the King.
Later
Some things I forgot first time around/more stuff that happened:
Eleanor got so incredibly dirty walking around at the Egyptian Museum that I decided she had better start wearing shoes. Whenever I have tried to put them on her before, she has immediately pulled them off. But today and yesterday, she wore her blue striped shoes all day long! What a big girl.
This morning I had been congratulating myself on how well we’ve been doing avoiding mosquitoes. I have no mosquito bites. Then Isaac woke up. He has about five mosquito bites on his face—cheeks, forehead, ear—and a bunch on his arm and his hand. I was expressing my sadness that he ended up with them, and the other kids all said, “I have mosquito bites, too!” So tonight we’re wearing mosquito repellent.
This afternoon we all wanted fruit but nobody wanted to go out to find it, so I left them inside vegging and went out in search of a produce store. It was very interesting, and not entirely pleasant to be out by myself. The streets of Cairo feel very different as a single woman than as a mother. I’m used to people looking at my babies and talking to them. I kept worrying men were looking at me and some teenaged boys said things to me. I noticed that all of the other women I saw on the street were either with another woman or with a man. I told the kids that from now on I thought somebody would need to go out with me if I went out. Last night we were talking to a woman from Mexico who is here at the hostel about getting to the pyramids. She was trying to assess for us how well different types of transportation would work. “Do you get hassled when you go out?” she asked me. I told her that people always talk to the babies. “Oh, of course,” she said, “they respect you with all your children. You would be all right.” It was an interesting observation.
I eventually did find a grocery store. It had one aisle with cleaning supplies, one aisle with rice and beans, and one aisle with pasta. There was also a cold section with feta cheese and other stuff that I couldn’t figure out. Next door to it was a butcher shop with two huge haunches of meat hanging from hooks in the open space next to the front door. Right underneath them were the baskets of fruit—a sorry collection of wilted grapes, shrivelled apricots, and tiny apples. But there were also melons, so I bought a melon. For dinner we ate the melon (rind cut off and thrown away), bread (Sam bought it from a street vendor), and almonds and raisins (we bought at the bakery; they also sell nuts). After family home evening we had wonderful chocolate cake from the bakery—we bought two kinds, one out of nostalgia because it looked exactly like the kind we used to love at Slasticarna Ramis in Sarajevo. It was delicious and fun.
When we were ready to do family home evening, Ruth and I started singing “This is the night we’ve waited for…” As usual, Isaac scampered over and climbed up by us. Both of us were delighted, however, to see Ellie, as soon as she heard the song start, turn around, her mouth in a little “o.” She dropped the thing she was holding and ran as fast as her little legs would toddle, held up her arms to us, and smiled a huge smile. We sang “Families can be together Forever” except I accidentally started singing it to the tune of “This is the night…” and Ed collapsed in giggles. Ed had us act out the story of Moses parting the Red Sea while he read the account from the Bible. Isaac was Moses, Lucy was the children of Israel, Sam was the pillar of fire, Ellie and I were the armies of Pharoah, and Ruth was the Red Sea with Lucy’s turquoise scarf. We played “Peep Peep.”
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Barbies in Hijabs
Veil-wearing Barbies (or maybe Barbie knock-offs) in a store window.
A boy, about Ed’s age, on a prayer rug on the sidewalk in front of a tiny cubbyhole of a shop, praying.
Egyptian women express their admiration of Eleanor by trying to pick her up and hold her. She hates it. She has taken to scurrying over to me or grabbing hold of my arm when someone approaches her, hissing. Once she’s sure they’re not going to take her, she’ll smile. Poor little sweetie.
Our day:
We’ve been sleeping in—it’s hard for the little guys to go to sleep with everybody in the same room--so we actually didn’t get everybody dressed and fed breakfast till almost 11:00! Our air conditioner stopped working again in the middle of the night. I asked a different desk clerk and he changed the batteries in the remote that operates the a/c and actually showed me how it worked. It’s been fine ever since. (And tonight they had finally fixed our non-flushing toilet.)
We had a very quiet day. I ran an errand to the Egypt Air offices, working on arranging our flights, and the kids and I worked on our Arabic. Lucy, Ed, Sam, and I learned the numbers up to 10 (they’re even different shapes), and then played some games with homemade cards with Arabic numbers on them—Go Fish and War.
