I called the vet. “I’d like to make an appointment”.
“Why?” came the response. Then I had to explain. I’d found some strange long sausage-shaped growth thing on my cat’s inside back leg. I tried to explain. I tried again. Then I said,
“Like a tumour.” I was understood immediately and soon an appointment was made.

I turned up with the furry ginger monster in my arms (having refused to go in his cat box), a green lead attached to his torso in case he decided to try to unhook his claws from my shoulders and make a run for it. I was asked what the problem was. I toyed it over. Did I try to explain, again, or did I use the word that worked last time, albeit probably, and hopefully, inaccurate.
“I think he has a tumour.” I said.

It worked. We went through. The vet and his assistant opened the poor cat’s legs and took a look.
“This?” he said, nonchalently. I confirmed. “It’s just matted hair. Very common on Persians.”

Did I feel like an idiot? Well, the fact that he and his assistant were laughing at me, not meanly and quite openly, made it rather difficult for me to try and pretend it was one of my better moments. I accepted in good grace and decided I had little else to lose.

“Would you be able to check if he has a penis?” I asked. They looked up, not sure if I was joking. “I asked another vet to neuter him and I’ve been afraid that he actually castrated him because he used the word castrated, not neutered. I thought it was just a mistranslation, not believing someone would actually castrate a cat, but since I brought him home afterwards, I haven’t been so sure. His hair is so long that I can’t see. I’ve been feeling so guilty about it for months now.” This time they made no attempt to hide their good-natured laughter, and in fairness, I was laughing too.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained: my cat has a penis. It seems that castration is the ‘vet’ term for neutering.

I have to claim absence from real blogging over the past month on health matters. Nothing serious, but enough that in four weeks I’ve been on antibiotics (with due cause, not just because I’ve had a sniffle – if you’ve been to the average Egyptian doctor you’ll know what I mean) three times in the past four weeks….

A few days ago I arrived at the doctor’s with Mr S. It was about 30C outside (8pm) and everyone was wearing summer clothes. The doctor walked into the clinic, came over and said hello to us (we’re permanent fixtures there this month). Then his head jerked back to me, looked at me wrapped up in a fleece and asked with mor concern that doctors usually express what was wrong. Mr S said, “She has a temperature of 39.3C (108F). ” I looked up from snuggling my neck into the hood of my fleece and said, “I’m cold”.

Action stations hit red alert. Assistants were summoned with the sort of urgency that says ‘I’m calm, I’m keeping calm, but move NOW!’ to open a room for me and put me in..well, an informal, temporary quarantine. I was happy: – it had a bed and it was too much effort for me to sit up, so I could just sleep as I waited for my turn. I was sure it wasn’t Swine Flu, but at the same time, was really hoping it wasn’t – I had no desire to be in the hospital where they keep those with swine flu, 5 star service it isn’t…

It came quickly. He took my temperature, and it had risen again. I told him I felt like I had flu and food poisoning at the same time, because my knees were so sore. Then the questions about chest pain, coughing, sore throat came. I answered no to them. Then he did an abdominal exam and found a source of pain.

Then he asked if I’d eaten outside the house over the weekend. Mr S and I looked at each other sheepishly, and I left Mr S to answer, “Yes…foul and ta’ameya..in Ras Sudr”. Ras Sudr, being a small town on the Western Sinai coast, is rather like saying that we ate from the street in Cairo – the chances of food there being really clean are slim. Then he had to add the cardinal sin, “Oh, and we asked for salad in the sandwiches.”

The laughter that came out of the normally serious doctor was nothing short of a giant wave of relief. “It’s just a case of bad food poisoning!” he eventually bellowed through his chortles, “Don’t worry, it’s not Swine Flu.”.

Something along the lines of, “Well of course not, all the pigs are dead” zipped through my mind, but I held my tongue – it was too much effort to move it anyway.

After I told this story to a friend yesterday, she replied that everyone is over reacting about swine flu. I have to say, I think he’s over reacting because it was food poisoning, but if I had had swine flu, it would have been sensible. I’d rather be put in a separate room unnecessarily, than not!

