Jenyfer Matthews

At last, the squirrel photos I mentioned Friday. Click any photo to enlarge. This little guy is a neighbor of my father’s. Cute isn’t he?

Not sure how well the hummingbirds are going to like this arrangement, however.

He was looking in the picture window chucking at my daughter – I think he wanted her Honey Nut Cheerios!

The rare coyote squirrel!

There are also a couple of resident foxes in the neighborhood, but they tend to be a bit sneakier. I’ll post a picture if I get any decent ones!

Unfortunately for me, paying to fly business class wasn’t really an option. So imagine my disgust when, as I am at the check-in desk in Cairo, one of the airline representatives comes to inform me that the flight is overbooked and due to my frequent flier status I’m eligible to be upgraded. Even as my heart swelled with hope she continued and tells me that it’s airline policy not to upgrade children under 12. Um, okay. So why tell me at all?? I could have lived happily without ever having been teased in that way. In the end, I got the seats I paid for, but see that cat up there? That was me, squashed in my economy class seats between two sleeping children.

(But it could have been worse – they could have stayed awake like me!)

After enduring a twelve hour flight shoehorned into a square foot of space, sandwiched between the kids, imagine my delight to find out that the next partner airline I was flying had NO problem upgrading children. We flew first class from NY to Minneapolis. It’s a different world up there. We not only had bigger seats and more leg room, but I had a real lunch with free beverages and actual glassware! I didn’t sleep on that flight just so I could better savor the experience

All in all, I can’t complain. I gave myself enough time to clear security and get from place to place and none of my planes were delayed and my luggage arrived in tact. These days, you can’t really ask for much more than that.

Because we are leaving on our summer vacation later tonight, I haven’t wanted to do much grocery shopping and have been trying instead to just eat up what we have left in our fridge and cupboards. Our meals this weekend haven’t been too too strange: macaroni and cheese for the kids, western omelets (with fresh salsa) for me and hubby, bean burritos (with more salsa) for everyone. We ordered pizza on the Fourth of July to eat at a backyard gathering with our neighbors. Sunday was getting trickier though – leftover pizza for lunch, pasta and tomato sauce for the children for dinner. I had an omelet and hubby had a fried egg sandwich.

Today will be even more interesting – or boring – depending on how you look at it. For fresh items, I’m down to one potato, a couple of onions, a lemon, two cucumbers, a bunch of grapes, a few plums, two pots of yogurt, and four eggs. There is plenty of bread in the freezer and a jar of peanut butter in the cupboard. Fried potatoes and scrambled eggs for breakfast sounds like a possibility. After that it will probably be take-out because I’m saving the peanut butter sandwiches for the plane!

The only thing left to do is actually pack up and then hope the rest goes smoothly; forget comfort, I’ll settle for a minimum of delays and no lost luggage. They’ve changed my flight times so instead of having a stop-over in NY with a (blessed) night of sleep in a hotel, instead we get to go all the way through in one really long day. Goodie. There isn’t a neck pillow made that can make a journey like that comfortable…

When the weather heats up in Cairo, there are few more pleasant pastimes than taking a felucca ride on the Nile – which is what I did with some girlfriends last weekend.

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A felucca on the Nile and the skyline of Cairo.

It’s not all pleasure sailing – some people are making their living.

And some are starting a new life together. One photographer was taking a picture of us, taking a picture of them!






Our felucca captain.

Sunset on the Nile.

I never get tired of sailing on the Nile, and every time I get out there I wonder why I don’t go more often.

I escaped all of the responsibilities of my normal life, left the children with their father, and spent last weekend visiting two of my closest friends in Doha, Qatar.

I’d never been to Qatar before – my friends only relocated there in August last year. I was interested to visit though – not only to see my friends and to have a little me-time but also because I wanted to check it out. Qatar is growing rapidly and when you work in this region it’s one of those places that is on the short list of possible places to move for a job.

Doha is a boom town, a sea of construction. Everywhere you look there are cranes and construction sites – with everyone competing to see who can build the shiniest, tallest, most interesting high rise.