We got kushari again at the place we ate it before and decided that we all like it very much. I kind of ordered in Arabic (using my numbers!). We didn’t get any apple Fanta this time because Isaac was urging us to get ice cream cones. We got ice cream cones and wandered around the tiny streets in our neighbourhood while we ate them. There are people everywhere, on all the sidewalks, selling things. Right now it’s 5 minutes before 11 PM, and the street outside our hotel is noisy with vendors yelling things and cars honking. Isaac and Nora got hissed at a lot, but we’re pretty used to that now. When I went inside the store to pay for our ice cream cones, the kids stayed outside, and the cashier asked where my baby was!
I banished the big kids out to the lobby—they have cushions under a fan by some open windows, and they call it the Bedouin Corner—while I put Isaac and Nora down for a nap. This is the first day we’ve succeeded in getting them to sleep, and they slept hard. Once they were asleep, the kids came back in the room, and Isaac and Nora didn’t stir for two or three hours, even with all our activity around them.
Sam has finished “The Kite Runner” and I’ve started it. Lucy read a book from the lobby that Sam had heard was very good, “Z for Zachariah” and Ruth is reading “Eldest.” Ed is going through the Tolkien books yet again. Isaac is reading “Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile” a lot. Ellie just chews on our books (and I discovered this evening that she has one big molar through!).
We went to the bakery and picked out some pastries stuffed with tomatoes, roasted peppers, and olives and some chocolate cookies. Meanwhile, Sam went around the corner and found someone sitting on the sidewalk selling stacks of pita bread. He bought some for us—they were about 4 cents apiece. We walked to the Nile, carrying our purchases and a couple of big bottles of water.
It wasn’t far to walk, but it was a bit tricky because we had some busy roads to cross. Cairo traffic amazes me. Every big intersection has traffic lights and white-uniformed policemen standing there, but people don’t stop at red lights anyway. They appear to be treated as only the mildest of suggestions. It’s very tricky to cross. You pretty much ignore the lights and watch for a break in traffic and just start crossing. Sometimes it turns into a bit of a game of chicken between the car (usually a Fiat taxi) and the pedestrian. We have had good success with attaching ourselves to somebody else crossing and just following in his or her wake.
Eventually we arrived at the river. As soon as we got there, someone offered us a ride in his felucca, the traditional Egyptian sailboat. I wasn’t sure where else to go, and while he quoted a price that I thought was somewhat high, I finally decided I didn’t have it in me to bargain (and I wasn’t completely sure about whether our large family would really qualify for a lower price). So I just accepted.
The boat was wonderful—a big beautiful sail right above the cushions where we sat. The boat captain, not the man who’d led us to the place, didn’t speak any English, but he was friendly. We sat and ate our picnic on the boat and enjoyed the breeze and the sunset and the sail above us bellied full of wind. It was really pleasant and relaxing. I was amazed at how quiet the river was. We passed several other tourism boats—a couple of feluccas, and some garishly decorated motorboats—and we also passed a coal barge! We went by several big hotels, some beautiful old mosques, and Nile Bowling. Eleanor loved to lean forward and catch the wind in her face. Reminded me of her big sister.
That was our day. Tomorrow we’re going to try to do the pyramids.
A boy, about Ed’s age, on a prayer rug on the sidewalk in front of a tiny cubbyhole of a shop, praying.
Egyptian women express their admiration of Eleanor by trying to pick her up and hold her. She hates it. She has taken to scurrying over to me or grabbing hold of my arm when someone approaches her, hissing. Once she’s sure they’re not going to take her, she’ll smile. Poor little sweetie.
Our day:
We’ve been sleeping in—it’s hard for the little guys to go to sleep with everybody in the same room--so we actually didn’t get everybody dressed and fed breakfast till almost 11:00! Our air conditioner stopped working again in the middle of the night. I asked a different desk clerk and he changed the batteries in the remote that operates the a/c and actually showed me how it worked. It’s been fine ever since. (And tonight they had finally fixed our non-flushing toilet.)
We had a very quiet day. I ran an errand to the Egypt Air offices, working on arranging our flights, and the kids and I worked on our Arabic. Lucy, Ed, Sam, and I learned the numbers up to 10 (they’re even different shapes), and then played some games with homemade cards with Arabic numbers on them—Go Fish and War.
