Copyright trailing grouse

Cairo is the City Victorious. She is. No matter what happens, she wins.

I trundle along in my rather mundane life, ignoring her, ignoring her richness around me and then it happens. Without fail. She chews me up, lacerating me with her sharp teeth, smothering me with her sandpaper tongue and as I fight to gasp a last mouthful of air, she swallows. I find myself deep in the uncertainty of her underbelly. Who to trust, where to go, what to believe? Everything is turned on its head and a black  scream forms inside my gut. It moves up, too loud for my voice, the screams echo inside my head, “I AM LEAVING. GET ME OUT OF HERE!” and then the words that later feel so disloyal, “I H-A-T-E  E-G-Y-P-T!”

Disloyal because also without fail, shortly after that, I have one of the best days of my life and know that Cairo is truly Um el Donia.*

Such is life in this megacity, that those of us who choose to live here because we love Cairo, cannot leave for fear of never finding somewhere that makes us feel as alive as we do when we’re in her arms.

*Mother of the world

“Grouse doesn’t suffer fools gladly.” This was one of the most thought-provoking sentences from my life at school. Perhaps because it was about me and my ego enjoyed that. It was a sentence in my school report when I was about 14. I was perplexed for a good while afterwards. Big Mama read it out to me like I should be ashamed of myself, “But what’s the problem with that,” I thought (and maybe, being 14, said), “WHO would want to suffer anything, especially stupid people and why would they do so gladly?” The sentence seemed flawed to me. After a few months of pondering, I thought perhaps it was a backhanded compliment, in that I wasn’t a fool.

Basically, I just didn’t get it.

Now I get it. I still don’t really like fools, I don’t suffer them gladly, but, I do make an effort to not show my suffering for too long. Sometimes I’m good at it.

Not so today.

Mr S wanted me to check out the biggest, prettiest, most expensive compound in Cairo to see about joining their sports club so that I could (finally) get to swim. It’s a nice place, if you like a cross between Hollywood and Marbella with some good old MacMansions thrown in between – and all that in Cairo. My protestations about joining in with this lifestyle when so many on our doorstep have so little have lasted three years, but finally I relented. The only thing I had to confirm was that the main pool which is outdoors is heated in winter.

“Is the main pool heated in winter?” I dutifully (well, I am married now) asked.

“Yes.” was the answer. It seemed too easy. Cairo isn’t that easy. Even in super-lux compounds. Or was it?

“When does that start?”

“Oh, Winter? Well you see here in Cairo we have a hot summer…”

“Yes, I know, I’ve lived here for 8 years. Which month does the heating come on in the pool?” (you can get an idea of what my teacher was meaning,  right?).

“Ok, the winter months are October, November..”

I was smiling, this was sounding good.

“..April and May.”

“Pardon? What about December, January, February and March?”

“Oh, then the pool isn’t heated.”

“But that’s winter.”

“Not really. Anyway, nobody goes swimming in those months.”

“Yes,” I said almost snorting, “because the water’s not heated!” (I was rather good and skimmed over the fact that December, January, February, the three coldest months of the year were “not really” winter.).  Then the Sco’ish blood started to boil. “So you mean, we should pay $1750* a year to go swimming, plus $250* introduction fee  and over December, January, February and March, we can’t go swimming?”

“Oh, you can go swimming.”

“Sorry? I thought the pool’s closed.”

“No, not closed, just not heated.”

My mind was boggling. Four four months of the year the pool is open, but not heated, so nobody goes in, but they don’t close it, just so they can say it’s open, even though they know nobody will go in because it’s not heated…

“So then I pay for a year’s membership because I want to go swimming, but for a third of the year I can’t because it’s too cold?”

Yep.

Never mind. I found somewhere else that heats the pool over the winter. Why? Well, according to the sales people, “So people can go swimming over the winter.” Right. That seems rather sensible to me.

*Yes, these fees are steep for a swim. They do also cover fees for golf and tennis membership and as for swimming there are VERY few options nowadays for women where the pool is also clean.

Dr One:  “What you have is a bit of inflammation, don’t worry. You should go and see Dr A when he comes back.”

Me: “When is that?”

Dr One: “He’s overseas on holiday, he’ll be back on 7 October (two weeks).”

Two days later, symtoms are even worse. Another Dr is chosen.

Dr Two: “What you have is an infection. Here’s a prescription for antibiotics. You’ll start to feel better in two days. If you don’t, call me.”

Me: “Ok, thanks. I’m allergic to penicillin.”

Dr Two: “No problem.”

