Then, at long last, our expeditor bestowed upon all of us our new Egyptian driver’s licenses, valid – Alhamdulillah (thank God) - for 10 years.
Monday, May 14, 2012
The Trial, Part 2: Office of Circumlocution
Then, at long last, our expeditor bestowed upon all of us our new Egyptian driver’s licenses, valid – Alhamdulillah (thank God) - for 10 years.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
The Trial of K
Exhibit A: Game of TVs, or Mad Woman
As much as I would like you to think that we Sobos are using every moment of our time in Cairo to become fluent in Arabic, strengthen diplomatic relationships with neighboring countries, learn to play the violin, land a 360 on our skateboard and engage in other lofty pursuits, sometimes we just want to kick back with a handfull of Commissary Pringles and watch TV.When we moved here, we fulfilled one of O's greatest desires: trading in the tube television T and I got as a wedding gift almost 19 years ago for a sweet 3D, 60-inch flat screen HDTV. High-def visions of college hoops, Monday Night Football and Orioles games kept O moderately motivated for our move. Kind brother-in-law, Matt, facilitated O's dream by offering to host a DVR and Slingbox for us in MD (not knowing he was also signing up to provide two years of 24/7 tech support) so that, through the magic of the Internet and Verizon Fios, we could have access to unlimited American programming on demand. Surely, we could all survive two years abroad as long as we had our Top Chef, iCarly and Downtown Abbey.
But, in Egypt, it's not as easy as turning on the TV and instantly flipping through 100's of cable channels for hours on end like a happy zombie. Never in a million years did I think I would ever miss Comcast but, God help me, I do. Our new TV and the connection to all that glorious content was not exactly plug and play. I had go through a few steps first:
1. Need special transformer to adapt our 110 Volt US equipment to EGP's 220V standard. Requisition from the Embassy, wait a week.
2. Need a surge protector/power strip for said American gadgets. Order with Amazon Prime, wait two weeks to arrive through APO.
3. Need hub to connect Wii, DVD player, satellite box to TV. Spend one week locating Radio Shack, surviving drive to Radio Shack, playing charades with man at Radio Shack until he guesses what I want. Then surviving drive back to Radio Shack with our Fixer, Fifi, to exchange incorrectly purchased items for correct items.
4. Discover that Wii can't read GLEE Karaoke and Just Dance Three discs, send Wii out to be repaired - inshallah. Wait another two weeks. Repair did not work - maa'lesh (oh well, what can you do). Screw the Wii - play GLEE songs on iPod in Bose dock and make pretend with the USB mics instead.
5. Order Apple dock and HDMI cables to connect iPad with Slingbox app to TV.
6. Of course, these items can't ship to an APO, so sign up for an account with a third party vendor to receive our shipment then forward it to us at the APO. Total elapsed time: one month. Football and basketball seasons have now ended.
7. Meanwhile, establish VPN to access Netflix account blocked in Egypt. Gratefully watch past seasons of Wizards of Waverley Place on Mac when bandwidth allows. Use ample “loading” and “buffering” time to build 1,000,000-piece Star Wars Death Star out of Legos.
8. Daisy chain of hardware and software in place just in time for baseball season and summer re-runs of Parks and Rec.
Victory is mine! We are now able to watch our glorious content ....maybe 10% of the time.
Whenever the planets align and the Internet works and we have enough bandwidth to handle mass quantities of streaming video and the power in our flat is not out and the IR blasters on the Slingbox in MD have not been knocked out of alignment by cousins, dogs or other acts of nature - 3 AM MLB games and inadvertent Polish porn are on like Donkey Kong!
Next time- Exhibit B: The Office of Circumlocution, or Getting My Egyptian Driver's License
/lkm in Cairo
Friday, April 27, 2012
Bad, Bad Blogger
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Epic Fail #233 - Accidental Porn
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Wishing you a Happy St. Patrick’s Day with Virtual Soda Bread & a Limerick
Sunday, February 5, 2012
What's a Wadi?
"What's a wadi?" And, on finding out, "Why are you in one?"