We got kushari again at the place we ate it before and decided that we all like it very much. I kind of ordered in Arabic (using my numbers!). We didn’t get any apple Fanta this time because Isaac was urging us to get ice cream cones. We got ice cream cones and wandered around the tiny streets in our neighbourhood while we ate them. There are people everywhere, on all the sidewalks, selling things. Right now it’s 5 minutes before 11 PM, and the street outside our hotel is noisy with vendors yelling things and cars honking. Isaac and Nora got hissed at a lot, but we’re pretty used to that now. When I went inside the store to pay for our ice cream cones, the kids stayed outside, and the cashier asked where my baby was!
I banished the big kids out to the lobby—they have cushions under a fan by some open windows, and they call it the Bedouin Corner—while I put Isaac and Nora down for a nap. This is the first day we’ve succeeded in getting them to sleep, and they slept hard. Once they were asleep, the kids came back in the room, and Isaac and Nora didn’t stir for two or three hours, even with all our activity around them.
Sam has finished “The Kite Runner” and I’ve started it. Lucy read a book from the lobby that Sam had heard was very good, “Z for Zachariah” and Ruth is reading “Eldest.” Ed is going through the Tolkien books yet again. Isaac is reading “Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile” a lot. Ellie just chews on our books (and I discovered this evening that she has one big molar through!).
We went to the bakery and picked out some pastries stuffed with tomatoes, roasted peppers, and olives and some chocolate cookies. Meanwhile, Sam went around the corner and found someone sitting on the sidewalk selling stacks of pita bread. He bought some for us—they were about 4 cents apiece. We walked to the Nile, carrying our purchases and a couple of big bottles of water.
It wasn’t far to walk, but it was a bit tricky because we had some busy roads to cross. Cairo traffic amazes me. Every big intersection has traffic lights and white-uniformed policemen standing there, but people don’t stop at red lights anyway. They appear to be treated as only the mildest of suggestions. It’s very tricky to cross. You pretty much ignore the lights and watch for a break in traffic and just start crossing. Sometimes it turns into a bit of a game of chicken between the car (usually a Fiat taxi) and the pedestrian. We have had good success with attaching ourselves to somebody else crossing and just following in his or her wake.
Eventually we arrived at the river. As soon as we got there, someone offered us a ride in his felucca, the traditional Egyptian sailboat. I wasn’t sure where else to go, and while he quoted a price that I thought was somewhat high, I finally decided I didn’t have it in me to bargain (and I wasn’t completely sure about whether our large family would really qualify for a lower price). So I just accepted.
The boat was wonderful—a big beautiful sail right above the cushions where we sat. The boat captain, not the man who’d led us to the place, didn’t speak any English, but he was friendly. We sat and ate our picnic on the boat and enjoyed the breeze and the sunset and the sail above us bellied full of wind. It was really pleasant and relaxing. I was amazed at how quiet the river was. We passed several other tourism boats—a couple of feluccas, and some garishly decorated motorboats—and we also passed a coal barge! We went by several big hotels, some beautiful old mosques, and Nile Bowling. Eleanor loved to lean forward and catch the wind in her face. Reminded me of her big sister.
That was our day. Tomorrow we’re going to try to do the pyramids.
Friday, June 16, 2006
Cairo, at last
Evening
Everyone slept in this morning. I woke up at 7 AM, wrote a bit, and then went back to sleep. Nobody else stirred before 10:30. We knew it would be expensive, but we decided to eat at the hotel anyway since it was the only place nearby. I was pleasantly surprised, looking at the menu, to see that nothing was much more than 4 Euros. It was a bit trickier to order, though; they told us (at this 24 hour a day restaurant) that they wouldn’t be ready for us for another half hour. So we took Isaac outside to play on their playground. The pool looked mighty inviting, but we were treating today as our Sabbath, so we stuck to the playground. It had really fast slides. One of them seemed to always deposit Isaac, giggling, on his bottom. There was a nice chair sitting under a banana tree, so the kids and I took turns sitting there. When we went back to the restaurant, we all had omelets in honor of Dad’s first breakfast in Sudan—six hard-boiled eggs.
