Jenyfer Matthews

Last weekend I took a trip to the Wissa Wassef Art Center. I went to the ATM first, knowing that I’d find things that I wanted to buy.

The place was really amazing. It’s basically an art colony started in the 1950s. Everyone works together but they don’t make the artists wait for a piece to sell before they pay them, they pay them all along so that their art doesn’t become commercial and so that the artists only follow their pure creative impulses. They even grow plants to make their own dyes.

If you want to know more about the place, you should go to their website. I was too busy running around taking pictures!

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The wool weaving these ladies were doing was amazing – particularly as they were working strictly from a vision in their head — and working vertically!

You can see that the picture is coming out sideways on this one.

They also weave in cotton – the panels are smaller since the thread is so much finer than wool.

I felt my heart rate increase when I walked into this workspace – this man is making a batik panel, and as a quilter I love love love batik. It was a real treat to see how it is done.

I coveted this fabric but could never conceive of cutting it up for quilting!

The detail they manage to weave into these panels is just phenomenal!

This gigantic piece is actually three panels made over the course of three years.

This is some detail from the above panel. Amazing!

All of the above pieces were in the art center’s museum. I didn’t look very closely at the items for sale because they were too expensive for me to even consider. They started at $500 and went up from there. Worth every penny, but I wasn’t so sure my husband would agree with me!

I also resisted most of the pottery. It was pretty, but I have a habit of falling in love with teapots and then not using them.

I loved these little teapots but in an awesome display of willpower, I decided only to take pictures of them

I got this picture while we were waiting for our bus to pick us up. The whole trip was worth this picture – I see this all the time but almost never have my camera with me, or a zoom lens powerful enough to take a picture like this from so far away.

All in all, quite a satisfying way to spend a Saturday morning in Cairo.

I’m going on a group tour this weekend to a place called Wissa Wassef Art Center and I’m pretty excited. Pottery and tapestry, two crafts so close to my heart, in one place?? I don’t think my husband truly appreciates how dangerous a trip like this might be to our bank account! I have several embroidered pieces already and the only reason I have as many as I do is because he wasn’t with me when I bought them (sshh!!)

Last weekend a friend of mine invited me along on a trip she had planned to go and see a Lego exhibit she’d heard about at the Egyptian Museum. Lego at the Museum? I joked that what were they going to do, build a pyramid out of Lego? The sphinx?

We first went into the main museum building, thinking that perhaps this would be a temporary display set up in a gallery somewhere. Much to my surprise, the museum was absolutely packed. The last time I visited, it was December 2003 when I was visiting Egypt as a tourist. I don’t know if it was because it was a weekday, it was raining, or because it was Ramadan, but the place was a whole lot calmer the last time I was there. Much more museum like. Yesterday it was more like Walmart two days before Christmas. (nightmare!) I had to pick my seven year old son up so that he could see some of King Tut’s treasure because the crowd was so thick that short people had no chance. When we didn’t see any Lego, we quickly made our way back to the entrance and the information desk.

Turns out that there is a new Children’s Museum around the backside of the main museum. At least I surmise it is new because it was empty – we had the whole place to ourselves. Such a treat after having escaped the crowd! And would you believe the first thing we saw as we walked in was a sphinx made out of Lego??

I didn’t have my camera with me but fortunately my friend was able to take a few shots with her Blackberry. It was truly amazing what they were able to do with Lego.

There was King Tut’s mask, mummies, seated statues, mosaic pictures – even a model of the workers building the pyramids all done in Lego! All these things were mixed in with other actual antiquities, plus there was a Lego play area so the children could construct their own exhibits. The children spent a happy hour there. The only thing that would have made it a happier place for the parents was a couch and a coffee bar

I’m really glad that we found it when we did because I imagine that when word gets out, it’s going to be just as crowded at the main museum is – no place like that will remain undiscovered for long!

I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt and think that this label is simply a holdover, an antique from an earlier time, but just so you know, there are a huge number of people in the world who would probably find this label offensive:

Given the fact that I’ve never seen a candy bar labeled this way any where else I’ve traveled, I’m betting you already know it’s offensive. I bought the bar in spite of the label – for my daughter. She enjoyed it tremendously…

Tennis was canceled all weekend because after the rain we had on Thursday afternoon / evening the courts were flooded. So were many of the streets – and my living room. My pretty floor to ceiling windows are apparently very badly sealed. I didn’t have any sandbags handy so I used beach towels to mop up the large puddles (this during my first party in my new place!). Makes me very happy that our new building has a laundry room with large washers and dryers in the basement – because what a wet mess!