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There was construction as far at the eye could see!

Not sure if this is an office building or apartments but it made me a bit dizzy just to look at it!

The pool at the Ritz Carleton hotel – an oasis of calm.

Taking an evening stroll in the Souq Waqif.

Coffee break!

Evening entertainment in the Souq Waqif

View of the Doha skyline from the corniche.

The Gulf region is great for street “art” – I simply had to have my picture taken with this giant oyster shell

Overall, Doha wasn’t a bad place to visit – very shiny and clean. There were lots of mall for us to visit, which was great since that is one thing that Cairo is sorely lacking. The weather wasn’t bad either – hot but with a constant breeze and surprisingly low humidity for being on the water. It will be interesting to see what it looks like in ten years.

And for anyone who read the account of my atrocious seat mate on the flight from Cairo to Doha, I am pleased to say that I had a row of three to myself on the return flight!

So my flight out of Cairo started with a five hour delay due to a technical problem. I’m all for safety, but the Cairo airport is boring under normal circumstances so the delay was especially dismaying. Thank goodness I had a great book to lose myself in (Tell Me Something, by Adele Parks)

We were finally allowed to board and I was all settled in when the flight attendant comes to me and asks if I’d like to change seats since the plane wasn’t full. It wasn’t a long flight and I was already all settled in so I declined.

The flight attendant must have known something I didn’t know. During our 3 hour flight my seatmate picked his nose, licked the underside of the foil covering of his entree and ate with his fingers, snored wetly, blew his nose on his shirt, and spit a loogey on the floor near the window. Is it any wonder I always feel the need to take a shower when I get off a plane? I wanted to wash my hair with sanitizing gel after that display!

The next time a flight attendant offers to move me to a row on my own, I’m going to do it! Anyone have a seatmate horror story to top this one? (I sincerely hope not!)

My children have been home for spring break for nearly two weeks now and I am more than ready for them to go back to school!

I’m really not sure what the difference is between today and when I was a child. I didn’t require nearly the amount of entertainment my own children do. If I ever I whined about being bored, my parents told me to go outside – though honestly I can’t remember whining that much (I can almost hear my mother laughing now) When I was the age of my youngest we lived in a neighborhood full of children. I was allowed to walk down the block and to the homes of my two best friends. I didn’t have a cell phone or even a watch and yet I knew when to go home for dinner.

When I got a little older, roller skating was my thing. I went through several pairs – actually skated the wheels off of them! My first boyfriend (age 9) lived across the street and he’d pull me around behind his bike with a jump rope. Look mom – no helmets! We spent hours doing loops around the block that way.

By the time I was a pre-teen my horizons expanded – I had a ten speed bike. I rode that bike just about everywhere. I can’t actually remember having any restrictions on how far I went – I suppose my parents just trusted me. By the time I was twelve, I rode it a couple of miles on neighborhood streets to the home of my best friend. She and I mostly just walked around and talked.

I have always been very good at entertaining myself, even when I had no friends around. I read books, I taught myself to cross stitch, I planted flowers. When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time either on the phone or asleep One time when my mother was at worked I pulled the wallpaper off the bathroom walls and painted!

So why is it that my own children cannot entertain themselves better? My own mother worked, but I don’t think that it is entirely due to my being a stay-at-home mom – I’ve heard similar complaints from friends who work full time. Is it the fact that today there are TV channels with dedicated children’s programming around the clock? Video games? More theme parks and activity centers? If so, then I think all of this “progress” has stunted the development of the important skill of self entertainment.

Now that I’m an adult, I have several other ways to entertain myself. I still read, I write, I quilt, I cook. This weekend I’m leaving the children with Mr. Matthews, jumping on a plane, and going to Qatar to visit some dear friends who I haven’t seen in almost a year. We have no definite plans but I’m confident that we’ll find a multitude of ways to entertain ourselves!

