Jenyfer Matthews

You may have noticed I have a schedule for posting – I have a schedule for most of my daily activities. With as many things / activities as I have to keep up with, if I didn’t have a schedule to follow not only would I fall hopelessly behind, but I’d also never know what day it was.

Today was armed forces day in Egypt and so schools and most offices were closed. Generally speaking, I am not a fan of mid-week school holidays. While I did enjoy being able to sleep in this morning, I know I’ll be paying for it for the next couple of days. I was already two days ahead of myself by mid-afternoon, assuming that today was Friday. You can imagine what it does to the children’s sense of time. They will not be pleased to go back to school tomorrow morning.

Oh well, a small price to pay for a truly pleasant and relaxing day spent sitting in the shade at our neighborhood club, chatting with friends while our children swam and played.

I took a walking tour early on Friday morning around downtown Cairo to see and hear about the European architectural influences in the old buildings in that area. Normally I avoid the downtown area at all costs, because though vibrant I usually come home with a migraine from all the pollution. It’s like another world on a quiet Friday morning however.

According to our guide the current area of downtown Cairo, once a low lying swamp, was built using Paris as the model at the turn of the last century. I could see the resemblance…if I looked really, really hard and used my imagination. I admit it – I listened to him but I did not take notes, preferring instead to soak in the atmosphere and take pictures that I’d never be able to get if I had to watch dodge crowds of people or cars the entire time (as I would on a normal weekday). Read this article for more of an overview on the area.

(Click any image to enlarge)

This is Tahrir Square, the main square downtown near which the American University in Cairo, the Egyptian Museum, and several large hotels are located. Don’t let the lack of traffic fool you – it was early!

Access to the underground transit train called “the metro” – I love all the cigarette butts on the mat at the entrance and the “no smoking” sign on the wall as you go down!

An old building that now houses offices and apartments, across from the main entrance of the AUC downtown campus.

I asked our guide about the general attitude to these buildings in Egypt. Let’s face it – they have historical antiquities 1000′s of years old so a hundred years it next to nothing. So many of the buildings are so sadly neglected and I have been given to understand from some others that most landlords would rather let the buildings fall down and replace them with high rises than put the money into restoring the old buildings. Was the government offering incentives to landlords to take care of their properties (or imposing any penalties). He answered that attitudes are changing which I was glad to hear. It would be a shame to lose this part of Cairo’s history to yet more concrete boxes.

Old meets new.

Not sure the aerials are an improvement!

Our guide was telling us about a historic building that now houses some ministry or other but I was more interested in using my super-zoom to catch this woman enjoying the morning breeze on her balcony. She looks like she’s enjoying herself.

The mural is apparently from the 70s but it’s still fun – does it make you think of Maggi Chicken Bouillon cubes?

There were some industrious people up and about – and those who were simply enjoying a glass of tea and a smoke.

Our guide called this the “eclectic building” because of the massively different styles from bottom to top. Just look at that incredibly detailed decoration at the bottom – all hand carved stone.

You won’t forget it…but you might regret it!

People watching goes both ways!

It’s sights like this that make me wonder how much longer these buildings will last – fire hazard much?

This is the traditional way to deliver “baladi bread”, the Egyptian flat bread. Takes talent, no?

This is a view of an ornate, sadly neglected and abandoned palace. Reminds a bit of the palace where the Prince might have found Sleeping Beauty.

According to our guide, this palace was once occupied by a school. Can you imagine how distracting this decoration might have been to little boys?

Our guide said he hoped that one day someone might turn the place into a boutique hotel – I think that is a fabulous idea, but they would have to do something about the view first!

