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!