A little while ago Mr S’s Maman and Papa visited. Maman asked me if I liked jewellry. I hesitated, but couldn’t exactly say no! She was curious because I don’t wear much. It also turned out that she was a little unhappy with the gifts her son bought me for Christmas and my birthday. My darling Mr S is extremely practical and some concern was growing that he wasn’t being romantic enough. I was perfectly happy with my walking boots, but my protestations I’d rather clumpy boots to jewellry rang a little hollow.

“I spoke to Maman today.” Mr S told me last night as we snuggled up on the sofa. “She thinks I should get you jewellry for your birthday.”

“Oh yes?” I managed to squeeze out while working quickly on my “surprised” smile.

Quite honestly, there are some people who I might be upset with if they gave me walking boots for a gift (I’m not a walker), but from Mr S, well, I’m perfectly happy. I can’t explain it, but there it is, I really don’t mind what he gets me - or not. I cannot pretend that I wouldn’t love a good, small piece of jewellry though.

What I’m dying to find out, is what he plumps for in the end. Will the super practical side prevail, or will the threat of a gentle ear bashing from his mother, who we’ll be visiting two days after my birthday, win the day?

Bets are on.

Shopping in Cairo reminds me of my high school German teacher. Her name was (and hopefully still is) Mrs Burgess. She had a daughter working for some time in Eastern Europe, so our German grammar instruction would sporadically be interspersed with stories about her daughter’s trips to the grocer’s. There were generally two paths these stories would take. Story A involved there being nothing in the shops. Story B would involve spotting something and queue all night if need be to buy it, because it would be gone tomorrow.

Well the shops in Cairo are stocked. What they are stocked with though can sometimes be a little odd. There is a strange stock control system in operation that can see one shelf of every shop in Cairo choca-block with one product for a week, after which, it disappears for months. So, like in Story B, when you find something you want, grabbing it is essential. Today, after looking for tartlette cases (just because I thought they’d be good to have) and a coffee grinder for a good six months, I stumbled across both of them when I was looking for, wait for it, shelves!

Of course, there was only one coffee grinder left, so following a mad dash home in 42C to get more money, the six month search was over. Rather coincidentally, Mr S has been dropping not so subtle hints over the past couple of weeks about how he really wants a fruit tart. A French fruit tart. Since we are yet to find a fruity tart here up to the specifications of my cute, but gastronomically demanding, Frenchman’s taste buds, it involves me making said tart - entirely from scratch. No nipping out to M&S for pastry shells, chopped fruit and custard here, no siree! And I must fess up to not being the best pastry chef.

So, whether it was out of love, or excitement at finding the tartlette cases, I’m not sure, but I embarked on pastry making (in hot weather - not advised), creme patissiere making and pitting cherries…

The French taste buds are yet to pass verdict, but no matter. I’m over the moon that I managed to not burn anything, not undercook anything and get 6 out of 7 tartlettes out of the cases without breaking them!

It took me a couple of days of watching Noor to figure out what was going on, not only in plot but with the actors’ mouths.

Noor is a new TV show in Arabic on one of the free satellite stations originating from Dubai. This particular station, MBC4, usually shows English language programs: Rachel Ray, Oprah and Dr Phil are staples - we’re not exactly talking high brow entertainment!

Nevertheless, and perhaps because of this, I like this show. Of course, it could also be because it is extremely odd to watch Arabic being spoken by so many people with blue, green and light eyes. The Arabic is Lebanese, the people beautiful and the landscapes stunning. After a few days of assuming it was filmed in Lebanon by actors mouthing strange words, I have just figured out it is a Turkish TV series dubbed!

The real reason for my new addiction though? The leading man has one of my favourite, and seldom heard names: Mohanad (yes, that’s an N in the middle) and I’m not sure I could ever get bored of hearing it.

And they speak slowly enough, with enough pauses, for me to actually understand!

NB I have stopped comments to this post. I have absolutely no contact with MBC nor the makers of Noor in Turkish or Arabic. I merely wrote a personal account. Please pass any comments you my have about the programme onto the channel directly.

Ask any Egyptian right now what’s on their mind and the chances are that the ever rising cost of living will be foremost in their thoughts (for more, read this).

The government announced on Labour Day (1 May) that it was going to up public sector salaries by 30% - an interesting figure given that the official rate of inflation is somewhere in the teens, but unofficially everybody knows it’s, hmm…30%.

So there were a few days of rejoicing coupled with queries about where this extra money was going to come from.

A few days later it has became all too clear: 30% increase in the price of cigarettes, removal of tax-free status for private schools and 35-47% fuel increases. The last one is the biggie.

The whole world is suffering the problem of increased commodity prices, but Egypt has far more people living on or around the ‘bread-line’ than most other places. A large swathe of society cannot absorb these rises in the way that the majority of the developed world can i.e. grumbling about having less spare cash at the end of the month. These people have no spare cash at the beginning of the month, never mind the end.