We ended our tour with lunch a landmark cafe called Felfela – famous particularly for their “foul” (fava bean dip) and “tamiya” (think falafel made with fava beans) Hard for me to believe I’ve been here for nearly four years and never eaten there. I can say that it was worth the wait for the tamiya – it was fabulous. Maybe I should go downtown more often…

As you might imagine, it’s dusty in Cairo, and lucky me, I have a wall of windows in my living room, two stories high on one half of the room. I cleaned them when we moved in back in February – and then it rained almost immediately, streaking them with dust once again. Since it is quite a project to clean them, I decided to put that project off until after the dust storm season had passed. Once that season was finished, I decided to put it off til after the summer, since I always tend to do a deep-clean-nesting sort of thing when I’ve been away for a while.

I hired a maid to come in once a week while I was away on summer vacation, to look after my husband and the apartment. She asked me if I wanted her to clean the windows. Did she even have to ask??? The idea of getting out of that job alone made it worth hiring her.

I’m probably just picky, but I wasn’t impressed when I saw how she’d done. Based only on the swirly streaks on the glass, it was obvious that she did attempt to clean the windows. But since the long handled squeegee I bought was still in the wrapper and the glass cleaner hadn’t been touched, I’m not sure what method she used.

I’ve been home just about a month and the streaky swirls finally got to me today.

Whoever designed and installed the sliding windows in my dining room was clearly a man and / or had a morbid sense of humor. They are at least 3 feet wide and the only way to reach them is to stand on a chair and then lean out. Did I mention I live on the third floor? What I won’t do to get a streak free shine! Even with my squeegee there were places I could not reach without a safety harness. That’s when the old Swiffer handle I have came in handy.

I’ll admit that even with my own acrobatics, there are still a few streaks but the windows are way better than they were before and it’s easier to live with my own streaks now that I’ve been reminded of what a pain it is to clean them. Thank god the windows in the other half of the living room swing in on hinges!

Now all I have to hope is that there isn’t a dust storm anytime soon.

It’s only Monday and I’m already exhausted.

In part, my lack of energy has to do with having had a busy weekend. Two children, two sports activities each = much running to and fro. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know how they do it. They are, however, considerably younger than I am and almost solid muscle.

I happily sent them back to school yesterday morning and got busy with my own to-do list. After changing all the sheets and getting a few loads of laundry going, I went out to do my grocery shopping for the week. Good news was that I had a frequent shopper discount card to use at the store for 10% off my bill. Bad news was that the ATM on my way was out of cash (not an unusual phenomenon).

I tend to rely more on my credit cards when I am in the US, but in Egypt I prefer cash. Not only because Egypt is the land of fraud and my credit card companies tend to put holds on my cards when I use them here, but also because of foreign transaction fees. I only use my credit cards here sparingly. I had a bit more money than I typically need for a weekly shop so I went on my way.

Miscalculation. In addition to groceries, I bought next week’s soccer snacks, plus a few other “fancy” treats for the children’s lunches. In the end I spent nearly all the cash I had, even with the discount, and I had not yet done my produce shopping.

I didn’t let that stop me however. I have never yet taken advantage of it, but I know that my vegetable seller will give credit. I could in fact just pay up once a month if I wanted. I decided in this case that I would try another ATM on my way home and pay him when he delivered my things. When I asked him if this was okay, he not only agreed immediately but he offered to give me a loan so I could do my grocery shopping. How’s that for service?

The second ATM had money and I was able to pay them at delivery. Somehow it doesn’t bother me to pay my credit cards off once a month, but I don’t like the thought of owing the vegetable man money!

I spent the rest of my day in the kitchen washing fruit, doing dinner prep, and planning school lunches for the week – after having cleaned all of the bedrooms and floors upstairs. After the children returned home we did snacks, homework, and headed out for tennis lessons.

Readers have asked me how I come up with new story ideas. The problem is not the ideas – the problem is finding the time to write anything.

It didn’t take me very long to kick the jet lag from my return trip, but I’m not out of the woods yet.

Egypt practices daylight savings time, but so far as I can tell, the Egyptian government seems to change the clocks at their whim. No one ever seems to know what it’s going to happen. How does anyone find out? A rumor spreads, then people wait around to see if it is announced in the local papers. Perhaps there is a master plan somewhere but I have yet to see a calendar printed with the date as you do in other parts of the world.