I’ve been at home pretty much for the past month so I haven’t had much contact with people. I have been told though, by a normally sensible person, that we should all be eating red fruit and veg. Why? Because apparently an Egyptian doctor has been in the press saying that that would protect against swine flu. Right. “Does this doctor also own a farm? Fruit and veg shops?” I asked.

It seems I’m not the only cynic. 

First published in Daily News Egypt on 14 June 2009

*from the strip: bool means urine in Arabic.

I’ve had my eye on this product for a while now. Purely for research purposes, you understand. It seemed that in order to share it with you, I was going to have to reach into my pocket.

Suffering from the age-old short-arm deep-pocket syndrome, I procrastinated.

Fate came to lend a hand and a little brochure appeared.

Free will..because I’m worth it!

It was a seemingly innocuous event: we parked the car.

We went to have dinner with some friends recently. The street was crammed full of cars, nothing unusual there, and we were happy to spot one parking space. Mr S carefully reversed into it.

We left the car, went to our friends entrance. As we got there, a bowab* from across the street said, “Someone’s coming.” I asked what he meant, and he repeated it. Then we were buzzed in and went to enjoy our evening.

About two hours later, the bowab from our friends’ building rang the doorbell and informed us that the man whose parking space we took had now come back and blocked us in.

We were a bit surprised – we hadn’t seen anything saying there was private parking. Mr S went to sort it out before dessert. We expected him to be a good 10 mins as he drove around looking for a new space. He was back in no time, with a piece of paper and looking shocked. ‘The man’ had apparently arrived home, found us in his unmarked ‘private’ parking space, parked his car in front of ours blocking not only us in, but the whole street. He’d left his handbrake on (not normal in Egypt where in exactly this situation cars are gently pushed aside), gone inside, printed off a poster, come back outside and put it on our windscreen.

The shock Mr S was in transferred around the table as we read the paper. Unprintable here, it had a giant fist with the middle finger sticking up and enough text to call us jack*ss and worse, for stealing his spot.

Thinking I could speak to the bowab of his building, or him, and soothe things over I went out. ‘The man’ had somehow made clear to the men on the street that he was going to bed and would not get out of bed to move the car. It was about 9.30 – 10pm.  I buzzed his apartment, but to no avail.

In the end Mr S, together with our host and another dinner companion, managed to get the car out (by a million-point turn and even lifting it at one point). Bravo I say.

I’ve been living in Cairo for seven years now, and it’s nine years since I first came here to study. I have never, ever experienced this before, nor heard of it happening. Cairo is starved of parking spaces, and in upmarket areas of Egypt where people claim pavements or special corners for parking there are either bollards or ‘private parking’ signs. Utterly devoid of either of these, or anything else for that matter, it’s not unreasonable for non-residents of the street not to know a space is ‘private’.

I have told some Egyptian friends about what happened and they were more shocked than we were at the time. Egyptians just don’t behave like this. It’s a parking space. It’s a small issue.

We could argue that ‘the man’ had a hard day at work. Perhaps a hard week. Perhaps a hard month. Fair enough, that’s not nice. But you know what, he’s driving a large 4×4, paid for by his company, his kids are at expensive private school, paid for by his company, he’s living in one of Egypt’s most expensive neighbourhoods, again, paid for by his company, he gets trips back to the States, yep, paid for by his company. How do I know this? I don’t for sure, but it’s a standard package for oil workers and the type of 4×4 together with the number plate are 99% of the time driven by American oil workers here.

It reminded me of why I used to cringe telling people that I’d moved to The Hood: it’s associated with the sort of person who has so much given to them (yes they’re working, but so are heart surgeons both here and back home, and they don’t get everything given to them) and doesn’t have the good grace to put it into some sort of context in which they feel lucky. Instead of taking on board some of the suffering around them, they concentrate on their own ’suffering’.

To think that someone ’stealing’ your unmarked parking space is such a big deal, when people just down the road are struggling to feed their children, where they eat meat once or twice a year – and that’s because someone is generous enough to give it to them – where labourers sit on the roadside every day, hoping someone will come along and hire them for a day’s back breaking work for meagre pay, where the majority of the population lives on less than $2 per day… To think a parking space is such a big deal when all this is just down the road, is utterly abhorrent.