Our new hotel sent a driver over with a tiny little Fiat. When he saw all of us and all of our luggage—six suitcases, a portable crib, an electric bass, a cello, two violins, two backpacks, a briefcase, and a baby backpack—he started shaking his head. He shook his head the whole time he was loading it in a teetering pile on his roof, stuffing it into his tiny trunk, and piling it up on our laps in the car. But he managed to get all of us and all of it in!
I haven’t known how much to tip people here. The taxi driver was especially problematic because the hotel provided him so I didn’t know how much the fare was. Sam and I debated under our breaths, all through the unloading of the luggage, how much to tip him. We eventually settled on 50 Egyptian pounds, or about 9 US dollars, figuring it was less than a dollar per bag. Later, the proprietor told me I could hire this same driver to drive us for 6 hours for 200 Egyptian pounds, so I think I way, way over-tipped him. Oh, well. As Sam reminded me, he probably needs it more than we do.
It felt very exotic to drive through Cairo to our new hotel. Some things we saw: many mosques, a huge mural of Hosni Mubarak beaming at us, women carrying plastic garbage bags stuffed with stuff (soda cans, lengths of folded fabric) atop their heads without holding onto them, a bride in a Western style white wedding dress, an open market crowded with people, concrete houses. It was hot and noisy (car horns).
Our hotel is in the downtown. We’re across the street from a shopping mall (which we walked through; it has five eating establishments in the basement—KFC was the only chain), }””}}}’[]\’’[]}”+{“> }””}}} (Ellie’s contribution to my post), one women’s clothing store, and seven stories of men’s clothing stores! The street in front of us is busy, busy and noisy, noisy. People cross it a lane at a time, especially difficult because the lane markings here appear to be merely suggestions. When we crossed it, we couldn’t even start across until a kind motorist pitied us and waved us across.
Our hotel is on the fifth floor. There is an elevator, though you have to go up half a flight of stairs to reach the elevator. Hmmm. We’re in a room with five single beds (Eleanor sleeps with me and Isaac’s in the portable crib—or he’s supposed to be, he’s sleeping with Ruth tonight) and a private bath. It has cavernously high ceilings, 15 or 20 feet high, and a balcony overlooking the aforementioned street (to Isaac’s delight—all the cars to watch!).
The room has an air conditioner, but for the first hour we were here, we couldn’t get it to work. I was starting to worry that we were going to have to pack our bags and go somewhere else; Eleanor and Isaac were turning red and by the end of the hour they were both screaming pretty much non-stop. Then the desk clerk (the third guy to come look at it) came and pushed buttons and poked at it and prodded it, and it has been working ever since. Air-conditioned, the room is very pleasant. I am spoiled by modern conveniences!
The hotel has a “Bedouin corner” in the lobby, an arrangement of cushions and low stools around a metal tray table like they made in Sarajevo (also a couple of hookah pipes, though for obvious reasons we ignored those). Sitting on those stools that are just his size, Isaac feels like he has died and gone to heaven.
We got the air conditioning fixed, planned church services for later, did our email, and decided to venture into the outdoors. The only maps I have are the two Lonely Planet guidebook maps, sketchy at best, especially given my challenges with navigation. Luckily, I have children who are very good at knowing where they are and how to go somewhere else. Sam led us to a restaurant just a couple of blocks away, recommended in our guidebook as a great place to get kushari. We didn’t know what kushari was and the place was intimidating—people (obviously not tourists) bustling in and out—but we had to eat dinner somewhere, so we went in.
It was confusing at first, since we can say about ten words in Arabic and nobody who worked there could say more than about fifty in English, but we eventually understood that we were to go upstairs and sit down. The tables and chairs were utilitarian and full of people, women in veils, men dressed as if they were coming from a long day’s work, families with little children. People would sit down and after a few minutes be served a bowl of food which they would inhale, and then they would leave—Egyptian fast food. The restaurant makes only one thing—kushari—so all you have to order is small, medium, or large. Eventually, thanks to the great patience of the restaurant staff, we ordered small bowls, as well as Fanta so we’d be sure to have something we’d like. No need to have worried. The kushari was wonderful. It’s a very odd dish—rice and broken spaghetti and macaroni noodles and lentils and garbanzo beans, topped with a couple of tablespoons of a tomatoey sauce and a few French-fried onions. It’s not soupy at all but it must be cooked in broth or something because it was wonderfully flavourful. We all liked it and I adored it. Each of the Fantas cost about 45 US cents, and each of the bowls of kushari cost about 30 US cents. So I guess the hotel restaurant was really, really expensive.