The Husband, Lads and I wandered in the wadi this past weekend, prompting these questions from my mother. Fair enough, since everyone knows I am more of a drink-a-hot-toddy than walk-in-the-wadi kind of girl.
First, some geography: wadi is Arabic for “valley.” Wadis are cut by water through the desert but are largely dry year round. Wadi Degla is in Egypt's Eastern Desert and drains into the Nile Valley at Maadi, Cairo. In the late 90s it was protected as a nature preserve. Today, its network of trails attracts hikers and cyclists.
The wadi floor is mostly coarse sand and gravel, with scattered piles of rocks - not to be confused with the pervasive, man-made rubble throughout Cairo. There are also several very high plateaus.
The Lads’ pre-wadi hiking experiences were generally tame and more on the green, or urban side – being carried in baby back packs through the Blue Ridge Mountains or walking through Rock Creek Park- with the scarring (figuratively and literally) exception of one very traumatic trek through the Billy Goat Trail with Grandpa the last time (and the last time) he babysat for the weekend. Said A, with a shiver as we tried to convince him the wadi trails were kinder and gentler, “I still haven’t forgiven Grandpa for that one.” Neither have, I, A, neither have I.
In the end, O and A were excited that they climbed a mountain of sand. I, remaining securely on the wadi floor, was slightly less excited about the mountain of sand in my shoes.
In leaving behind my telephoto lens, I inadvertently pleased O with pictures that made him, his brother and father look like ants "1 or 2 miles” above me (in reality, more like a few hundred feet).
Then, just as I was thinking how standing in this very alien landscape was like being on the moon – the actual moon peaked out above the plateau behind which the boys had disappeared .
Still wondering, what’s a wadi? See for yourself at my Flickr set Wadi Degla.
/lkm in Cairo
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Fish Lights
If it is true that the first step in understanding a country is to smell it, then I am making some progress here.
Cairo is filled with many wonderful and exotic (to my nose) scents. Musky incense burning in the tiny, almost cave-like shops that dot the streets. Rich spices like cardamom, bay leaves, cinnamon, cumin and nutmeg simmering in a pots of koshari or baked into an infinite variety of plentiful phillo-based pastries. Fresh mint in mugs of sweet hot tea. Juicy oranges, ripe bananas and tiny local lemons at the corner market or peddled from a basket on a bicycle.
But mostly Cairo smells like dust. And, for our first week here, inexplicably of fish.
O, who must get his keen sense of smell from me, said it first while we made our inaugural tour through our new apartment. “Why does our hotel smell like fish?” (without our stuff and with Fifi making our beds, it does feel a bit like a hotel ...) Fair question, given that there was none now or recently in our apartment. Perhaps it wafted in from another flat or on the evening breeze that makes Cairo so pleasant during its brief winter? We turned off the lights and went to sleep and the fish smell blew away.
The next day, as I was reconfiguring furniture in our living room, the fish smell was suddenly there again. It hovered above the sofa so heavy that I actually removed the pillows and cushions expecting to find a fillet amongst the stray crumbs and loose change. Not finding a forgotten fish, I shut off the lights and moved on to something else.
And again, reading in the evening. Watching Disney shows with Greek subtitles from the satellite. The real and really stinky stench of fish making us ever queasier and more curious.
Several days later we met an American woman, the friend of a friend who had actually lived in our exact apartment two years earlier. We queried each other with the standard expat questions – where are you from, are you with an oil company or the embassy, how long have you been here, how long will you stay here, when did you get here, where do you live here? She immediately recognized our address as our mutual friend’s former apartment.
“Have you found the Fish Lights,” she asked? I apologized for not having much Arabic yet and asked her to explain these "fishlights" of which she spoke. “The sconces, in your living room, that smell like fish when you turn them on.” Apparently, she became acquainted with our ill-smelling illumination during a belly dancing class that my friend hosted weekly in our apartment’s large living room (or dance floor, as A now calls it). Mystery solved.
With an ever-present back note of dust.
For more pictures, check out my Our Apartment set on Flickr.
/lkm in Cairo