It reminded me of the people I do not generally meet here. They tend to be American. They live in The Hood, their children attend a very privileged school (lucky them, really, it’s a great school), they spend the weekends at an expat social club only for Americans working in certain companies, they don’t even need to interact with Egyptians when shopping because they buy everything, even milk, and, I’ve been told, fruit and vegetables at the commissary, a special, high security US government run supermarket that flies everything in for the ’suffering’ American expats who are eligible to shop there. And last but not least, they complain about how hard life is in Egypt and in general about Egyptians.

Not all American expats are like that, not at all, but they do exist – and not just American, although the commissary is something no other government seems to find necessary for its nationals living in Egypt.

Anyway, I was so furious about the incident I thought about keying his car or letting the air out of his tyres. Until it hit me: the sort of life ‘the man’ must think he has in order to react so venomously to such a triviality is payback enough.

* Bowab literally means doorman. In reality he deals with taking care of the building and cars.

I recently received a comment on the Foreign women and orfi marriages in Egypt post. It was addressed as “Hi All” so I thought I’d post it here to maximise responses. To you all you lurkers, yes you, you know who you are (and I know you’re there!), this is a time to delurk and put in your 5 cents worth. You don’t even need to introduce yourselves!

“..I have just returned from Sharm el Sheikh where I met this wonderful Egyptian man…A ll we did was talk about everyday things a few days before I left. He was being ulta nice to me and I do believe he is genuine, as he didn’t seem the type to come on to girls, he was rather quiet – there was many girls around and he never seemed interested in any of them. I had only been there a few days when I first noticed him. You look and watch their actions etc., but all he did was work, work, work. During the last few days he was telling me I had the most beautiful eyes…on the night before we left, he was at our table all the time, so on leaving we said nice to meet you etc., gave him a good tip [and] said we may return in the autumn… The next day when he..finished work, he came to the pool where I was sitting and said he had to say one last goodbye. I gave him a hug and he had a tear in his eye. We exchanged mobile numbers and I never thought for one min he would text. I was at the airport and he should have been sleeping..he texts saying he had great time meeting me… to be honest I was flattered. Well 6 weeks have gone by and everyday night he texts me..now he wants me to go back. He will take 2 weeks off work and we will rent apartment, which he will pay for – he offered. He wants to cook listen to music and ???? I said I was worried about law in Egypt. He then [mentioned] a contract to stay together, which i believe is the orfi marraige. If I want to get that we will, if not we won’t, as it will be ok for us. Its up to me what I want. He says [I can] just put [the]paper in my bag and after [the] holiday if I still want him keep it for when I visit again..or put in the bin, but hopes i would keep it if we get one. He then says he wants me for life and one day we both stay in Egypt and go to Cairo for full contarct marraige if I want. I guess alot of people will think WAKE UP but he sounds so trusting and to be honest I do believe him. We now text when I wake in the morning, when he goes to bed at lunchtime, before he starts work and before I..go to sleep. Sometimes he calls around 4 in the morning because it’s quiet then… and this is everyday. Does anyone think I am getting taken for a mug?????? How can he know he wants me if nothing really happened when I was there?”

………

How can he know he wants me if nothing happened when we were there? Exactly. He doesn’t know your personality, not from when you were there. He doesn’t know how amazing you are, what makes you truly happy, or how horrible you are when you’re grumpy. You’re right.

Let’s look at what he does know.

He knows you have money. It doesn’t matter how much money you think you have or don’t have, at minimum you have enough money for a holiday abroad and enough to plan another holiday abroad. In Egypt that is something only the very rich can imagine doing. In Egypt, working as a waiter in Sharm is respectable, but imagine Bill Gates staying in a hotel in London and a waitress starts telling him she likes his eyes.  Shouldn’t he be just a little bit suspicious? Imagine she sends him texts for weeks and calls him sometimes. If you were Bill Gates’ friend, wouldn’t you be highly sceptical of the waitress’ intentions? If you were the waitress and you saw that the millionaire was flattered by your advances, wouldn’t you continue? I mean, what’s to lose?