Hanging out with Isaac here is kind of like tagging along after a movie star. The waiters at the restaurant came over to pat his head and stroke his hair and rub his cheeks. There are lots of street vendors in front of our hotel (ties, socks, T-shirts, food items), and they all love our babies. A young twenty-something street vendor rushed away from his cart, put one hand on each of Isaac’s cheeks, and kissed him. Another man held out his hand for Isaac to shake and asked him in broken English if he wouldn’t please be his little boy. The kids waited outside while I was in a bakery, and Isaac was apparently kissed repeatedly, almost always by men (men’s admiration of our babies is something we had noticed in Europe as well; maybe it’s only American men who tend not to go gaga over babies). Eleanor gets her share of attention, too. As we walked down the street, we were at first discomfited by the number of people making hissing noises at us. Then we realized that they were making hissing noises at Eleanor, trying to get her to look at them so they could smile or coo at her. The hotel desk clerk here asked my permission to take her photograph (and she even smiled for him!).
Ruth did wardrobe research and analysis while we were walking around. Almost all the women wear veils—probably 80-90 percent. Of those who are not wearing veils, though, there is a wide variety of clothing. Never any skirts shorter than the knee, some sleeveless dresses. Ruth and Lucy and I feel comfortable in our longish skirts and blouses. Ruth noticed that teenage and twenty-something women (unmarried women perhaps?) wear a slightly different veil—tight around the face and then tight against a knot of hair at the nape of the neck—kind of a turban look but whereas the silhouette of a turban would have the fullness at the top of the head, here the fullness is where the hair must be bunched up at the back of the neck. These veils reveal just the lobe of the ear, so you can see earrings (an item of great interest to us as the three of us have decided that we are on the hunt for earrings). Older women wear veils that completely cover their ears. Women in veils wear either tennis shoes or strappy sandals.
When we got back to the hotel after our satisfyingly successful venture into the neighbourhood, we held a family church service in our room. Lucy had us sing “Lead Kindly Light” and talked about doing what we need to do to accomplish God’s will in a new country. Sam and Ed prepared and gave us the sacrament (we decided we’re not in our branch because we’ve started our Sudan adventure so it was appropriate to do the sacrament as approved by the area president). Ruth and Sam taught a great nursery lesson to us on the theme, “Heavenly Father loves us so He gives us loving parents.” They used baby Jesus as the exemplar, and we acted out Mary and Joseph taking him to Egypt (!) to keep him safe. At the end of the lesson, Ruth asked Isaac, “Do you have parents who love and take care of you?”
He nodded solemnly. “Yes. Luz and Ed and Ruth…”
Ed did nursery music, and then we had snack (cookies from the bakery we had stopped at).
While the big kids and I had a Sunday School lesson about King David, Isaac and Nora played around. Isaac has discovered scissors. He loves to cut papers up until they are “lacy.” He made one of Ed’s scratch pages lacy and then dropped the scissors. None of us noticed that Eleanor had picked them up until I saw her, the scraps of Isaac’s lacy paper in her lap, trying hard to cut the paper and managing to do not only that but to also cut two holes in her sweet little eyelet lace dress. Those scissors are going way up high.about a fifteen minute walk, apparently.
Everyone slept in this morning. I woke up at 7 AM, wrote a bit, and then went back to sleep. Nobody else stirred before 10:30. We knew it would be expensive, but we decided to eat at the hotel anyway since it was the only place nearby. I was pleasantly surprised, looking at the menu, to see that nothing was much more than 4 Euros. It was a bit trickier to order, though; they told us (at this 24 hour a day restaurant) that they wouldn’t be ready for us for another half hour. So we took Isaac outside to play on their playground. The pool looked mighty inviting, but we were treating today as our Sabbath, so we stuck to the playground. It had really fast slides. One of them seemed to always deposit Isaac, giggling, on his bottom. There was a nice chair sitting under a banana tree, so the kids and I took turns sitting there. When we went back to the restaurant, we all had omelets in honor of Dad’s first breakfast in Sudan—six hard-boiled eggs.