There are plenty of forecasts of doom and gloom out there about Egypt’s future. What I haven’t seen these predictions take account of is the natural resourcefulness of Egypt’s people. Many will suffer and I don’t mean to down play that, however, humans are great at finding work-arounds and I have to say that Egyptians are absolutely superb at this. So while health and safety is an unheard of luxury, money-saving devices and ideas are likely to be making an appearance sometime soon.

On a completely different thread, is the Grand Hyatt’s decision to go ‘dry’. It is a large 5 star hotel in central Cairo with Saudi ownership. Rumours abound about why the owner/chief shareholder decided to take this route with some newspapers citing his personal religious beliefs, some saying it was the result of a dispute with top management and others saying that in the competitive summer market for tourists from his native land and the Emirates it was a marketing strategy. The result is that the story has made all the newspapers in Cairo with further talks about the Ministry of Tourism downgrading the hotel to 4 star status or even that the Hyatt will pull out of this hotel.

Meanwhile, H&M is apparently going to open in Cairo on 5 June. Whatever the state of the economy, this place is going to be packed out. Fashionistas won’t know what to do with themselves: a foreign brand with fashionable clothes at equal to and cheaper than Egyptian brand prices. It’s pretty amazing really. Three years ago I still had to go out of the country to buy clothes (unless I wanted Versace and the like - not really affordable on an NGO’s salary!) and now there are: Next, Evans, Accessorize, Karen Millen, French Connection, Mango, Top Shop is coming and there are more that I can’t remember right now. Not bad for three years!

Lastly, to follow up from this - we did change the clocks! Apparently some other countries in the region didn’t and next year Egypt won’t either.

Changing rooms were a nightmare for me as a kid. I could spend 45 minutes looking for my locker after a visit to the pool. Worse still was when at the embarrassingly shy age of about 11, I spent a good ten minutes poking and jabbing my key at various locks before an attendant asked what I was doing. Miss Goodie-Two-Shoes wanted to point out that he was in the wrong place. Then I realised I was surrounded by blurry images of people with dangly bits.

Once safely reunited with my eyewear (and in the correct changing room), it was more than apparent that the writhing mass of unathletic women around me were performing Houdini-esque contortions in order to get dressed without revealing an inch of skin.

At around the same age, I would leaf through one of our home tomes of photographic encyclopaedias to the page about hammams. Images of steamy rooms, archways, patterned tiles, women in various states of undress who were lounging, chatting, being scrubbed and massaged with frangrant oils introduced me to a strange world where women didn’t appear to be shy of their bodies.

Full of these heady images, and quite a few years later, I went to the gym in Egypt for the first time. There was a locker room packed full of women getting changed, and chatting to and over each other after our class. I peeled off my trackie bottoms, picked up my jeans and the room went quiet.

Hear a pin drop silent.

I looked up. A room full of eyes were looking at my flabby, years-of-living-in-Scotland-white behind (which, clad in a g-string they had a good view of). Pairs of eyes then moved up to meet mine to give me the sort of disapproval appropriate had I just stripped and done a private pole dance in front of their husbands.

I have this picture in my head: a cute bob with the edge a little higher at the back and a little longer at the front and lots and lots of layers at the back. I have been to the hair dresser three times in the past year, pointed to the picture of this in his book and each time come out with something different. The first time it was just rescued from being a mullet. Absolutely not what I’ve been dreaming of.

A friend of mine has short hair and it always looks nice. “Aha!” I cunningly thought after I saw her last sporting yet another fab do, “I’ll go to her hairdresser.”

I turned up armed and ready: print outs of exactly what I wanted from the front, side and back. No room for confusion this time. No siree!

Chop, chop, brush, brush, snip, snip. It was going swimmingly. Best still, after asking where I was from and my name, he didn’t try to talk too much to me.

Sitting next to me was a platinum blonde getting something done with her colour. About two thirds of the way through my cut, she started getting antsy: she wasn’t happy.

The simmering turned into a boiling, “My husband only has one day off a week..”

“Oh bloody hell,” I realised, “She’s British.”

“..and I’m wasting it in here!”

Heads remained still, eyes around the room picked out other eyes.

“I wanted a rinse! I’ve been here three hours and you’ve done nothing!”

“Yes, madam,” my hairdresser said, “we gave you a rinsage.”

My hairdresser, Sam, was Lebanese. Lebanese generally speak Arabic first, French second and English third. His English wasn’t fluent, but was comprehensible (and come on, his third language!).

“But I wanted a rinse!” At this point we are now rising up the decibel scale.

“But madam, yes, we gave you a rinsage!”

The other client and I had stopped breathing.

“I just want someone who speaks ENGLISH!” Now topping the decibel range.

Other client and I shifted uncomfortably.

