Day 4 of Ceaseless Adventure

After some scrubbing, rearranging of the furniture and some key purchases (a pillow, bath towels, some food for the fridge, etc.) this place started to feel like somewhere I could live for a little while.  After some additional key purchases (some candles, incense, tea & a tea kettle, and finally, popcorn and a popcorn kettle (yes, I bought a big kettle special for popping corn)), this place has just begun to feel like somewhere I could live for a little longer while. 

 

It’s actually quite nice.  To start off, it’s huge (or maybe it’s just that I’ve never had whole apartment all to myself and have been using up a fair amount of my creativity brainwaves trying to figure out what to do with all the space.  For instance, there are six big chairs and a couch in the living room.  I’ve arranged them all so that if I were to ever have, say 9 guests all at once in my living room, they could all sit and chat quite comfortably.  It is, however, unlikely that I will ever have 9 guests over, seeing that I only vaguely know five people in Egypt, and one of them is my landlord.  I think I have personally sat in all but two of the chairs and have found them all equally agreeable.  Two of the chairs are armless with a floral pattern roughly the color of dirty sand.  Or perhaps sandy dirt; I will have to think on that.  The others, all with arms, are a faded red and pink with a hint of olive, made of a durable fabric, and sporting a design that can best be described as a cross between the mitochondria cells we looked at in my 10^th grade bio class and the CT state seal (which we looked at in my 4^th grade class). 

 

As you have probably guessed, I am sitting in the living room.  I have situated one of the chairs just in front of the open patio doors so as to catch the Mediterranean breeze on my back and the breeze from the ceiling fan on my face.  This brings me to the heat.  Put simply, it’s hot.  Damn hot.  Although I think it is actually a bit cooler than Cairo because of the sea.  I don’t know what I would do if it weren’t for the breeze and the ceiling fans (note that presence of ceiling fans is equal to absence of a.c.). 

 

And as for the Mediterranean, I am not sure what it is but I am so drawn to it.  I have always loved to say the word (which is weird because I hate the word "medical" and I'm not even particularly fond of "mediate" so there must be something else beyond phonetics).  I think it may have to do with my whole thing about balance and the middle and bridges and those places where two things meet.  I mean the Mediterranean is Middle Earth, right?  Who speaks Latin?  It is where the East and West meet and maybe that is why I had to come here.  Anyways yesterday I drove down the Corniche (boardwalk, roughly equivalent to the Rambla in Montevideo) along the Sea and the sun was at this angle that it shone so brightly off the water that everything reflected gold and it hurt your eyes to look at it but it but it was so compelling that I couldn't look anywhere else and for maybe 5 seconds I cried a little bit in the taxi.  Then the driver started harassing me about how much I would pay him and so I stopped.

 

Speaking of the Mediterranean, I had a doofy moment today when I was trying to ask someone how to get to the tram stop and I kept confusing North and South.  I know this is not hard to believe, considering my sense of direction is about that of an intoxicated lab rat wandering through one of those mazes so the psychologists can study the affects of alcohol on the brain and determine that it makes you more likely to get lost.  Unless you’re me.  Because in that case you’re almost always lost to begin with.  Needless to say, I was slightly frustrated by my inability to distinguish North from South, when I realized that the Mediterranean is actually to the North of Egypt!  I have lived in two coastal cities in my life (Anchorage and Montevideo) and in both, the water has been to the South.  So apparently in my head, the Mediterranean must be south as well.  Oops.

 

Let’s wander back to my first night…

It was probably 8:00 p.m. when I set out to find food (and by “set out,” I mean that I headed out my front door and immediately adopted the look of, again, an intoxicated lab rat in a maze, until a middle-aged man approached me and said something that I did not understand.  I quickly deliberated with myself about whether or not I was supposed to talk to men in the street; decided that I probably wasn’t; and proceeded to ask him anyway.  To my credit, he was the same guy who had helped my cab from the airport find my apartment on the street, so I figured he already knew I was foreign and lost.  I mumbled something in Standard Arabic (I found out later that none of the words I had used are actually said in colloquial Egyptian Arabic so I must have sounded pretty funny).  The guy somehow knew what I meant, or maybe he just guessed, because what else would someone be looking to buy on their first evening in a place they’ve just moved to?  So he brought me to a tiny corner store.  Of course this was not a supermarket where I could browse and find things on my own.  No, this was a place where I had to ask for everything I wanted.  Which was tricky because I didn’t know how to say most things.  So I ordered milk and water and was attempting to describe cereal to them (I later found out the cereal is not at all common in Egypt, which may be why they had no idea what I was talking about) when I finally gave up and pointed to a bottle of dishsoap on the shelf because, well, I supposed I would be needing that as well.  After that I was too embarrassed and exhausted to try any further, so I trudged back to my flat (behind the man who was, of course, carrying my grocery bag) with water, milk, and dishsoap.  Nice dinner.  So I ate the trail mix that I had leftover from the States and went to bed.  But being hungry gave me a tummyache (I hadn’t eaten since the in-flight breakfast nearly 24 hours ago) so I got up and tried to watch an Egyptian soap opera, which have me a headache, so I shut the t.v. off and wrote in my diary, thought about how nice it would be to have some tea, and contemplated my state of sheer alonness in a country where I couldn’t even buy cereal for breakfast.  (I would soon find out that I was not entirely alone, as the cockroaches in the kitchen would be more than happy to keep me company.  Thanks to Jack’s savvy investigation on the Raid website, however, we determined that they may have been attracted to the dirty dishes I left in the sink, so I will try not to do that again.)

 

Cockroaches are not the only hazard here.  There’s flooding in the bathroom (which, as you can imagine, if left to oblivion, the way I sometimes leaves things, quickly becomes flooding of the entire flat, which I had to squige (how do you spell that?  Little mop thing with a head that looks like a windshield wiper) the living room, 2 bedrooms and bathroom, and hang a couple of carpets out to dry, all the while praying that it wasn’t leaking through the ceiling onto the neighbors below me, especially because if they had come up to pay a visit, I would not have been able to communicate much except by showing them my clever mess all over the floor. 

 

The only other “hazard” I have come across (insh’allah (Arabic for “God willing”) there will not be ones much bigger than this) was a construction site with a bunch of debris lying in the street.  There was a big cement top of a pillar that had tumbled into the middle of the road, and just as I was walking by, a car hit it, causing the obstacle to come rolling towards me at a reasonably high speed, as far as rolling chunks of broken pillars go.  Anyway, it was fast enough that I had to more or less leap out of the way to avoid toe crushing.  It was totally Indiana Jones.

 

My last story is about pillows.  I was trying to buy a pillow and I asked the guy at the store for an almohada, which is actually the word in Spanish, but it’s a loan word from Arabic, so I figured it might be close.  Turns out it is actually the same word, except that my non-Spain Spanish accent used a softer, as opposed to gutteral “g” and these are two different letters in Arabic, so the man didn’t know what I wanted. This is something I am quickly growing accustomed to.  So I tried to act out sleeping and say, “for sleep.”  To my surprise and delight, he said, “oh yes, we have that!”  I was priding myself on my survival communication skills when he came back with a can of Raid.  Right. (too bad I didn’t know about the roaches yet, because I ended up going back the next day for that very same bottle of Raid).  You know, the Universe  tells you all sorts of things; it’s just a matter of listening.

With that, I’m going to listen to my yawning face and head off to bed.  I start work on Monday and have actually met a couple of English-speaking companions at the Amideast Center, where I’ll be teaching, so I’m feeling a little less alone.