Twenty minutes later, I open the box of antibiotics and read the insert: contradindicated for sensitivities to penicillin. I call Dr Two and get the name of an alternative antibiotic.

Two days later: I feel on top of the world.

Day after that: I feel like Hades would be heaven.

A few days later: I call Dr A on the off chance that he’s back in Egypt and I can see him at a different clinic before his clinic day at my clinic in 6 days’ time. A lady answers. Dr A is male. I ask to speak to him, she says he’s in surgery, and asks what it’s about, so I explain. “What do you expect him to do about that?” is the response. “Um, nothing,” I say, “I just want to talk to him about it.” I’m told to call back in an hour. In the end I send an sms and arrange an appointment with him in two days’ time.

A week and a half since Dr One:

Me: “Did you have a good holiday?

Dr A: “Yes, but never long enough.”

Me: “That’s true. Were you somewhere nice?”

Dr A: “I just stayed in Egypt.”

Me: “Oh, Dr One told me you were abroad.”

Dr A: “Abroad? No, I was most definitely here!”

Then we get down to business.

Dr A: “Firstly, it’s not an infection. Secondly, why didn’t you just come to my clinic in Dr One’s office last week? You could have saved yourself all this trouble.”

Me: “Um, because you were on holiday.”

Dr A: “No I wasn’t, I had a big clinic in Dr One’s office last week.”

Me: “Um, well, a week and a half ago Dr One told me you weren’t back until 7 October.”

Dr One is supposed to be our trusted Dr.

I think I’m going to start eating apples by the kilo….

Apple from http://dnn.mandeeps.com

A few months ago I mentioned that Mr S had proposed. All terribly exciting. I also said I would try to not turn this blog into a wedding blog.

Perhaps I should have. I may have bored you all stupid with tedious details*, but purging it on the (virtual) page may have helped with my stress levels and all those ruffled feathers.

The majority of the stress came from the British Embassy. Since my first visit to Cairo in 2000, I have heard rumours as well as stories in the first person of how unhelpful the UK embassy is. Other than registering with them online, I’ve managed to avoid it completely. Having now had my ‘experience’ with it and in my despair, spoken to other Brits here, it seems that our embassy is officially one of the least helpful and most frustrating around. One Brit told me, “My husband and I have figured out our own evacuation plan for an emergency [talking about a coup or major political instability], we just don’t trust them to help us.” For my part, I have almost always entered Egypt on my Canadian passport..in part just in case the rumours were true.

On the French front (the wedding is in France) Maman and Papa (Mr S’s mother and father) have been running around the French countryside doing a hundred million things that we can’t do because we’re not there. “The patience of a saint” was coined for these people. We’re trying to think of a gift for them as a specific thank you for the months of errands they’ve done, but just haven’t yet been able to think of anything that is big enough, without being over the top and making them uncomfortable, to represent how thankful we really are. Thinking caps are firmly glued to our heads.

But now, six weeks away from W-Day, still with a million things to do, we have decided to have a pre-honeymoon. It’s a long weekend at the beach in a nice hotel with no talk of the dreaded Ws (wedding or work).

Can’t wait.

*In fact, now I think about it, they were so long and tedious, that it would have tired me just to try to explain them as they happened!

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 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!

I’ve been an absentee blogger for a few months now. Don’t worry though, alimony has been paid to the big daddies who run some company it is that allows me frequent visitation right to trailinggrouse.com (cos where would I be without the dot com..?): the absenteeism was only temporary!

Sometimes it gets tiring blogging and living a life. Sometimes blogging kind of becomes life. A friend says a few words in passing and a little rubber hand opens a trapdoor in the brain to store them in the ‘blogging moment’ box. It’s funny. Sometimes.

Then there’s the writing. It’s fun. I love writing. I even write things I know nobody will ever read. I write things and then just store them on the computer, then delete them. I don’t mind. It’s just fun. Sometimes it’s good to take a break from fun things to make them even funner.

So, while savouring every word, no, every letter I type, I say, “Hello world! Wanna hear my news? Trailing Grouse is going to become a trailing spouse!”

Will that make me Trailing Spouse? Trailing Grouse Spouse? Trailing Spouse Grouse? Trailing Grouse the Spouse? Trailing Grouse the Trailing Spouse.

Oh dear, are we getting into “There’s a moose loose aboot the hoose territory”?

Nah. Once Trailing Grouse, always Trailing Grouse!

Mr MacTavish getting some shut eye.

I’m getting up about three times a night. It’s the wailing. I can’t sleep.