“Nobody’s fucking listening to what I’m saying!” she said under her breath, but loud enough for everyone to hear.

“I JUST WANT SOMEONE WHO SPEAKS ENGLISH!”

Absolutely dumbfounded, probably with my mouth gaping, eyes certainly popping out of my head, I thought about saying something in her beloved English along the lines of, “We’re in Egypt, nobody has to speak English!” but was in too much shock to say anything.

The Egyptian lady on the other side of her volunteered to translate in a tone, lost on the British woman, that saw stern and utterly disapprovingly.

In the end, Blondie flounced out of the salon without paying.

My hairdresser was by now just as furious as Blondie had been, but he couldn’t flounce out. I, still mortified, sat stock still and didn’t say a word.

This was rather unfortunate.

Hairdresser Sam was taking his pent up frustration out on my hair.

I breathed deeply decided that I would sit back and think of the UK. Not wanting to give everyone in the salon, who was now watching Sam, further reason to think that British women are cows I resolved to keep my mouth firmly shut.

Perhaps too firmly. When the receptionist looked at me, then up at my hair and asked perplexedly if I liked the cut, I should have broken down and started wailing there and then. With valiant stiff upper lip, I smiled politely instead and said, “Yes. Thank you.”

So, great my country men, in the name of your honour and all that is good about our great nation, I now sport a haircut that looks like a short, curly Worzel Gummidge with an uneven pudding bowl.

And to my one particular fellow country woman: if you wake up and find your hair dyed green, or wake up to find it has all been shaved off, you’ll know I’ve foregone my right to pistols at dawn.

Actually, there are two words on the Street right now.

First is that we are not going to change the clocks this year. This has yet to be proven as we normally do it three weeks to a month later than the UK, however, the theory I’ve heard is that it is because of Ramadan. This year Ramadan is due to fall on or around 1 September, when the weather is still pretty hot. Last year, Ramadan started a week before the clocks normally change, so they were changed early (a week or two) - hence the ‘word’. We’ll see.

The second word is that tomorrow there is going to be a national strike. There has been no official approval for this strike, so we’ll see if people decide to stay indoors. The strike would be about (as I understand it) the rising cost of living. I’m not sure what the would-be strikers hope to achieve though, as with food, the government has been sheltering a sizable part of the population from what is happening on the global markets by way of subsidisation. With petrol, this is so for the entire population. Saying that, prices are rising far faster than salaries, and times are extremely tough for many. Again, we’ll see.

~~

Our bowab (doorman) works hard for the building. He is up every morning washing the cars, he cleans the stairs, which has been no small job with the number of workmen in the building for the past 18 months and generally keeps it looking good.

He also does a lot of running around town for The Lady Downstairs (TLD) who has a business and seems incapable of going to the bank or offices on the other side of town herself. The business has employees and sizable funds, given where it advertises, for marketing. Her mode of transport is a BMW, his, because she won’t give him a taxi fare (which is nothing here) is the microbus - Cairo’s most dangerous and crowded form of transport. His pay for all this is minimal. On top of that, she treats him as a verbal whipping boy. Living above her, I am treated to her daily (on average) screaming fits. The bowab isn’t the only recipient, however, being close at hand, he is yelled at daily for absolutely nothing.

The day before yesterday, I was waiting for the elevator and heard him downstairs ringing her doorbell. Someone came to the door (not TLD, probably her maid) and he told her he had the electricity bill. Next hurried footsteps came to the door, followed by TLD’s raspy screaming, “You’ve got the electricity bill for me? Give it here!”.

Nice, huh?

So, Mr Bowab told me last month that he would be leaving for his home in the South for a few weeks at the end of March/beginning of April because his wife is going to give birth. This would be the second time he’s seen her in the past 12 months as the job of doorman does not come with holiday time.

Yesterday I realised that it was well into April and he was still here. Why? Apparently TLD won’t let him go because she has too much running around town for him to do.

And she has him by the short and curlies, because everybody knows that jobs are scarce and people on his his salary have few savings. What he does have though, is a savings account of hatred towards here growing with compound interest.

First the stomach starts clenching. Next a rats nest of blazing fireball shoots up to my chest and sits, a burning cocktail of indignation and humiliation.

There are many things that caused this when I first moved here: taxi drivers’ roaming hands as they ‘opened’ the passenger door for me, getting ripped off, taxi drivers taking the ’short cut’ which always involved an extra 45 mins journey time (and therefore increased fare), sleazy comments made as I passed a group of men and being told something will take five minutes and then being made to wait an hour. And that is just for starters.

I have (I think) learned a great amount of patience on a number of different levels. I didn’t enjoy the process much, but it’s probably not a bad thing to have learned, especially as I held the double title of Miss Super Efficient and Miss Goody Two Shoes for all the years of my life pre-Egypt.

