It’s about
time that I write something more on the blog. Since my blogs are very
activity/travel oriented I have slowed down quite a bit while here in
Cairo because just not as much events happen every day. Mostly the
events are studying Arabic and eating. The most recent event is that
maybe I ate something not so good, because on Sunday I woke up at 3am
and took regular trips to the toilet (conveniently located adjacent to
our bedroom) from then on. Danielle has had occasional stomach
tenderness before and I hoped that I would be immune. Turns out that’s
not the case, so now it is her turn to walk an extra 5 minutes to the
far away grocery store that sells imported cans of Campbell’s soup.
Combined
with sickness I’ve been feeling a bit down anyway. Arabic class is still
fun, but studying outside of class is really starting to feel just like
any homework I’ve ever done. It is rewarding though so (for now) we are
sticking with it. I go back and forth between being appalled by how
little we’ve learned in 40 hours of class time (plus at least that many
studying) and being surprised that we are able to learn as much as we
are, having had 0 exposure to the language (or any language like it)
until we arrived in Egypt.
I feel, much
like at home, that I don’t have the time to do all the things I want to
do: play harmonica, blog more, read some of the Koran, learn about
history, hack on mnemosyne, improve my web page, research where we might
go next, fix the neighbor’s computer, and on and on. I suppose that is a
sign that we’ve really settled here and are establishing a bit of a
life. Buying tomatoes is no longer an adventure, it’s just another
chore. We do still wander down streets we haven’t been down, but mostly
we find the same things we’ve already found. If we were here for the
long term this is when I would go and seek out friends with common
interests. As it is it doesn’t quite feel like it would be worth the
effort.
The recent
big event was the arrival of my parents over a week ago now. It’s been
fun for us to share what we’ve learned, and also motivated us to go see
some of the sights we haven’t seen yet. We’ve visited Hussein’s mosque
(featuring mister Hussein’s head in an elaborate silver box), the
Citadel (where we saw another 2 mosques), and just re-explored some of
the places we’d already been. It’s also been nice to have a conversation
in English about more than just what we like in Egypt, although
predictably that is a common subject of conversation anyway.
I haven’t
really talked about the food here. Generally it’s good. Some of it is
very good. There is not a huge amount of variety, though. There are some
expensive upscale restaurants with foreign cuisine, but we tend to stay
away from them. Common meals are roast chicken, kebab, served with rice,
pita. Vegetables we see a lot are tomato, cucumber (mixed together with
vinegar), and egg plant (fried or stuffed with rice). The spices used
are quite tasty, but again without much variety. The candy is good but
again, there’s not a lot of variety.
In general I
do not see a lot of evidence of other cultures here. There are of course
all the historical influences (Arab, English, French) but the vast
majority of people that live here have lived in Egypt for generations.
They have the same religion, roughly the same ethnic background, follow
the same sports, and eat the same food. Not to say that everybody is the
same, but even in fairly homogeneous Santa Barbara there are at least 2
religions, 2 ethnic groups, any number of non mainstream sports, and
countless ethnic restaurants. I think we may have seen the same
homogeneity in East Africa, but we weren’t around for long enough to
really notice it. There’s nothing like travelling to make you appreciate
home…
