Logistics and Practicalities

Well I thought I would update everyone on two very important steps to getting settled here: House and Car. I am pleased to report that we are in a state of decided transition with both. Today we just got back from spending a few hours in Maadi, for church (10 am every Friday), and then to spend some time checking out our house. Kate just got the keys for the house on Wednesday, and we gave our approval to start the lease, even though there are just a few minor fixes left. We've been fairly pleased with the process. My company required that the outlets in the kitchen and laundry room be changed from two prong ungrounded to three prong grounded, and I'm impressed that they actually rewired the place for us to move in, in only about 10 days! That would never happen in the US for a one year lease. So, even though our place is a bit dirty and tired right now from vacancy, we are sure it will be spruced up and make a great home. However, we still have to wait for our sea crate to arrive to really move in, which is why we're in transition on the house. The sea crate left our house in Denver on July 15, and it should get into port any day now, maybe August 30? Then a few weeks through customs, truck it to Cairo, and I think we'll be lucky to move in in about four weeks from now.

The other piece is the car, we've been looking quite fervently for a while because we are allowed to get a duty free car (normal car duties are very high for big cars here - a full price Chrysler Town and Country costs about $120k). However, to get a used duty free car it has to be bought from another oil industry expat, so the pool is quite small. But, luckily we just found a great used Mitsubishi Pajero, similar to the US Montero. It is the quintessential car for expats here, there's about 562,000 of them in Maadi, but we couldn't resist the cliche. So, if everything goes well then in about a week the official car processing guy will change the registration for me, possibly including driving it to Alexandria, and then it will be ours!

television weirdnesses

So here in the hotel we have at our fingertips an interesting assortment of English language tv channels. For instance, right now I'm watching the current episode of 'The Daily Show.' Love it. Similarly I have caught 'Good Morning America' live (airing at 2pm here) several times and consider it a mid-afternoon treat. Another channel I've found with fairly good programming is called Dubai One. At any given time you could catch an episode of 'Lost' or 'Grey's Anatomy,' among other shows. It's easy to forget you are watching a channel run by a Muslim country. I have been jolted back to reality several times, however, when there's a sudden interruption to announce that it's the evening prayer time in the U.A.E. (hint hint, get out your rugs, couch potatoes, and face East). Yesterday a brief message appeared on the screen to remind us that Ramadan is a time for quiet devotion to god and increased piety. I think I can do without the channel that pipes 'Dr Phil' into my home also acting as a moral compass. A similarly bizarre item is a cartoon that stars 4 middle-aged housewives and I think they might be superheroes; unfortunately the teaser for that one's in Arabic. Even though it's a cartoon, the wives, while not wearing burkhas, have these weird golden contraptions drawn over their noses and mouths. It's a little creepy, like 'Desperate Housewives' meets 'Halloween.'

The major entertainment channels here have also been showing lots of promos for the lineup of holiday programming that's on during Ramadan, traditionally a time when families stay home in the evening and eat together. A lot of the 'special' shows are variety acts that seem to hail from the 1970s and spotlight drag queens. The other main holy month tv delicacy appears to be soap operas involving camels and villagers with torches.

Just one more quirk for you: here they bleep the word 'ass' from being said (and I would be very curious to know how the subtitles bowdlerize the nightly episodes of 'Family Guy'), yet you can change the channel and see full frontal nudity posing or strutting the runway on the fashion channel!

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On a completely unrelated note, here in Egypt we went back an hour in time zones last week so folks could start their evening feast a bit earlier. It happens the day before Ramadan every year, apparently. The thing is, it's not widely publicized, none of the other Arab countries do it, and much of the world is unaware that we've already done our 'falling back.' Cairo time is still listed as two hours ahead of the UK on many web sites. Go fig.

Ramadan recipes with Raga

Yesterday I took an Egyptian cooking class through CSA, the main expat community center in Maadi. Raga, a woman whom many in Cairo call upon to cater their functions when they want delicious local dishes, led the class and quickly executed 5 dishes in 90 minutes! The six of us in the class diligently and speedily took notes. Each measurement was quickly 'translated' from Raga's useage of different sizes of spoons, to metric for the Europeans, and cups and pounds for the Americans. I really liked her emphasis on lots of vegetables and her preference to limit the amount of oil wherever she could. I'm looking forward to trying them out for myself once we get kitchen access again. In the meantime, I'll share them with you.

Torli (only an approximation of the Arabic word...could also be 'touli' or 'toli'...)

2 potatoes
2 carrots
1/2 lb green beans
2 small zucchini
6 plum tomatoes, boiled and then peeled (I could also see using canned plum 'matoes)
1 red onion, chopped
1 large spoonful butter
1/2 tsp crushed garlic
1 tsp curry powder
1 tsp boharat, a mixed spice, similar to the Moroccan mixed spice ras al hanout
2 cubes chicken stock
1/2 tsp cardamom
1 cinnamon stick

Slice vegetables (minus the onion and tomatoes) lengthwise into sticks. Grate the skin off the zucchini before cutting it. Sautee the onions in a large pot. Put the tomatoes in a food processor and roughly chop. Add the garlic, curry powder, spice mix, stock cubes, and cardamom to the onions. Pour 2 1/2 cups of water into the pot with the onion mixture. Also add the tomatoes now. Insert your cinnamon stick and then add the veggies. Cover and cook on medium for 20 minutes. Serve in a glass dish and top with freshly chopped cilantro.