He knows you have a foreign passport. As much as he probably loves Egypt, as much as he may (and you haven’t mentioned this, but as it’s a common story, I’m filling in this blank) say he does not want to leave Egypt, the truth is that working abroad will make him far more money than working in Egypt. Leaving Egypt is not so easy as other countries get tougher on immigrants, but if you get married and after some time, get the passport, suddenly hundreds of doors open.

He knows that you will sleep with him. Sorry, this isn’t exactly tasteful, but it’s something that cannot be overlooked. While it is totally accepted in our culture to have a ‘fling’ in Egypt it is absolutely and utterly not.  Not at all. No way. Sex before marriage is pretty impossible. It doesn’t mean people don’t want it though – we’re all human. Imagine the thought of two weeks of sex, in a country where having a phyisical relationship with a girlfriend means holding hands.

Something worries me slightly: you do not know this guy. Staying in a flat with someone you hardly know,  other than through phone calls, in a foreign country and culture, is a risk. Chances are the risk is minimal, but why put yourself in that position? And what would you do in the worst case scenario? Sharm is incredibly spread out and very difficult to get around without a car. If  you had to get to the airport or hospital in a hurry, how would you manage that? It’s not as simple as just dialling an emergency number, or calling a cab. If you’re not staying in a hotel in Sharm, life it really not as straightforward. The hotels are there to make things easy. Taxis wait around them and reception will organise pretty much anything you ask them to.

Think of it like this: would you want your best friend to go and stay with someone she hardly knew in a country where she doesn’t speak the language and get a contract/marriage she doesn’t fully understand?

The other thing that this guy knows is that you like attention and flattery. Really, who doesn’t?! It’s not a weakness, it’s totally normal, but just because someone pays you a lot of attention, does that mean that you should be considering marriage – either full or orfi?!

If you feel like having an adventure, by all means go back to Sharm, with a friend to look out for you and stay in a hotel. Don’t get any sort of contract, don’t stay with him. Don’t make it so easy for him: if it’s true love, he will understand why you don’t want to stay with him just yet.

…….

It would be fantastic if you lurkers would get in on this. In case it adds to anything, our commenter is 35 and the waiter is 24.

This post is not about Egyptian men. There are no generalisations made other than this: women are women, men are men and nationality does not determine ‘goodness’ (or ‘badness’). All comments are moderated and no rude, rasict or otherwise derogatory comments will be accepted.

I have never been one to get homesick. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s a deep-rooted lack of enthusiasm for Scotland’s evergray skies and its winds that seem to chill me to the bone. Perhaps. I love Scotland, I am enthusiastically Scottish, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the weather, or feel homesick.

So I don’t know what it is about this video. Perhaps it’s because it shows a lot of the places I used to spend my time as a student. Perhaps. Perhaps it’s just been a while since I visited my home town (Edinburgh – my dear North American readers, sorry, but there’s no ‘g’ pronounced at the end there, aim more for ‘Edinbuhruh’, cheers, you’ve just won a lot of friends!).

Perhaps it’s just because I’m happy to see someone in my home town do something so cool*, so utterly amazing. Go on. Watch it. It’s totally worth it.

I think most of the rest of us are but mere ‘Sunday’ cyclists!

*Of course he’s not the only one, it’s just I’m so uncool that I don’t see many!

I used to work with a girl who got engaged. She was very focused and dedicated to her work, to the point where the rest of the team wondered how on earth anybody could be just quite so efficient – and so nice. For weeks and weeks after her engagement, she would be caught zoned out in meetings, looking down at her hand, touching her ring and smiling when she thought nobody was watching. It was very cute – and rather funny.

I have turned into that girl.

Admittedly I’m in a grumpy mood today: I always am after a bad night’s sleep.

But, but BUT, I wasn’t last week when I went shopping and I was superbly pissed off then too.

I walked into La Senza at our local hypermarket/shopping centre. It was about 9.30am and there were seven guys in their twenties, two of whom were clearly behind the tills, the rest were just hanging out, chatting with the two female floor assistants. Of the guys there, four were clearly watching me as I perused the lingerie. One of the girls came to follow me around and smooth out anything I even breathed on.