This year, the clocks changed back a bit early because of Ramadan – no surprise because Muslims break their day-long fast at sunset and they wanted the sun to set as soon as possible. Here’s the absurd part: now that Ramadan is over, instead of just rolling with it, the government is actually going to change the clock again – “springing forward” an hour – only so that they will then “fall back” again on October 1st.

It’s amazing how much difference an hour can make in your day and sleep cycle so ask me how much I’m looking forward to losing, then gaining back, then losing an hour three times within a month??

By the way, the recycled Frankenstein bicycle has been put to rest. We patched up the flat tires, only to discover that the handlebars were loose and damaged in a way that could not (easily) be repaired. Because I am, well ME, I scavenged the tires and took back my tubes before we put it out for the garbage collectors to take away. Now I have a month or so to find a good quality new bicycle for my son’s upcoming birthday…

It’s been a rough landing in Cairo this year. It’s only the second week of school and my son is already taking a mental health day.

I guess I can’t be too hard on him – he has always had a hard time settling into a new school year. Even holidays throw him off. Guess what? We have a four day weekend coming up for Eid, the end of Ramadan.

(Confession: I still have that bag of food to give away!)

I haven’t had the easiest time settling in myself. I can’t concentrate on anything, yet sitting around depresses me. Having trained myself to write for an hour at night, it’s difficult to settle down in the daytime now – which brings me back to the concentration problem. I’m doing what I can to force myself to get back into the routine and for now that means tackling all the little things that have been languishing on my “to-do” list for ages, like finally hanging up those pretty applique wall hangings I bought in the Tent Makers Souk and finally, finally seasoning the cast iron waffle iron I bought last spring. Doing these things hasn’t yet done much to alleviate my flat mental state, but at least I am getting a few things done.

A few of the things I still need to do:

Clean and season my grandmother’s cast iron stew pot (it is soaking in a vinegar solution to loosen the baked on crud even as I type)
Dye two pairs of my son’s stone colored chinos (he is incompatible with light colors so I got dark brown and olive dye)
Dye two pairs of my son’s navy school shorts (they are faded)
Catch up on my children’s scrap books
Clean off my sewing table, so I can you know, use it. (this has been languishing since we moved in Feb!)

All this in addition to the usual daily chores and cooking. Sigh.

Oh well, it could be worse. I might have actually gotten that part-time job I applied for at the children’s school…that would have been three days a week right down the drain…

My poor son is the victim of his birth order and my thrifty nature. If I can get a little more use out of something by handing it down to him when his sister is done with it, I will. I’ve saved untold amounts of money from the fact that until recently my daughter was the ultimate tomboy.

The Christmas my daughter was three, Santa brought her a pretty red Huffy bike with white wall tires and chrome fenders. It was a nice sturdy bike with a pedal brake, which is much easier for a child to learn to use and not all that easy to find (not that I would know since Santa brought this one) When she outgrew it and got a new bike, I handed it down to my son, in spite of the fact that it was a “girl bike” with a downward sloping bar. I figured that was only in his favor – he is a wild boy on a bike and what engineering genius thought it was a better idea for a man to have a high crossbar anyway??

Just before my summer vacation, my son’s red bike got a flat. We tried to patch it but the tube was a loss. So were the tires – and since my daughter is now ten and those tires never gave us an ounce of trouble in SEVEN YEARS I could hardly complain. I ordered a couple of thorn resistant tubes and new tires to pick up in the US and bring back.

In the meantime, my son grew taller of course. He’s almost too big for that wonderful red bike now. He rode his sister’s larger bike recently and it looked much more size appropriate. I had thought of getting him a new bike for his birthday, and I may still, but while every toy store in town has a selection of bicycles most of them are total crap – you wouldn’t believe how many of those locally available bikes I’ve seen people buy and throw away within a year. And most have hand brakes besides.