Our new hotel sent a driver over with a tiny little Fiat. When he saw all of us and all of our luggage—six suitcases, a portable crib, an electric bass, a cello, two violins, two backpacks, a briefcase, and a baby backpack—he started shaking his head. He shook his head the whole time he was loading it in a teetering pile on his roof, stuffing it into his tiny trunk, and piling it up on our laps in the car. But he managed to get all of us and all of it in!
I haven’t known how much to tip people here. The taxi driver was especially problematic because the hotel provided him so I didn’t know how much the fare was. Sam and I debated under our breaths, all through the unloading of the luggage, how much to tip him. We eventually settled on 50 Egyptian pounds, or about 9 US dollars, figuring it was less than a dollar per bag. Later, the proprietor told me I could hire this same driver to drive us for 6 hours for 200 Egyptian pounds, so I think I way, way over-tipped him. Oh, well. As Sam reminded me, he probably needs it more than we do.
It felt very exotic to drive through Cairo to our new hotel. Some things we saw: many mosques, a huge mural of Hosni Mubarak beaming at us, women carrying plastic garbage bags stuffed with stuff (soda cans, lengths of folded fabric) atop their heads without holding onto them, a bride in a Western style white wedding dress, an open market crowded with people, concrete houses. It was hot and noisy (car horns).
Our hotel is in the downtown. We’re across the street from a shopping mall (which we walked through; it has five eating establishments in the basement—KFC was the only chain), }””}}}’[]\’’[]}”+{“> }””}}} (Ellie’s contribution to my post), one women’s clothing store, and seven stories of men’s clothing stores! The street in front of us is busy, busy and noisy, noisy. People cross it a lane at a time, especially difficult because the lane markings here appear to be merely suggestions. When we crossed it, we couldn’t even start across until a kind motorist pitied us and waved us across.
Our hotel is on the fifth floor. There is an elevator, though you have to go up half a flight of stairs to reach the elevator. Hmmm. We’re in a room with five single beds (Eleanor sleeps with me and Isaac’s in the portable crib—or he’s supposed to be, he’s sleeping with Ruth tonight) and a private bath. It has cavernously high ceilings, 15 or 20 feet high, and a balcony overlooking the aforementioned street (to Isaac’s delight—all the cars to watch!).
The room has an air conditioner, but for the first hour we were here, we couldn’t get it to work. I was starting to worry that we were going to have to pack our bags and go somewhere else; Eleanor and Isaac were turning red and by the end of the hour they were both screaming pretty much non-stop. Then the desk clerk (the third guy to come look at it) came and pushed buttons and poked at it and prodded it, and it has been working ever since. Air-conditioned, the room is very pleasant. I am spoiled by modern conveniences!
The hotel has a “Bedouin corner” in the lobby, an arrangement of cushions and low stools around a metal tray table like they made in Sarajevo (also a couple of hookah pipes, though for obvious reasons we ignored those). Sitting on those stools that are just his size, Isaac feels like he has died and gone to heaven.
We got the air conditioning fixed, planned church services for later, did our email, and decided to venture into the outdoors. The only maps I have are the two Lonely Planet guidebook maps, sketchy at best, especially given my challenges with navigation. Luckily, I have children who are very good at knowing where they are and how to go somewhere else. Sam led us to a restaurant just a couple of blocks away, recommended in our guidebook as a great place to get kushari. We didn’t know what kushari was and the place was intimidating—people (obviously not tourists) bustling in and out—but we had to eat dinner somewhere, so we went in.
It was confusing at first, since we can say about ten words in Arabic and nobody who worked there could say more than about fifty in English, but we eventually understood that we were to go upstairs and sit down. The tables and chairs were utilitarian and full of people, women in veils, men dressed as if they were coming from a long day’s work, families with little children. People would sit down and after a few minutes be served a bowl of food which they would inhale, and then they would leave—Egyptian fast food. The restaurant makes only one thing—kushari—so all you have to order is small, medium, or large. Eventually, thanks to the great patience of the restaurant staff, we ordered small bowls, as well as Fanta so we’d be sure to have something we’d like. No need to have worried. The kushari was wonderful. It’s a very odd dish—rice and broken spaghetti and macaroni noodles and lentils and garbanzo beans, topped with a couple of tablespoons of a tomatoey sauce and a few French-fried onions. It’s not soupy at all but it must be cooked in broth or something because it was wonderfully flavourful. We all liked it and I adored it. Each of the Fantas cost about 45 US cents, and each of the bowls of kushari cost about 30 US cents. So I guess the hotel restaurant was really, really expensive.