Chicken shwarma

2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 small onion, sliced
2 tbls canola oil
3 peppers: 1 red, 1 green, 1 yellow, cut intro strips
1 chili pepper
2 diced tomatoes

Add peppers to the onions in the pan. Now add:

1 tsp garlic
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp boharat spices

Now add the diced tomatoes. To the onion mixture, add:

2 large (SERIOUSLY) tablespoons tahina (sesame paste that goes into hummus)
1 large tbls vinegar
1 small (like the little 4 packs) container of plain yogurt
1/2 yogurt container's worth of water

Add all the above ingredients to the pan. Cut up the chicken breasts and brown in a separate pan, using just enough oil to coat the pan. Now add chicken to the vegetable mixture. Cook on low heat for 5-10 minutes. Serve rolled up in slices of pita bread.

Egyptian-style eggplant side dish

Poke holes in a medium-sized eggplant (the eggplants in egypt are sort of pumpkin-shaped in that they have a bunch of ridges arching out--pretty cool) and roast on top of a gas burner, turning halfway through after you see steam coming out and the roasted half of the eggplant starting to disintegrate. Rinse in cold water, let it cool down, and then peel. Mash up the eggplant with a fork and on top add: the juice of 2 lemons, pinch of salt, bit of garlic, a sprinkling of cumin, a drizzle of oil, and top with freshly chopped mint and cilantro.

Baladi salad (perfect for summer)
Baladi means 'of the country' so this is a particularly Egyptian dish
This salad results in a gorgeous confetti of fresh produce.

1 small red onion
1 carrot
1 red pepper
1 yellow pepper
1 green pepper
2 large cucumbers, peeled
3 tomatoes
1 large lemon
mint, cilantro
salt, pepper, oil

Pulse all the veggies EXCEPT for the tomatoes and the herbs in a food processor until they are in very small chunks. Dice the tomatoes and chop the herbs by hand. Mix all the ingredients together and squeeze lemon juice, generous pinches of salt and pepper, and a drizzle of oil on top.

And for dessert: a dried fruit salad, eaten especially for Ramadan

1/2 lb each of: prunes, apricots, dates, figs, and raisins
1/2 lb of apricot paste (called amardeen--I saw it in the supermarket today, actually--similar to the guava paste used in Mexican sweets and I bet you could sub it in with no problem)

Cut all the fruit (well, except for the raisins) into small pieces. Let the dates sit in 1 cup of water along with the apricot paste for 4 hours. Then add the rest of the fruit to the date and water. Add honey or sugar to taste.

Al Iskandria!

Just last night Kate and I were having dinner in La Bodega in Zamalek (the island in the Nile) when we got a text from my coworker Michael asking if we wanted to go to Alexandria for lunch the next day. So, it was a great chance to do some touring and we took him up on it!

We set out at 9:30 this morning when the streets were clear due to Friday prayers, and drove 2.5 hours to the coast. Alexandria has quite a different feel than Cairo, still seems quite busy and sprawling, but has a wonderful corniche road that follows the coast line for several miles, and is every bit a beach town, albeit with burkas replacing bikinis. After a scenic stroll we ate lunch at a place where you choose your own fish and how you want them to cook it, a process which was much easier since our gracious Egyptian hosts were translating. Then the obligatory trip from ice cream (just pull up on the street outside it, honk your horn, and get served on the curb), check out Carrefour, and 2.5 hours back home! Turned out the "lunch" trip was from 9:30 am to 9:00 pm, but was really a wonderful day. We are really pleased to be becomming friends with Michael and Silvana, who we think we can really relate to and are such great hosts showing us our new city!

On another personal note: almost three weeks in. I've had a fair amount of logistical frustrations so far, but a lot of other things here are so easy. These last. . . three or so days I've been really anticipating an exciting and fulfilling life here.

setting the scene

Here are some shots from the window of our latest hotel room, which overlooks an intersection. Note the really old school black and white taxis. They're everywhere although we haven't used them because they lack both seatbelts and fare meters. Cairo has recently instituted an upgraded type of taxi service with late model cars and NYC-style meters that we are finding very easy to use so far. I've taken them several times myself, in fact.

field trip to the Citadel

We decided to grab a taxi and head to the Citadel, a complex of buildings originally built and fortified by the ruler Saladin in 1173. The fortress offers great hilltop views of Cairo and the desert beyond. If you look *really* closely in the city panorama shot, you can make out the outlines of the two main pyramids of Giza in the center. It was our first view of the pyramids!

There are several mosques inside the fort, one of which is especially grand and is where Connor got a little artistic...

pictures of the hotel

these are some images of the hotel we're based at for probably the next two months. It's certainly lovely but...we just moved into room #3 today. The last room had someone seemingly right below hammering and sawing away at pipes each night between 2-6am... third time's a charm?!