A good friend of mine who left this summer also left two bikes behind at the building where we were neighbors before I moved in February. Her son had the same kind of Huffy bike my daughter has, with a pedal brake, so I decided to go and take a look at it, with the idea that maybe it could serve as a stop-gap for my son while I look around for a good bike in the meantime.

My friend’s son is a wild man and he rode that bike hard. Extremely hard. I knew that when I went to see it, but I figured that if it could survive my friend’s son (who was also a close friend of my son) that it must be decently constructed. That other boy makes my son look almost sedate!

The bike had a torn up seat (which it turns out was a replacement that had previously been on my son’s toddler bike), was missing its hand grips and one pedal. But since it was overall in okay condition in spite of the rough treatment it received, I decided that I could make it work. The bike is black and neon green. Now it’s a Frankenstein bike. We cannibalized a few bikes destined for the junk man and replaced the seat with a red and black one and took a purple pedal off of my son’s toddler bike. I’ll have to hunt down some hand grips and also get a new tube for the flat tire and a couple of matching pedals if I can find them, but otherwise, it’s good to go.

Lucky for me, my son doesn’t care about the hodge podge of mismatched parts – he is thrilled with his “new” bike. He’ll be even happier when I get that tire fixed…

My son went on a play date over the weekend, during which the hosting parent decided to direct some charitable activities. It’s Ramadan, a month-long Muslim holiday during which they fast in daylight hours, and this parent decided to put together some bags of groceries to distribute to poor families.

My son came home with three bags of groceries to assemble his give-away bags. Each bag ended up having 500g dry lentils, 500g red lentils, a bag of pasta, a 1kg bag of sugar, a package of dried apricot sheets, a 1kg bag of rice, and a small pack of biscuits. We assembled the two bags and my son was very excited about the idea of finding someone to give them to.

There is no shame in begging in Islam. In fact, from my limited understanding of things, it’s part of a Muslim’s religious duty to care for those less fortunate. Part of the reason for fasting during Ramadan is so that they can experience the deprivation that poor people suffer on a daily basis.

There is always a catch of course, this one being strictly cultural. One is that being on foot, I don’t often give money to beggars unless I can make a speedy getaway. I’ve been in situations where you give some money to one person and suddenly ten more come out of the woodwork. A friend of mine said she gave some money to a woman with a baby one day and found herself being followed home by a small posse of beggars. There are so many poor people in Egypt, you could stand on the street corner and give out money steadily until you yourself were impoverished and still there would be more people with their hands out.

The other thing is that I myself feel very awkward about going up to people on the street and offering them charity. I don’t want to make any faulty assumptions about a person’s income level or offend anyone’s pride. I would prefer for someone to approach me, thereby removing all doubt. However, I live in a rather affluent suburb of Cairo so there aren’t so very many beggars on the street here anyway. I know of a couple of families who live in tumble-down shacks on vacant lots, but again I feel strange going up to their door and offering them charity they may or may not want.

I also wonder about how best to include my son in this activity, or whether to include him at all. Surely, it’s not a bad thing for him to know that not everyone is as fortunate in their circumstances as he is and to teach him compassion, but how does including him in the equation change things? Would people be more willing to accept an offering from a well intentioned (and adorable) little boy? Or might they think that I’m using them as some sort of object lesson? I don’t want to humiliate anyone in the process.

It is, of course, entirely possible that I think too much.

Still, I have these two bags to give away so I took one bag with me on Saturday, to look for a likely candidate while we walked to our club to take our children to their tennis lessons (just the contrast in those two very different activities makes me squirm) The bag was ridiculously heavy and of course I did not see anyone who might have really needed such a bag. I did not want to carry it home again so a friend and I took it to a family who lives around the corner from our club, in a vacant lot. They were extremely gracious and seemed pleased enough to have it. I was extremely pleased not to have to carry it home. Win win.