My family joined in with several other families we know and went to a resort in Ain Suhkna, on the Red Sea, for the weekend. I wasn’t expecting much frankly – I’ve stayed in some real dives in some very nice places in Egypt – but I have to say that this place was a very pleasant surprise. The rooms were a nice size and more importantly, clean! But who wanted to stay in the room when there was a beach, multiple large swimming pools, a playground, and seven tennis courts on the grounds? The only time we spent in our rooms we were sleeping!

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A view from the beach

A view of the resort from a jetty built into the water

A line of ships waiting to pass through the Suez Canal

The first two days we were there, it clouded up in the afternoons and got cooler. It even attempted to rain a couple of times.

Luckily for us, this is about as much rain as I’ve ever seen in Egypt at one time!

Who needed sand toys when there were sea creatures to play with? These jelly fish look pretty serious to me, but in fact were pretty harmless. The children were picking them up and tossing them like frisbees!

We did encourage the kids to let this lovely starfish go back into the water.

All in all, it was a wonderful weekend. I would have been happy to stay a few more days! Since it’s only an hour and half away, I’m already scheming on when we can go back again…

Every now and again I make an effort to escape the rut of my routine and do something new and different. I had the opportunity this weekend so I seized it with both hands and went on a half-day tour of the Bulaq district of Cairo.

The only thing I knew of the Bulaq is that there is a very large fabric souq located there. (What do you expect? I’m a quilter!) There’s much more to it than that – apparently it was once the center of town and a big port, way back when the Nile was actually still running nearby.

(as usual, click any image to enlarge)

One of our first stops was the Sinan Pasha Mosque, a somewhat rare example of an Ottoman style mosque in Cairo – though it did have some Mamluk touches here and there. I’m no architectural expert so I took the tour guide’s word for it. While it was quite plain and unassuming on the outside, it certainly was lovely inside. I can only imagine how lovely in its day, when all the adornments were fresh (and still in place).











The mosque attendants were not at all sure about letting us in to visit. The man on the right was particularly crabby about us being there!


Next, we walked down the street to a hamman, or public bath house, that was built by the same man as the mosque. It’s in the process of being restored, though there are apparently no plans to open it for use.

It has quite an unassuming entrance!

It’s a shame it won’t ever open for business. Can’t you just imagine relaxing in a sauna in here?

I love taking pictures of street scenes, of normal people going about their business. I’m sure that they look at us taking pictures of them or of houses or shops or horses and just shake their heads. Once, when I was still living in the United Arab Emirates, I had a man stop me while I was taking a picture down an alley of a line of laundry hung out to dry and ask me, “Why do you want a picture of that?” To him it was ugly, to me it was fascinating.





We passed along the back of the fabric souq as we walked from site to site. This shop was as close as we got, but it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind!





Work horse, taking a break.

This man was in attendance at the last mosque we visited and he wasn’t nearly so crabby about our visit. Perhaps the first guy just needed a shisha pipe and a cup of tea to mellow him out!

A neighbor of mine had a lovely beaded curtain hanging in her apartment and it occurred to me one day that I’d like one for my apartment too. It turns out that she got it in a very small shop in a local market close to downtown and she offered to take me there on Saturday.

The market is near Attaba Square downtown and was utterly fascinating. I was a little hesitant about taking pictures at first, but then I figured there was no way I was going to blend in anyway! Everywhere I looked there was a photo, but the place was so crowded and there was so much going on it was difficult to frame shots. In the end I just took what I could and figured that maybe some of them would be okay.

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A little bit of this, a little bit of that!

Notice the talented lady in the shadow on the left!

Need shoes? Got shoes!

I can’t imagine a place I would want to buy lingerie less!

A very typical street scene, taken from the car.

It was a successful outing. I got my beaded curtain ($16) and some lovely pictures. I also got the itch to get out of my rut once in a while and go exploring. My own neighborhood is quite bland by comparison to some places that aren’t all that far off. I’m here, I might as well see what I can see, right?

ETA: or perhaps in light of the bombing yesterday, I’ll just stay in my bubble for now. My thoughts are with all those families who had loved ones killed or hurt.