He Meant Well

It's a good thing he drives a taxi for a living, because he'd never make it as a photographer.

Up for Some Culture

I am getting a late start (typical) and attempting to get to Saqqara and Dahshur today.

Apparently the best way to do this is to get myself to the Giza Pyramids and rent a horse from there.

But that's three hours in each direction, and six hours on a horse in the desert actually sound highly unpleasant to me. (I went horseback for 4 days once in the Grand Tetons and my butt still hurts--and that was in the early 90s.)

The second best way is by tour or taxi. I am not looking forward to taxi negotiations. I am going to start by searching for the bus that goes to the Giza Pyramids. If that becomes frustrating, I'll get on the metro to Giza and wing it from there. I just have to bear in mind that the fun is in the chase.

Who Says There Are No Coincidences?

I am obsessed with Sitemeter. For those of you who don't know, I see you.

This shouldn't freak anyone out. It doesn't mean I can see the contents of your hard drive or your mother's maiden name. It means I can see general things, like what country you sign on from and whether your use Windows XP or Mac OS X. And I can see when people "hit" my site while searching for some specific term. (In most cases this is random and meaningless, but occasionally it tells me a lot. For example, if a European is searching for my ex-boyfriend by the nickname I gave him, and then pores over the entries related to him, I assume this person is not his uncle or mother.)

Yesterday, someone in Egypt hit my blog while searching for blogs on Valentine's Day in Zamalek. That was so weird that I mimicked the search.

I found this. It was similar to my own blog entry for February 14th, and the blogger's photos show that he lives in the building with the "flat with a view."

Those are both funny coincidences, but not really that unusual.

But this... this is a good one.

I know this guy! I met him at a party in New York's Chelsea in 2002, given by the girlfriend of a man who was selling a condo in Jersey City, one I nearly put down an offer on.

Our email exchange then went something like this: "You're in Cairo? I'm in Cairo! You're in Zamalek? I'm in Zamalek!"

We're having coffee on Sunday.

Diving with Cleopatra

I was never that excited about going to visit Alexandria, Egypt, because I figured most of the sights there were underwater.

Then I stumbled over this. You can scuba dive there to look at what's in the sea.

That sounds really cool, except that I forgot my swimsuit, have no idea where my NAUI license is, and visibility is supposedly terrible.

The first two may be surmountable, but the third? Is it worth the effort and the money?

I am going to send an email now to inquire about introductory dives. Most places offer a single dive alongside a divemaster for an extra fee, and these dives are really shallow anyway. I'll ask about visibility too. If I go to the trouble to do this, I want to be able to see something.

I Bought A Bridge

Alfa Market has all the best gum! First Banana and now Brooklyn (made in Italy).

Though what the Brooklyn Bridge has to do with gum is beyond me.

Monkeys Rejoice

Check it out:




Banana gum! Eww, sounds gross, right? So gross that I bought it, which means the cashier had to go to a lot of trouble to get the right small change. (Everyone in Egypt seems to be lacking in change, but at least in the supermarket they don't shortchange you like in Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, though my pal D chooses to believe they just can't count.)

I thought it would be overpowering, too banana-y. But it had only a pleasant banana taste, much nicer than the overbearing yellow color of the gum stick. The ABC (already-been-chewed) look was still yellow, so I guess the dye stayed in the gum instead of going into my stomach. That's a plus. The consistency was a bit waxy.

I couldn't figure out where the gum was made. It had English, Arabic, and Cyrillic writing on the side of the package. My friend google tells me it's from Korea.

Lesson Learned

Last night, I went to an upscale mall in the suburbs, had Asian cuisine in a food court, checked out the times of Hollywood's latest blockbusters at the cinema multiplex, browsed through the book section at Virgin Megastore, bought a pound of Starbucks Kenyan roast ground for a french press, and took a modern, climate-controlled taxi home.

Which all sounds perfectly normal (except that I would never buy bitter Starbucks coffee elsewhere but here I had extenuating circumstances*). Except I'm in Cairo, so it wasn't normal at all.

The mall had a sparkling pyramid on top. And getting to the mall in question involved taking the metro from work in Dokki to Heliopolis, then sitting in traffic for ages in an old Fiat taxi. Then to get into the mall, I had to go through a metal detector and put my bag through the x-ray machine. (I had to do this once before, in a mall in the Israeli city of Eilat.)

The menu at the Asian restaurant was all over the map. I ordered a "bento box" off a menu that featured sushi, Thai red curry, chicken tikka, Korean barbecue, and sweet and sour chicken. And then I got the idea to go to the nearby Starbucks (the only one in Cairo) to acquire coffee for my french press, not realizing that it would involve complex street-crossing acrobatics. It actually occurred to me that I might never get across the streeet, so full of cars was it, but finally a group of locals braved the lanes and I walked alongside them. In retrospect, it seems a bit stupid to risk my life for coffee that I don't even like, but I didn't realize traffic was so awful until I was in the middle of it.