I took the other bag with me when I went out to grocery shop the next morning. Lately there have been a least a couple of ladies who have been begging on my route to the shops, and failing that I figured I would be able to find a street sweeper. Where are the all beggars when you need them? There was no one out either going to or returning from the store. I’d leave it outside a poor family’s house if I didn’t worry that they would be suspicious of who left it there and reject it for that reason. I ended up carrying the damn bag home again where I weighed it (once I got the strength back in my arm). It weighs nine pounds. I feel like I’m doing my own sort of Ramadan penance, just carrying the thing around.

I’ll give it a couple more tries. Surely I can find someone, somewhere who would appreciate it before Ramadan ends…

I’m very happy to say that the children started school yesterday – yeah hooray! You might think that after having spent all day, every day with them for the entire summer I might have done something fun with myself like go and have a pedicure or a coffee morning with the other moms. Nope. I know how to really have fun.

I came home and changed no less than seven light bulbs, a few of which required me to stand tip-toe at the top of a six foot ladder. In my stairwell. If that’s not an adrenalin rush, I don’t know what is.

One of the first things I did upon returning home from vacation was to change all the bedding, including quilts. I washed and stowed the Broken Star quilt for another year and put on what I think of as my late summer quilt.

I made this quilt at least five years ago using a variety of bali / batiks and marble fabrics. It’s a fairly simple pattern that really lets the gorgeous fabric sing. My original plan was to use black sashing between the blocks but once I had all the blocks done, black seemed too harsh so I opted for navy blue.

It’s a bit difficult to see, but I hand quilted swirly suns using rainbow variegated thread in the center of the blocks.

I backed this quilt with a large scale bamboo and hibiscus print that is all in shades of blue. It was a print I fell in love with at first sight while fabric shopping in Dubai one day and bought acres of, figuring that one day I would use it as for backing. This quilt was just the perfect candidate.

I was sort of thinking of making each of the children a Halloween quilt this year, but somehow I think that’s a project I should have started in May if I was going to finish this year!

My trip back to Egypt went smoothly enough, in spite of a surprise re-route through Paris. I was worried about that – can you blame me after the trouble I had on the first part of my trip?? – but it all went well enough. I am almost positive two of my bags were over the weight limit but with the distraction of re-routing me and the children either the gate agent didn’t notice or chose to let it slide. Phew.

I arrived in Cairo three hours later than originally scheduled, just before iftar (the sunset breaking of the fast during Ramadan) and was a little concerned about that timing because typically nothing happens for about two hours after that. It was in fact the most efficient arrival I’ve ever experienced. I was through passport control in about five minutes and all of my bags came through one after another, bam bam bam. I was through customs and driving away in half an hour. Unheard of. The call to prayer (and the signal to eat) came as I was waiting for my driver to bring the car around. The timing worked out in another way as well: the roads were nearly empty so we cruised home in no time.

I can almost hear you thinking what’s the catch. Well, let’s just say I would advise you never to assume an airline with have the sense to throw a tarp over your luggage, even if it is raining steadily for a five hour layover. All of my bags were damp and the contents of two were actually wet. One quilting magazine and some other assorted paperwork were soaked. It could have been worse I suppose – at least all my new books were well protected (I tend to pack with lots of plastic bags, against interior explosions of shampoo, etc)

I’ve been back a day and my bags are unpacked and put away, until next time. I am however still settling in. After being in the quiet of the north woods for six weeks, things here seem really loud. Air conditioners perpetually blowing, two toilets running, traffic noise – not to mention the children. It will take me a little while to tune it all out again.

It’s quiet in other ways though. Two of my closest friends moved away at the end of June. No more girly chats, no more wine nights. No more silly text messages throughout the day. I’m sure I’ll find ways to fill in the gaps and distract myself but for right now it all feels a little hollow.

School starts on Sunday. I’ve been ALONE for more than half an hour since the end of June and I’m looking forward it. I haven’t been able to write since two nights before I left Minnesota and I’m itching to pick up the story again…