There are, however, two things that still get my goat and I cannot get over them. First up is the lack of respect for customers by supermarket staff. They have yet to realise that their behaviour towards customers impacts where the customer will shop in future. They have no qualms about pushing you aside to get past and under no circumstances if you meet where one needs to give way, like the entrance to a narrow aisle, will they give way to the customer. Ever.

The second fireball-inducing happening involves groups of pre-pubescent and teenage boys. For some reason, probably because they’ve seen their fathers/uncles/cousins doing it and want to be macho like them, they make sexually degrading comments (and depending on where you are, actions). Unlike the supermarket, where I show restraint, I am not usually so calm around these guys (and hey, better out than in, right?).

Today I passed six of them mincing towards me. The mutterings under their breath while simultaneously not taking their eyes off me was a pretty clear indication of what was coming. I knew they wouldn’t touch me, but the stomach clenching had begun. I let the first comment directly to me go unnoticed because sometimes they just leave it at that. This guy, incidentally the smallest of the group by a good half metre, obviously had to make up for his inadequacy by a second comment.

I have a bit of a frog in my throat (not from French classes) at the moment, which makes me sound like a 40 a day 60 year old fisherman’s wife, which happens to be a bit like an Egyptian Momma. “You think you’re so big? Huh?! You’re,” (hand gesture indicating 1 cm tall), “THIS small!” I growled loudly.

Of course, they cracked up repeating it and laughing. That’s normal (and hey, I have no idea how what I said actually translates socially/culturally in Arabic, it was just the first thing I could think of).

Part of the reason this enrages me so much is that, as is typical, when this incident happened, there were four fully grown men on the street, before and after the group of boys. Not one said or did anything, and they’d blatantly heard the comments.

Allied to this is the fact that it forces me to stop ignoring the fact that I am viewed by many, by virtue of my heritage and clothes (which were today, by the way, baggy, long sleeved and high necked), little more than a common hoar [ed. whore].

Not a good feeling to be left with.

The only thing I have found to make it better is to treat the next Egyptian male I meet with the respect I didn’t receive from the previous. Not always easy and not always reciprocated, but it makes Miss Goody Two Shoes feel at least she has the moral high ground.

When I was 13 I went to school in Austria for two months during the Summer term. It was great. Coming from Scotland, the only thing I cared about was that I saw the sun almost every day, which essentially meant I was on holiday (despite the homework).

I was staying in a lovely old four-storey house, just down the road from the Mirabell Gardens and Palace in Salzburg. This meant nothing to me before I arrived (and not very much either when I was there as I didn’t watch much TV), but it was where Maria and the children sang “Do-Re-Me” in The Sound of Music. Very picturesque and a little touristy.

I am guessing that at one time, way back when, the house I was staying in faced fields. Then, one day, probably in the seventies, along came a town planner and decided the fields would make an excellent location for a whopping great big block of flats.

The result, twenty years later, was a distinct lack of ‘respectability’ on the opposite side of the street. This had less to do with economics and more to do with the presence of two sex shops in the giant blocks (one which blatantly offered more than toys for sale). Now, sunshine was most definitely a great change from the grey skies of Scotland, however, living opposite two sex shops, proved fantastic entertainment for a 13 year old girl who was particularly sheltered back in her homeland.

My friends and I used to gather at my window and yell things to the men who would try to sneak into the dodgier of the two shops. Subject to particular attention were the ones who entered carrying toilet roll (no idea why and don’t want to know). After yelling, or wolf-whistling, we would immediately duck down under the window, giggling, and then raise our heads slowly to catch sight of the confused patron.

And so it was this afternoon, that leaning over our balcony railing, I saw Mr S arrive home. I blew out a long wolf whistle. Unfortunately he didn’t hear. The four workmen on the street apparently have better hearing and spun around, looking at each other to see where it came from.

I, worried I’d be spotted, ran inside giggling, giddy with the idea I had just stumbled upon a way of playing with the workmen who have been annoying me so much for the past 18 months.

And thinking of Austrian sex shops.

1. You don’t worry if someone overtakes you on the inside lane.

2. You have no qualms about overtaking on the inside lane.

3. You only buy summer shoes that are dust proof or can be easily cleaned.

4. You have no qualms about walking around streets in the West with the same numeric value of relevant currency as you do here, until you notice the shop assistant’s eyebrows raising when she sees $1000 in your wallet when you pay for a coffee.

5. You know that when you go to the movies for the 6pm showing you don’t need to turn up before 7pm as that’s when the trailers start.

6. Having watched too much MBC, you dream about Jeremy Paxman.

7. You notice how expensive everything is getting.

8. You start forgetting which words are spelled with a ‘B’ and which with a ‘P’.

9. You notice how crude lyrics to Western popular music are, especially in comparison to those of Arabic pop.

10. Amr Diab starts being sexy.