So, the wedding and CD release party were a success with the help of our wonderful friends in Minneapolis. They threw us a nice going away party at Rich and Tabitha’s as well. The final goodbyes seemed to be never ending which was very sweet. I have to say that the reactions of many of our friends and family to us moving to a developing nation and a Muslim country were greatly exaggerated (“you’ll be killed!”, “won’t you live in a mud hut with camels?” lol)
We got on the plane for our 30 hour plane ride through Chicago and Frankfurt, Germany, and finally Cairo with our little kitty sitting on my lap. She was soooo good and in fact, the only time she even made a sound or poked her head out of her carrier was when she smelled the flight attendants coming with chicken! We were seriously exhausted by the time we got to Cairo. We were supposed to be met by representatives from the school inside the airport but, when we arrived, there was no one there. They didn’t know that they wouldn’t be allowed inside the terminal to meet us. Fortunately, I navigated the masked H1N1 attendants, customs, and the temporary visa desk with no problems. The school representatives were waiting for us just outside the terminal. We stocked up on vodka at the duty free and got in the van for our 1 hour ride through Cairo traffic to our hotel. There was NO air conditioning in the van taking us to our hotel room and it was very hot the day we arrived. I kept wetting down our poor little kitty (she’s a long haired Norwegian forest cat) with wet napkins and she was very appreciative (as if 30 hours on a plane/in the airport wasn’t enough trauma for her!) We arrived at the hotel completely exhausted and it was kind of a dump I have to say. JoAnn was not pleased!
The next morning the schools representative picked us up to go look at apartments. Fortunately, our friends, and JoAnn’s fellow coworkers, Billy and Laure Kruger had arrived a couple weeks before us and had already scouted things out for us. They told us the apartment we wanted and not to even bother looking at the other ones because they were not up to American standards. That saved us a lot of hassle! Unfortunately, it costs us LE 6000 a month or approximately $1000! The school pays for half so, we end up paying $500 a month which is still a lot more than we wanted to pay. It is quite nice though.
The first night we are there we put the cat’s food and water out for her on the floor and we noticed that she was upset and not eating her food. We look down and the water bowl was SWARMED with ants. I dispatched them with a lighter and some Dr. Scholl’s foot spray as we had no bug spray at the time. They didn’t care about the food, only the water. DUH! It’s a desert. It doesn’t rain here at all. Maybe a couple inches a year during October I think. We now keep her food and water on the coffee table. The next day the sewer backed up in the bathroom. We called a plumber (after we found someone to interpret English to Arabic, my Arabic is much better now after being here 2 months) The plumber shows up with his 8 year old son as his helper and a steel ½ inch cable that’s frayed at one end as his snake for the plumbing. They removed their sandals at the door (as is the custom in Muslim countries) and he and his son were working in 3 inches of standing sewage for 3 hours in bare feet! The bill? I think it was like $6. The next item on the agenda was figuring out our cable TV. We had asked our bohab (like a caretaker that lives on site) if he could figurre it out. He said he didn’t know (they are far too poor to have cable and maybe not even a TV) but, he had a friend who did. His friend arrived and “set up” our cable. I happened to be in the other room as he was setting it up in the living room with JoAnn. There are two options for your satellite (there is actually no “cable”) TV. One is Nile TV and the other is Hotbird. Hotbird consists of 50 religious channels and 50 channels of pay per view soft porn with previews running constantly. They turned on the porn channel and were staring at JoAnn smiling because I was not in the room. She FREAKED on them and they were all like “no! no! so sorry madam!” It’s no wonder Muslims have the view of western women that they do because all the girls on the porn channels were all Asian, Russian, European or Latina. We eventually got someone more qualified to sort out our cable and found that actually, the channels here show better quality movies than back home albeit somewhat censored.
We went to the French version of Target that they have here in Cairo call Carrefour to stock up on groceries and some household items. It is quite nice and has most everything you could want. It’s like a super Target. The guys that were working there, and everyone else in Egypt, wanted to know what I thought of Obama and Bush. They LOVE Obama and they absolutely HATE Bush. Traveling in Cairo is absolutely CRAZY. It is the worst traffic congestion in the world with over 6000 traffic related deaths each year. The worst record on the planet. Even crossing the street, or walking down the street for that matter as there are no sidewalks, was an adventure when we first arrived. Walking and street crossing has now become second nature even if the cars are passing 6 to 10 inches from you at 45 mph!
To be continued…
· Bohab and kids living conditions
· Cats and dogs in Egypt, dogs all look like dingos
· 1st walk thru maadi seeing beggars in tunnels
· Unpacked all 7 bags onto bed fell asleep on couch sitting up
· Really bad Chinese food from otlob, power transformer, curling iron $60
· Beer delivered!
· Walked to Kimo market, stepped in mud
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