Hanging out with Isaac here is kind of like tagging along after a movie star. The waiters at the restaurant came over to pat his head and stroke his hair and rub his cheeks. There are lots of street vendors in front of our hotel (ties, socks, T-shirts, food items), and they all love our babies. A young twenty-something street vendor rushed away from his cart, put one hand on each of Isaac’s cheeks, and kissed him. Another man held out his hand for Isaac to shake and asked him in broken English if he wouldn’t please be his little boy. The kids waited outside while I was in a bakery, and Isaac was apparently kissed repeatedly, almost always by men (men’s admiration of our babies is something we had noticed in Europe as well; maybe it’s only American men who tend not to go gaga over babies). Eleanor gets her share of attention, too. As we walked down the street, we were at first discomfited by the number of people making hissing noises at us. Then we realized that they were making hissing noises at Eleanor, trying to get her to look at them so they could smile or coo at her. The hotel desk clerk here asked my permission to take her photograph (and she even smiled for him!).
Ruth did wardrobe research and analysis while we were walking around. Almost all the women wear veils—probably 80-90 percent. Of those who are not wearing veils, though, there is a wide variety of clothing. Never any skirts shorter than the knee, some sleeveless dresses. Ruth and Lucy and I feel comfortable in our longish skirts and blouses. Ruth noticed that teenage and twenty-something women (unmarried women perhaps?) wear a slightly different veil—tight around the face and then tight against a knot of hair at the nape of the neck—kind of a turban look but whereas the silhouette of a turban would have the fullness at the top of the head, here the fullness is where the hair must be bunched up at the back of the neck. These veils reveal just the lobe of the ear, so you can see earrings (an item of great interest to us as the three of us have decided that we are on the hunt for earrings). Older women wear veils that completely cover their ears. Women in veils wear either tennis shoes or strappy sandals.
When we got back to the hotel after our satisfyingly successful venture into the neighbourhood, we held a family church service in our room. Lucy had us sing “Lead Kindly Light” and talked about doing what we need to do to accomplish God’s will in a new country. Sam and Ed prepared and gave us the sacrament (we decided we’re not in our branch because we’ve started our Sudan adventure so it was appropriate to do the sacrament as approved by the area president). Ruth and Sam taught a great nursery lesson to us on the theme, “Heavenly Father loves us so He gives us loving parents.” They used baby Jesus as the exemplar, and we acted out Mary and Joseph taking him to Egypt (!) to keep him safe. At the end of the lesson, Ruth asked Isaac, “Do you have parents who love and take care of you?”
He nodded solemnly. “Yes. Luz and Ed and Ruth…”
Ed did nursery music, and then we had snack (cookies from the bakery we had stopped at).
While the big kids and I had a Sunday School lesson about King David, Isaac and Nora played around. Isaac has discovered scissors. He loves to cut papers up until they are “lacy.” He made one of Ed’s scratch pages lacy and then dropped the scissors. None of us noticed that Eleanor had picked them up until I saw her, the scraps of Isaac’s lacy paper in her lap, trying hard to cut the paper and managing to do not only that but to also cut two holes in her sweet little eyelet lace dress. Those scissors are going way up high.about a fifteen minute walk, apparently.
Considering the beauty and simplicity of moves, this one will be remembered as an ugly one. Talking about it, the kids and I decided that it was because we were making many moves all at once: Sam to college, some of our things to storage in the US, some of our things to temporary storage in the Netherlands, some of our things for the week or two wait for our visas, some of our things for the six months of our initial contract in Sudan. It meant we ended up, yesterday, with too few hours for everything that needed to be done. The kids were great, though. The house-cleaning that got done got done by them. Ed and Lucy mailed Sam’s college boxes. And Sam helped me load and deliver 26 (!) boxes to a warehouse near the airport for shipping to Sudan. We managed to meet up with Friso and Elisabeth at the airport to pass off the van to them. So if Eleanor spent much of the day crying, if the van never got cleaned out, if the house is a bigger mess than any house I’ve ever before left (I shudder to think what Wilford Woodruff’s wife, who swept her Nauvoo house as she was abandoning it, would think of me), and if we were packing our bags for the airport in the van as we drove to the airport,…well, we made it to Cairo anyway.