I hate that. I don’t care if they do it when I’ve left the shop, but following me and straightening every, single hanger while I’m there, like I’m ruining their display of hanging garments, which is there so that people like me come and look and then, presumably, buy, drives me nuts. Team it with some sexually repressed spectators and, La Senza, there’s not a hope in hell of me getting out my credit card.

So, I left the shop last week without buying. Not before quick glance at the two guys who were still watching me, then the two cashiers, then the guys sitting around the changing rooms with the other floor assistant and saying, in Arabic, loud enough for them to hear, “So, this is where all the guys come to hang out?” and walking out.

Today I went in just to see if it was different. Instead of seven, there were five guys.

I just don’t get it. It’s lingerie. It’s a conservative society. Women are covered up to protect their modesty, and so as not to titillate men, but lingerie stores have men working the tills? I know that there are bra stalls in markets and women pick their bras in full view of everybody, not just the male stall holder, but this is (for Egypt) an upmarket, expensive store.

It’s not just La Senza. A few shops away is Women’s Secret. They have a female floor assistant with a man on the till. The same with Nike Woman. Is it that Egyptian women cannot count and so cannot be trusted with tills? Nope. Perhaps it’s the patriarchial society. I don’t know. I don’t CARE! I don’t want some guy folding my bras, checking out if I might need another size (what the hell does he know about how bras fit?!) by asking and taking a quick ‘glance’.

Egyptian women are smart. They are also really nice and friendly. I would have probably bought something in all three stores today had there not been men checking out what I was going to be wearing for Mr S (and him alone). Egyptian men are also smart, but there are plenty of other retail ‘experiences’ that talented men can work at, there is no reason for them to be pawing my panties!

Cairo finally has a boutique hotel. In a city with such wonderful architecture that is, for the most part, under performing it’s potential through lack of investment, I’m surprised that it’s taken quite so long for someone with a bit of dosh to establish a well-run, well decorated boutique hotel.

It’s called Villa Belle Epoque. It’s stunning. There is a great article in the Times comparing it to Cairo’s ‘monumental bed farms’ – which, of course, are left in its shadows.

I am excited by this hotel because Cairo has so much to offer tourists, but nowhere ‘tasteful’ to stay on a small scale. It’s what I look for when I go on holiday and want to stay somewhere nice. It’s the sort of place I look for before deciding if I want to visit a particular town. And in the earlier days, when finances were a bit tighter, it’s the sort of place I would leave as a treat for the last couple of nights of an otherwise more modest holiday.

I can’t think of anything better, after arriving in Cairo’s busy airport, to being whisked to this calm hotel. Or, being enveloped by its garden after a hectic day sightseeing. Dinner tête-a-tête, with no queues for a buffet or any other such unappetising activities, divine.

Yes I’m raving. No I’m not getting paid for it – I don’t even know the owners. Yes I’d like to stay there. No, I can’t think of a reason..ooh..perhaps an upcoming birthday!

Wouldn’t this also be the perfect place for a honeymoon in Cairo before going on a cruise or going to Adrere Amellal in Siwa or the Al Moudira in Luxor?

I met one of Mr S’s colleagues today. He’s a nice guy, quite religious in the good way (i.e. a good guy and doesn’t force his beliefs on you), he works closely with Mr S. He recently got internet installed in his house – for the first time.

Today he told me, “You’ve got an internet site with pictures on!” I went silent, trying to think what he was talking about and wondering how the hell he found TG and linked it to me so quickly.

I stalled, “Pictures?”

“Yes, lots of pictures.”

And then it hit me that my entire 2756 photos on flickr have been public for some time now.  I wanted to deny it, but knowing he’d just seen over 100o pics with me in, there wasn’t really a way out.

As soon as I arrived home I googled myself. Working speedily, I beat the nanosecond response of the Giant G search engine, and did a Yahoo! search just to confirm. Yep, there I was on Yahoo!. I came back to Google. And again there I was.

Google, however, also had my facebook profile – which I’d set to not appear. I clicked the link. There is indeed another  me out there, complete with blonde hair, which would be all well and good, were her profile picture not of her semi naked, sucking the face of some guy in a hot tub and Mr S’s lovely, religiously conservative colleague  googling me and finding that!

And to think, I’d been considering putting my real name on this blog!

PS My flickr account is now well and truly private!