I’m happy to say that the get-together with my friends went well in spite of the weather and the mess. But I do have to start all over again with my windows and floors now!

The “brilliant” post idea came back to me, and as I suspected it wasn’t that great anyway. My thought was: when you have a monstrously huge zit blemish and you are sure you can see the person you are talking to looking at it so you make an apologetic comment / joke about it and the person you are talking to totally denies noticing anything, are they lying just to be nice or have you just drawn their attention to the one thing that you didn’t want them to notice anyway?

(It might amuse you to know that this idea came back to me last night as I was washing my face. I don’t care what dermatologists say – enough chocolate and I get zits. End of story.)

I like to look at my blog stats, not only to see how many visits I get on a given day but also to see what searches have led people to my blog. One of the most consistently popular searches is for people wanting to convert their digital books from one format to another. That one I can understand. The next most popular lately is for people searching on “birthday ear pulling” which is funny enough but “birthday ear pulling with cake” really amuses me. I had a post of birthday traditions from around the world on one of my own birthdays, but I am happy to say that no one actually pulled my ear. I wouldn’t have permitted that even if they had offered me cake!

It does make me remember that when I was a child, the other children always took the opportunity to give you a “birthday spanking”, the number of smacks corresponding to the number of years. I suppose that’s a tradition that has totally died out. Try that these days and you’ll end up in the headlines for assault.

This adorable creature (chick? duck?) is the product of an after school art club my son attended this term. If you don’t let yourself get distracted by all the bling you can see where he started his stitching, so neatly and carefully, and then became bored and just wanted to finish. The fact that he stitched the whole thing at all is impressive to me – he’s a seven year old boy after all!

It only rains in Cairo a few times a year, mostly in the winter months. I knew that when I washed my (many) windows, I’d likely have to do it again soon because we are coming to the khamseen season (sandstorms) I did not however expect it to rain two days later. I really should have expected it though because really, isn’t it always the way? I remember when I was younger it always seemed like the best way to invite rain was to wash your car. Rain in Cairo is not cleansing in the least. It never really rains hard enough to wash away the accumulated dust – it only drips enough to carry the dust in the air and on the trees to the objects below. The worst place to stand when it rains is under a tree! Get caught in the rain here and you’ll need a shower when you get home. Having said all that, imagine the dirty drop marks on my once clean windows…

It dripped on and off all day long yesterday, and then late in the day it started to look very dark and gloomy. Lightening started to flash and then suddenly it started to rain really loudly. Hail!

The hail was pea-sized, not that impressive in general hail terms, but mighty impressive in Cairo-terms!

Even as I rushed around to turn off all the computers because of the lightening, I grabbed my camera to take a few pictures (my daughter was not happy with me for opening the door at such a time!)

If snow in Texas and hail in Cairo doesn’t point to changes in the climate, I don’t know what does…

I have moved several times in my life – in fact, this is the 17th time in my life I’ve moved to a new residence. Granted, I wasn’t always responsible for packing and shifting everything, but the process leaves an impression nonetheless.

First of all, I’m much more a purger than a pack-rat. Since I have never known what it feels like to have a house as a permanent home, I just don’t tend to keep many things past their useful life. It’s not to say I’m not sentimental, but you tend to get pretty ruthless when it comes down to having to move things from place to place – not everything makes the cut. I’m also an excellent packer. I know not to pack books in large boxes and I like to use towels, blankets, etc as packing material – it all has to get moved anyway and by using soft items for cushioning, I’m also saving on volume. Stuffed animals are excellent buffers for fragile items

I’ve only ever had the luxury of using professional movers a few times in my life – most of the rest of our moves were accomplished under our own steam. The first time was when my family moved from Wisconsin to Louisiana when I was four years old – mostly what I remember about that move is that the moving men had an eighteen wheeler truck and they let me sit up in the cab and play. Also, one of them made my sister a tiny horse saddle for one of the many model horses she had in her collection.

The second time I hired professional movers was when my husband and I moved from Cleveland, Ohio to North Carolina. Normally we’d have hired a U-Haul truck and done it ourselves but once I’d seen the warning on the sun visor in the truck about overheating brakes and possible brake failure on downhill slopes I didn’t much like the idea of driving the truck down through the mountains of West Virginia! That was a terrible move – we ended up camping in an empty rental house because the movers ended up being 10 days late. I called the company nearly every day to complain. When the truck finally did arrive, the movers refused to open the truck and unload our possessions until we had paid them! Several items were damaged as well. I ended up fighting the company and getting several hundred dollars back for delays and damage but I tell everyone I know not to use that particular company (though no one I tell has even heard of them so that probably says something right there!)

