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Published: August 7th 2009
Sadat Shisha Cafe
This is early Friday morning, so nobody around. Further behind me where the people are is a falafel restaurant.Erin's birthday was on July 18, so we decided to go out for lunch. We had been past a pizza restaurant earlier in the week so returned to try our luck. After confirming that they did serve pizza, we got seated upstairs. And that's when it all went wrong. It seemed they didn't actually serve pizza at that time of day, and then they missed most of our subsequent order. And what we did get in the end looked nothing like what it did in the menu. None of this is a big deal, except that I was trying to make Erin's birthday nice. There was another couple in the restaurant who were friendly, and not long after leaving we ran into the man in the street and he was able to show us where to buy a birthday cake. It was a triple layer sponge with peaches and fake cherries and lots of icing... yum!
We have made another friend, Mr Ghazal. He speaks a little English and he says he makes a point of talking to foreigners. He says that there is a Ukrainian family staying in the hotel down the road from us. The father works at
Sadat Shisha Cafe
Area 8 Market shisha cafe on the right the steel mill, which is owned by the same crowd that own the hotel. The lady used to come down to the cafe and chat to him. She speaks good Arabic, having been here 2-3 years. The cafe waiter keeps coming over and telling Mr Ghazal to go away. We wondered if he blames Mr Ghazal as the Ukrainian lady doesn't come to the cafe anymore. Salma (corn and prickly pear seller) says the family has gone away for the summer.
Back home in NZ, our Muslim neighbours always kept the windows shut and the curtains drawn, which we put down to excessive paranoia. Now that I am in Egypt, I fully sympathise, as any time you look out the window you find a face looking in. There is a guy in the neighbouring block who I swear waits on his balcony all day for us to open the lounge window. We have called him Google Egypt. One day after getting home from work, Erin decided to go down to the shop. When he went down the stairs, he saw Google Egypt on his balcony gazing at our lounge window, waiting for it to open. So he does wait
Sadat
Area 8 Market. No-one around during the heat of the day, but they all come out at night there all day!
Mr Ghazal introduced us to a friend of his, an agricultural engineer called Mohammed. Like many educated Egyptians, he wants to emigrate and quizzed us about immigration to NZ. Like many Egyptians who speak fluent English, you wonder if they actually listen to anything you have said. After describing our flat here, and our home in NZ, and after being shown a picture of Erin's wife on Erin's phone, Mohammed then asked Erin if he is married and where his wife is. He seemed quite surprised to learn that I am actually Erin's wife. We asked why that is, when he knew we were sharing a home both here and in NZ, and that the picture on the phone was of his wife. His response: this is what foreigners do, and you are foreigners. We both found that fairly insulting and weren't sure whether it was due to a misunderstanding of what we had said or a general assumption about foreigners on his behalf. More about such attitudes later.
On the weekend we go to the vegetable market. As well as veges, there is a live bird and bunny market, freshly slaugtered animal carcasses, grocers,
Area 8 Shops
More shops and the other Area 8 Mosque spice and seed shops and household implements. One of my favourite things in Egypt is "peasant cheese" - fresh cottage cheese made from buffalo milk. A handful of ladies at the entrance to the market sell milk and cheese and one of them was friendly and managed to catch my eye so I regularly buy cheese from her. We have been buying prickly pears from Salma and her brother every day. They have a mild, sweet flavour and lots of chewy seeds, almost like a pomegranate. We also tried boiling up some of her corncobs. The cobs are white and go slightly yellow when cooked. Man, that is the driest, hardest corn we have ever eaten, and at 1pound (about 30c) a cob, not particularly cheap either. Someone told us that it is maize, not corn, and designed as animal feed.
We are starting to get a bit down about the amount of rubbish around the place. A lot of planning has gone into Sadat, being new and spacious and relatively clean and it seems a shame to let it all go to waste by thoughtless littering. They don't even care that there is rubbish around their mosques, houses,
New Hospital
Outside plaster now complete. One of the banks on the right (the hospital is on the street where all the banks are, which is well out of the central shopping area for some reason) or places where they like to picnic. I realise that caring for the environment is a western luxury but even they don't enjoy having to suffer the stench of a pile of rotting vegetables. So why is it so hard to make a little effort and put rubbish in its place? I have quizzed Egyptians about this in the past, and they have made excuses ranging from "there aren't any bins" to "someone will come later and clean it up". They just don't seem bothered that until someone does come and clean it up, they have to put up with the mess that they have created.
In Egypt, lots of people go around the streets with loudspeakers selling or collecting things, for example onions, carpets, scrap iron, scrap bread, beans etc, so the other day when we heard a loudspeaker we rushed to the window to see what was being peddled. To our surprise, it was a taxi, then we remembered someone telling us about the "death taxi" in Menouf, another medium sized city in the Delta. In Egypt, when someone dies, they are buried within hours, so its important for anyone who might be interested to know straight
At work
Erin welding up a fence section. Only 8 left to build! away. Hence a taxi is employed full time to drive around the city broadcasting the names of the recently deceased.
We have been in Sadat City for one month now. We enjoy the relative quietness and coolness, but it's a bit lonely and there's not a lot to do. Actually, there's nothing to do. Our daily highlight is going to the local shisha cafe and our weekly highlight is going into Area 4 to the vege market or to the kushari restaurant. Next weekend we are going to Cairo to say goodbye to some church people who are going back home for good, and we look forward to it.
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sharon
non-member comment
haha google egypt!