I bored of the mall and shopping fun pretty quickly. I know it's there if I have something to buy. Then it was time to go home.

Uh, how do I do that? And where in the hell was I?

The map I'd swiped from my first hotel placed me on the border of Nasr City and Heliopolis. But I had no idea how far that was from Zamalek. It wasn't too close. That's all I knew. How much would I pay the taxi? Obviously, leaving it up to the driver was a doomed strategy.

Had I known what I was doing, I'd have comfortably gone to the cinema and figured out how to get home later. But I was worried.

How about a meter taxi? My colleagues from the Kuwait office won't even take a regular taxi here--only a new, safe metered taxi. I usually laugh at them, but of the three of us, I'm the only one who battles it out with taxi drivers on a near-daily basis. They pay more but travel in clean and safe conditions. (The irony is that I'm the American—supposedly the spoiled one—but I'm the most likely to embrace squalid value.)

I tentatively approached the taxi rank. At home, we'd call these radio cars. The kind you call on the telephone. The regular rickety taxis weren't allowed inside mall grounds and they all honked and clogged up traffic just beyond the parking lot boundary.

The driver of the fancy taxi turned the meter on, wound the windows up, didn't smoke, and PUT ON HIS SEAT BELT.

He couldn't get out of the parking lot due to the exit being blocked by all the cheap taxis. Rather than sit there and honk, he turned the car off, got out and asked them to move. They did!

There was still awful traffic all the way to Zamalek, and at one point we were in a wedding procession of cars all honking their horns in unison. The ride took forever, but it wasn't too bad since I was comfortable and I had no dread about the ride ending with an argument.

How long was it? I don't know. Probably just over half an hour as we zipped along the elevated highway above downtown Cairo. The grand total? 21 pounds. $3.68. And no hassle.

Maybe my colleagues from the Kuwait office are onto something.

*All I could find was espresso, Turkish coffee, or Nescafe, nothing for french press, except at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, where a pound was $16.

Minimalist Office

Here is my office, decorated in printouts of next month's comic book. It looks a little sparse. I'll have to ask the Kuwait office to send me some posters with the next Mac that flies over.

The best thing about my office is that to get internet, you have to pick up the reception phone and dial "9." And then you only get internet for half a minute. This is cool because it means I get to work from home tomorrow, since it won't be fixed until Tuesday.

Bargain Hunting

I love the two-pounds-fifty store.

It's like the dollar store at home. I went there to supply my tiny kitchen. The kitchen has a brand-new cooktop, microwave, and electric kettle. But nothing to cook in except one Teflon-coated brand new frying pan. Now this'll stuff'll kill ya, sure enough, so I wouldn't touch it without first buying a rubber or plastic spatula. (Forks and metal utensils scratch the Teflon, which you then ingest--a very bad thing.)

The two-pounds-fifty store didn't have pots for cooking rice or pasta, so I had to splurge at Alfa Mart. About $12 for two. (Ouch!)

But the rest awaited me right down the street, in the same building as my gym. Everything in this little store is--you guessed it--only two-and-a-half Egyptian pounds.

Here's what I bought there:

• wooden spoon set
  
• can opener
  
• dishwashing liquid
  
• cleaning sponges
  
• plastic spatula
  
• cutting board

The two-pounds-fifty store is not actually as good as the dollar store. The selection was smaller and a lot of it was just a neverending supply of nail polish. But it has one advantage over the dollar store.

Two-pounds-fifty is only forty-four cents.

Working Stiff

I just got back from working for the second nearly full day in the office.

I really hate working in an office. It's so depressing that I'm eating a brownie and coffee for dinner to make myself feel better. Which won't work, because it means I have to go to the gym class tomorrow where they make me roll around on a dirty ball while doing leg lifts and holding weights. And that makes me feel even worse that going to the office.

This is going to sound ridiculous to people who always have to work in an office, but I get nothing done in that environment. Too many distractions. "Is the internet broken?" "You want me to drop everything and print what?" "How do I get on the printer server?" I have work to do, so actually, I don't have time to go to work.

One nice treat today was that Nabeel from Kuwait came by with his wife. They got a cheap deal on Jazeera Airways to Luxor and had come up on the train to see the pyramids. The Omani designer and I went to lunch with them. I listened to Nabeel talk about what things were costing them here, and I thought "Wow, that's a lot" and then I realized I was thinking in Egyptian economic terms and he is thinking in Kuwaiti Dinars. Twenty Egyptian pounds sounds like a lot, until I realized it's only 1 KD.

I have to go back to work again tomorrow. Friday is our day off here. My schedule is that I work four days a week, but I thought I'd try to set a good example for our new employees by working every day for a while. Now I'm not so sure that's a good idea. I think it's going to last about one week, and then I'll have to settle for being a bad influence.