Our move to Cairo from the United Arab Emirates was a huge job. We’d been in the UAE long enough to have had two children and accumulate the possessions of a family of four. And it wasn’t as easy as just packing up – every box had to be inventoried in detail so that the university could write the customs authorities in Egypt a letter of guarantee so we would not have to pay duty on our things. In short, everything we bring in, we take out. Being a librarian by education I went a little overboard on the itemizing – I kick myself when I see “Mr. Potato Head” on the list when I could have just written “toys”!

The only bad part of our Cairo move was the aftermath: I ended up rupturing a disk while unpacking all of our many boxes. Six months in bed sounds like a lot of fun until you can’t do otherwise. Ouch.

My back has since recovered and at last check my other disks were in reasonable shape, but I wasn’t anxious to injure myself again. The university would have moved our boxes for free if I packed them, but not our personal furniture. So when the moving company I called about the furniture offered to pack everything, move it, and unpack for what was a mere pittance in the grand scheme, I decided it was worth it. Honestly, the move last week went so much better than I expected. I’ve never let anyone else pack all of my things before and they did a great job all the way around. They moved my stuff, they took a couple of large potted plants to the apartments of friends of mine, they retrieved the TV satellite off the roof, and they installed my washing machine. The whole time they were at it, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop – they were going to tell me that the move was a bigger job than they expected and I owed them more, for instance. In fact, they finished up and left and never even asked me to pay! It wasn’t until the next day that the owner of the company called me and arranged to come over and collect the fee – which was exactly what he had quoted me.

It was totally worth the money and the twenty five tea bags and kilo of sugar the five guy crew consumed in their tea breaks over two days!!

I’m busy nesting now and making the new place our own – and really hoping I don’t have to face packing up and moving for at least a couple of years!

A couple of days after I returned from Thailand, a friend in Cairo asked me if I wanted to go with her to the Khan al Khalili, the oldest bazaar in Cairo. It wasn’t as if I needed to go shopping having just spent ten days in Thailand, but how could I resist?

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It was actually fairly quiet in the market once we got into the inner streets.

My favorite part of the Khan al Khalili is the architecture – there is never a shortage of things to take pictures of. And there are so many narrow streets and alleys and shops above, hidden up dark stairways, I’m convinced I’ve ever only scratched the surface of this place.

My friend was there looking for a beaded curtain made with glass beads so we ended up in a section full of glass shops.

With my love of silly signage, how could I let this one pass?

It did have rather a celestial feeling upstairs, with all the lanterns hanging from the ceiling.

It’s amazing how much trash you find tucked away in the nooks and crannies, put away because it might be useful one day. Well, guess what? I’M NOT MOVING IT. Throwing. It. Out. There’s plenty more where that stuff came from…

I am happy to report that the only thing injured in the process of reducing the port bottle down to pretty green glass dust were several plastic bags and my rolling pin. Even several layers of thick plastic bags are not enough to protect a wooden rolling pin from shards of glass. (The top edge of my hammer was much more effective) On one hand, I don’t use the rolling pin that much. On the other hand, I guess I’ll have to get a new one since it’s newly gauged surface won’t work as well on dough (darn it!) – unless scar-faced gingerbread men are acceptable!

I just hope that in the end, my pottery projects come out as I envision.

On another topic, housing is provided with my husband’s job and a while back we requested to be moved to a larger apartment. I’ve loved the one we are currently in for the nearly four years we lived here, however we’ve outgrown the space and the children really need their own rooms. The housing department called us on Thursday to say they had a place for us and could we move on Tuesday? My initial reaction was um…no! I’ve gotten pretty good at moving, but I’m not THAT good! The movers I called yesterday for a quote on moving our large furniture items gave me such a good quote on moving everything that I decided in the interest of my stress levels and the remaining disks in my back to let them! They also suggested they could move us on Tuesday and since they are also responsible for the packing, Tuesday it is! Fortunately, our new place is only a few blocks away so things don’t have to be packed quite as carefully as they would if we were moving countries, but it’s still a big job.

Bigger still will be the job of cleaning / sorting / unpacking on the other end!

I also wanted to report that I did try a new recipe over the weekend (February – check!) I made shrimp chowder, using a fish chowder recipe from my Jane Brody cookbook. The only things I changed were I substituted shrimp for fish, I omitted the white wine, and I added a can of corn. It was amusing how much the frozen “cooking shrimp” I bought shrunk in the process though – in the end they were so small they could have been sea monkeys! The chowder was a hit – very tasty – and I’ll definitely be making it again.

I suspect the rest of this week we’ll be eating sandwiches and pizza however!

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There are many levels on which this sign does not seem to be working!