So, you’re trying to hatch an evil plan. Don’t know how to get your inner dastardliness on paper? Never fear: Maadi Plotting Center is here!

(Yes, it’s for technical drawing, but the English isn’t quite as clear as the Arabic!)

A long time ago, a certain Misssy went on holiday and took lots of photos of funny signs. “Oooh,” thought I, “I should join in this little funny-photo jaunt, seeing as I’m living in a country where nothing is ever spelled quite right.” The trouble was, I never seemed to have my camera with me at the right moment.

Until now. Misssy, I’ve got a cracker:

In case you think you missed it:

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’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!

A few years ago I bought a laptop from a UK company called Laptops Direct. I’ve been on their mailing list ever since and as the bag was so good, I’m not needing replace it and I never read their emails. Today the subject line caught my eye: Free Funerals from Laptops Direct. I opened, read and incredulously opened the link to their site.

It was after seeing that there was a video about the free funerals that I asked Mr S, “Is it 1 April today?”

Happy April Fool’s!

Nope, this is not a post about how you have to be nice when you drive in Egypt (just for the record: you don’t, if you are, you’re probably not alive to read this now).

It’s a post about green car licence plates. Here in Egypt personnel from embassies, the UN and the high ranking Arab League staff have a green licence plate on their cars. As if that didn’t single them out quite enough, there is also a number denoting which embassy/organisation the car comes from, which proves useful for the concierge – it lets him know how deep to bow, before the car stops. Kidding – well, sort of. Devised in Nasser’s time, numero uno goes, of course, to Russia. Take that US and UK. You’re not number one. Egypt can have other friends too. Ha!

Right.

The benefit of a green plate is that you can do what you want on the roads. Yes, if you’ve seen Cairo traffic, you probably thought you could do that anyway. The difference is that you can talk on your phone without worry that you might get spotted and possibly thereafter get a fine. You can park wherever you want, without worry of getting clam-bed (clamped). You can drive the wrong way around a roundabout and nobody will bat an eyelid. Oh wait, that’s just normal. There’s not a chance that you’ll ever get your car damaged as it’s being towed off by authorities. Best of all, and this is truly useful, you can bypass the automobile pushing, shoving and shunting that happens at checkpoints at busy times and just whizz through (or mount the pavement and whizz around), without having to show a driving licence or passport.

Wait, does that mean you don’t actually have to be able to drive if you have green plates? Hmmm. That hadn’t occurred to me until now.

Despite all these liberties diplomatic immunity heralds, driving around in a metal box that says, “Hello everybody! Yes I’m foreign, yes I’m (comparatively) wealthy, yes I’m here officially and yes, I’m from country X.” isn’t necessarily all that great. Not that it makes them a target. No, no, no. It just means that they’ve got barely anything to discuss when it comes to making small talk with strangers.

It seems that when all this happens on our own turf, we get a little antsy. BLOGitse has an article about unpaid car fines from London embassy staff. Now, we all know that Egypt has a bureaucracy large enough to stuff governmental buses full of workers from Cairo to Mars, and it’s fairly obvious to anybody who has been to the mogama’a when it opens (8am in case you’re wondering) that not everybody at work is actually, umm, working. But let us not scoff. Is it not better to have an army of officiates who take a bit of time to have their ful sandwich and shay before they get down to an hour’s productivity, than an overstretched bevy of bureaucrats chasing fines on cars with diplomatic immunity?

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?

This is too good, to downright fantastic not to share.

If for any reason it doesn’t show up or doesn’t work, you can view it here.

(Image from gigwise.com)

The metaphorical blizzard has hit and there’s no turning back. I think I’ve done fairly well this year in fact, but a little browsing on iTunes today brought me over the threshold: they have a ‘Christmas’ genre. Perhaps they always have had it, but today I spotted it. Don’t get me wrong, nobody in my house, whether living permanently or just popping in to read the gas metre is starved of Christmas music in December. It’s too catchy, too evocative, too cheery and calming. There’s Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’ alongside Harry Connick Jr. singing ‘Let it snow’ (I know, I know, it’s Cairo, but still…), next to the Pogues ‘Fairytale in New York’ and ‘Silent Night’ from Kings College, the Ronnette’s ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa’, Bing Crosby & Judy Garland’s version of ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’, Chuck Berry’s ‘Run Rudolph, Run’, Burl Ive’s ‘Frosty the Snowman’ and Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas’ – plus another 4.5 hours more of music (it was more, but I decided to delete dupilcate songs last year). I don’t even like Mariah Carey. I really don’t, but give me a Christmas song and well, I can’t really help myself.

About a week ago my cousin’s cousin (what does that make her to me) asked the question to her Facebook friends: is it too early to play Christmas music? I couldn’t decide. Now I say, “You go girl!”

I’m still containing my desire to hoist up the decorations. No Poinsettia can be purchase before 1 December. That’s my rule. But come 9am on that day, I shall be getting my Christmas Roses and (what will make do as a) Christmas tree. Then I will start the painstakingly delightful process of individually stringing stars up from a beam on the ceiling.

This year I started buying decorations in August. It’s not that I don’t have any, it’s just that I didn’t have those decorations (wooden angels that hang on the door). Yesterday I cheekily added a simple, white clay angel that holds a little candle to my stash. I guess this is the year of the angels. I’m itching to take her out of the wrapping, but no, no, I’ve been telling myself, wait a few more days, December will be here soon.

Mr S, coming from France, doesn’t share my UK/North American/German festive cravings. Candles, marzipan, chocolate, mince pies, Christmas cake, stollen (because of the marzipan), pfeffernusse, homemade truffles, cinnamon, spices and cloves. He just doesn’t understand. He didn’t even know what Christmas cake was until last year! Utterly unimaginable to me.

But I’ve started working on it. Bereft of advent calendars when he grew up, this year, aged 36 in a few weeks, will get his very first painted card with doors (not one of those chocolate ones, but one with different pictures behind every door – because what’s the point in knowing there’s the same thing behind every door?) at breakfast on 1 December. This year too, we will add mince pies (homemade by yours truly) to our December menu, and the arrival of Big Mama and Lil’ Bro should see stollen, pfeffernusse and Christmas pud pausing on his virgin taste buds.

“..There’s a happy feeling nothing in the world can buy,
When they pass around the coffee and the pumpkin pie
It’ll nearly be like a picture print by Currier and Ives
These wonderful things are the things
We remember all through our lives.” (Sleigh Ride)

And a little PS for all you bah-humbug types: sssshhh!

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.