Another Glimpse

LOL! Okay so it just took me like 5 minutes to figure out how to make this keyboard stop typing in Hindi (an Indian language, not Egyptian), and another 5 minutes to figure out which Arabic word to click on to create a post...yep a lot of things here are trial and error, just one of the reasons you are excited when you complete one thing a day on your to do list. :-)

Yesterday was a national holiday here! Yipee! A day off of work! Not that work is much yet, I am still learning about the project I will be working on, but still a day off is a day off! Sa7? (Right?) The weekends here are Friday and Saturday, so just 3 days left in the work week!

Back home I would be given a hard time occasionally for my tendency to run late for almost everything, here it comes in handy :-) ! An example: on Sat. I met with a guy who works with CEF (my former employer) here in Egypt. He has a car, so he was nice enough to meet me in my area of town (Cairo has a recorded population of 18 million people, so the city is quite large). We agreed to meet at 11 am at a coffee shop not to far from my flat. It is about a 20 minute walk to this coffee shop and keeping with my habit of being a few minutes late, I left the flat at about 5 minutes til 11. Just as I was leaving the flat I received a call from him saying that he was on his way but it would be another 20 minutes or so before he would be at the coffee shop. LOL! Of course you can't say this is for all Egyptians, but it definitely helps if you are flexible with time here.

I am still learning the area around my flat, but it is a good area to be in. There is a small grocier, a coffee shop, bank, electronics store, music store, veggie stand, fruit stand, juice store, etc all within a mile or so. And as I mentioned before, there is an unusual amount of foreigners in my area, which has some interesting results. :-) Aside from the clothing differences, I have also noticed that there are quite a few dogs in our area. It is strange to hear dogs barking here all of the time, because normally people do not have dogs as pets (cats are the preferred pet here). But alas the foreigner in me is strong :-) and I too would love to have a dog.

The weather here has been a beautiful 65-80 degrees! With cool evenings! I haven't made it to the Red Sea yet...:-) but hopefully soon!