Apparently I have to teach him to be quiet at night and change his sleeping pattern to coincide with mine. Every time he tries to sleep during the day, I’m supposed to wake him up. I do this with cuddles. And tummy rubs. Sometimes I just let him sleep.

“He’s like a child.” I hear myself saying, then cringe inwardly as I remember my good friend and former colleague Mr N. Upon being ‘invited’ (do management ever really invite?) to join a weekend meeting out of town, for which most of the team would be leaving their wives and children behind, Mr N replied, “I’m sorry I can’t. I have to look after my kittens.”

So that’s it. I’ve turned into a frightful bore who believes my kitten is my ‘cat-baby’ (what an awful term), who is equal to other people’s children, and is beginning to wonder if having a kitten entitles ”mama’ TG a right to caternity leave.

The drawing skills of a 29 year old. Standing far apart, tense bent arms, what on earth would Freud say? Nevermind the fact that asked to draw both sexes, they appeared on the page firmly covered up with clothes. Perhaps that’s just the result of living in Egypt throughout most of my twenties.

Feeling a little artsy I enrolled for some drawing classes recently. I was pretty confident of my abilities as far as not being able to draw goes. I mean, I can’t draw, I really can’t, but I can draw better than most people who can’t draw. That was what my ego told myself.

Class number one. There are two students. One of them is me. I already know and like the teacher’s work, so good start there. I’d been out shopping to try to find the 2B pencil required, without much success, so, in my hand-made-at-school-but-still-pretty-cool leather pencil case I arrived armed with lots of other pencils. You know, in the hope that 11 HBs would not make up for not having one 2B.

We had a brief introduction to the course. It sounded so exciting and the voice in my head was rather self-congratulatory about finally getting around to taking a drawing class. Talking done, we were told to draw a man and a woman.

Umm.

At this point I realised that I’m a pretty-good-not-very-good drawer – of anything but people. Somehow I learned to draw people as a kid, progressed until I hit about eight and then, despite hours of art classes for years, I couldn’t get past that.

“What do you mean ‘a man and a woman’? I mean, standing, sitting, long hair, short hair? What do you meeeeeeeeeeean?” I screamed inside my head.

I could already hear my classmate’s deft pencil strokes cutting through the silence.

Looking back at my empty page, I decided to join the pencil stroke ensemble. Let it be noted that I did not go for the stick men version, although the thought did cross my mind. But come on, I didn’t want to appear totally stupid on my first day in class.

I couldn’t decide what to do. Straight arms, bent arms. How close together should the man and woman be? Should the woman be in heels? How big should her hips be? How big should her breasts be? Should I bother to denote her breasts? Is there time for this? Just do the quickest thing possible. A skirt, yes, an A-line skirt, long hair and delicate shoulders for her. Squarish shoulders and torso for him, with trousers.

Finished, finally, I looked down at my valiant effort. “Not too bad really, for a first attempt – considering they’re people.” I thought.

Then I glanced at my classmate’s.

She’d only managed to sketch a man and woman reminiscent of Matisse’s Blue Nude in a standing position.

Tonight is class number three. Luckily there is a big glass of wine waiting for me after! Still, I can only get better, right?

I have been hanging onto this photo* for a few weeks now, waiting for a good time to share. ExpatMum gave me just that opportunity with her post about her new fave website. Today, my dears, is World Toilet Day. Why? Well, umm, just because? Because even our most private moments need international days.

Actually it’s quite serious. Coming from Edinburgh, “Garde loo!” is a remnant of bygone days (about the 1600s) when we didn’t have the porcelain goddess. We were even pretty late at developing a system. Four thousand years old remains have been discovered in North-West India of the world’s first WC. All that time has passed and this world of our still has people lacking basic sewage options. ExpatMum has something more about that today.

In the meantime, I will hark back to the politics of peeing in Egypt.  It’s still a pain to find somewhere where you don’t need to hike your trouser legs up while nervously reassuring yourself, “It’s only water on the floor, it’s only water on the floor, it’s only water on the floor..” Some good news is to be had about that long road to Sharm though (the road never ends when you’re waiting to pee): there are now TWO resthouses with clean facilities for women (men, we don’t care about you, we see you relieving yourself willy-nilly at the side of the road). One of them is pictured above and it is right beside the checkpoint at the turn to the St Katherine’s Touristic Road. The other is at the roundabout on the Cairo side of the tunnel.

*You may find youself asking, “What photo?” Well, I can tell you that it was taken, it was uploaded first to my computer, then to flickr and it was linked to this post. Where it has gone, is a complete mystery. I’ll let you imagine it for now.