Cairo Sweet Cairo (by Tom)

As much as our parents don’t like to hear this, right now Cairo is our home.  We live in an affluent suburb called Maadi where many expats live.  The streets are narrow, often one-way, and usually with cars usually parked on both sides.  There are very few sidewalks.  To find our apartment you need to know our road number, building number, floor number, and apartment number.  Most of the streets in our neighbourhood have numbers instead of names.  To confuse the matter, our building is “9G” on the Arabic sign and “9C” on the English sign.  In addition, the apartment number is not an indication of which floor it is on.

Now that I am unemployed, I have been spending A LOT of time in our apartment.  We have two bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, an office, kitchen, living room, dining room, and balcony.  When we first saw the apartment we were happy about the size, the balcony, the hardwood in the bedrooms, and the condition of the bathrooms.  When we actually moved in, we were not particularly happy with the gold pillows, fake flowers, ugly rugs, and bare bulbs hanging in every room.  We also find the walls to be a little on the scuzzy side.  One of our bathrooms is blue, and the other is green.  Seriously, the floors are coloured, the walls are coloured, the toilets and sinks are coloured, even the light is coloured.  Who really wants that much green in a bathroom?!?!  However, in spite of all this, we have managed to turn this apartment into our home.  We put away the gold pillows, ugly rugs, and fake flowers, and put up a wedding picture of us.  We also bought live plants (some of which we have already killed) and re-arranged the furniture to our liking.  The apartment is not quite “us” but it is as close as we’re gonna get knowing that this is only a temporary dwelling.

 

Master Bedroom

Guest Room

Dining Room

Living Room

Office

Kitchen



Blue Bathroom

Green Bathroom

Now I spend enough of my days cooking and cleaning.  Cairo is a dusty city.  Most of our windows don’t shut tight so there is always a stream of dust entering the apartment.  There is no clothes dryer so every load of laundry needs to be air dried.  We also cook just about everything from scratch (we use little, if any, canned and pre-packaged foods).  These are the things that keep me busy during the day.  I’ve also been sorting photos and e-mails, but there are only so many hours that you can spend staring at your computer screen before you start to get antsy.  With that in mind, I will end this entry.  We are heading to Barcelona tomorrow night and we will update the blog again when we get back next week.