Our plane was a few minutes late landing, and then by the time we had made our way through visas, passports, baggage claim, customs, found the shuttle bus to the hotel, figured out how to tip the people who insisted on carrying our bags and babies (!) onto the shuttle bus without parting with my new high denomination Egyptian pounds (I gave them all the leftover Euro coins in my wallet), and made it into our rooms, it was 4 AM. We were just getting settled a few minutes later when the front desk gave us our courtesy wake-up call! (for morning prayers, I think)
We were all surprised by how lovely the air was in Cairo—22 degrees Celsius and balmy. We were also amazed at how alive the airport was. I had been concerned that, coming in at 2 AM, I wouldn’t be able to find people to help me find my way to the hotel. No such problem! The airport was teeming with people, including tiny children playing and running and laughing, apparently completely unflapped by being up at 3 AM. My two babies, one flopped over asleep in the baby backpack and one staring lethargically ahead from the stroller seat, seemed positively comatose by comparison. Once we exited customs, our luggage carts ground to a halt in a sea of people, some of them holding up signs, some looking for family members. Luckily, the kids are big enough that they managed to make their way back to me, laden luggage carts and all, even when we got separated. And perhaps this was Cairo Airport at its sleepiest!
I like having the babies here. This is obviously a culture that values children. The man selling us our visas slapped down 14 adhesive visa stamps and barked, “Put them on your passports, two for each.” Then, I think he saw our little ones, and he pulled the passports back and did it for me! The gruff passport men would glare at a passport and then, for no reason I could see, order its owner to go stand against a nearby railing, but when a little child was held up to the window, their grim faces would dissolve into smiles. I even saw one of them tickle a two year old with a mop of curly blond hair. They were very sweet to me, despite the overwhelming stack of passports I handed to them. In the lobby, other little children ran over to peek into our stroller as their mothers beamed at my children. The man at the hotel who brought in our bags squatted down next to Isaac to ask his name. So I think we’ll be just fine.
Our plane was a few minutes late landing, and then by the time we had made our way through visas, passports, baggage claim, customs, found the shuttle bus to the hotel, figured out how to tip the people who insisted on carrying our bags and babies (!) onto the shuttle bus without parting with my new high denomination Egyptian pounds (I gave them all the leftover Euro coins in my wallet), and made it into our rooms, it was 4 AM. We were just getting settled a few minutes later when the front desk gave us our courtesy wake-up call! (for morning prayers, I think)
We were all surprised by how lovely the air was in Cairo—22 degrees Celsius and balmy. We were also amazed at how alive the airport was. I had been concerned that, coming in at 2 AM, I wouldn’t be able to find people to help me find my way to the hotel. No such problem! The airport was teeming with people, including tiny children playing and running and laughing, apparently completely unflapped by being up at 3 AM. My two babies, one flopped over asleep in the baby backpack and one staring lethargically ahead from the stroller seat, seemed positively comatose by comparison. Once we exited customs, our luggage carts ground to a halt in a sea of people, some of them holding up signs, some looking for family members. Luckily, the kids are big enough that they managed to make their way back to me, laden luggage carts and all, even when we got separated. And perhaps this was Cairo Airport at its sleepiest!
I like having the babies here. This is obviously a culture that values children. The man selling us our visas slapped down 14 adhesive visa stamps and barked, “Put them on your passports, two for each.” Then, I think he saw our little ones, and he pulled the passports back and did it for me! The gruff passport men would glare at a passport and then, for no reason I could see, order its owner to go stand against a nearby railing, but when a little child was held up to the window, their grim faces would dissolve into smiles. I even saw one of them tickle a two year old with a mop of curly blond hair. They were very sweet to me, despite the overwhelming stack of passports I handed to them. In the lobby, other little children ran over to peek into our stroller as their mothers beamed at my children. The man at the hotel who brought in our bags squatted down next to Isaac to ask his name. So I think we’ll be just fine.
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