Someone I know is having an affair. It’s serious. It’s with a colleague. He wanted my opinion, so bearing in mind cultural differences, and what I knew of the situation, I gave it.

In response to a point he had made about the “other woman” liking his wife and that she would have liked to be friends with his wife, I pointed out that if that were true, she would have done so when she had the opportunity (long before the affair started - and then, perhaps, it might not have begun).

I certainly don’t know everything there is to know about Egyptian culture, but I do try to remember the pieces of the jigsaw I discover. After all this time, it is unusual for me to hear something about it that I have never come across before. A gem came in response to my observation: the “other woman” colleague could never have become friends with his wife.

Apparently, it is socially unacceptable for a colleague of the same sex as your spouse to become friends with your spouse.

Why?

Because it would ignite suspicions that your colleague has amorous intentions towards you and wants to get closer to you via your spouse.

I have no idea if this is the same in any other country/culture, but it baffles me.

And certainly did not work in this case.

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.

Due to some work engagements of Mr S, I found myself heading to Alexandria again this weekend. I didn’t mind that he had to work, I was planning to take it easy at the hotel, reading my book on the balcony and looking over the sea.

I expected there to be a problem when we got to the hotel, there have been the two previous times I’ve stayed there. Apparently 5-star grading doesn’t take into account check-in (or check-out!) procedures. Anyway, I am not going to whine about staying in a 5 star hotel. Primarily because I think the stars are there purely as decoration, not as part of any rating. I will say, still not whining (only because I’m saving it for another post), that it is the only time in my life where I have told the manager of a place of accommodation directly to their face that I do not want to stay in their establishment. It was not a good weekend.

We took the train to Alex. It’s a decent train and usually runs pretty much on time. I’ve done this journey plenty of times over the years and until today, had not realised that every time I have gone, I have arrived in the morning and left the same day, or another, in the late afternoon/early evening. What brought this to my attention today was watching the commuter trains arriving.

You can forget right now any polished notions you have of commuter trains. These trains had not seen a lick or a spit probably since they were purchased in the seventies. A lot of the commuters themselves were not on the way to the office in freshly pressed suits, but were traveling in from outlying farming communities to sell their wares at the market.

I did not take any pictures of what I am about to describe, because I was so shocked and so sad at the suffering that I did not want to capture a moment of it on digital celluloid. A picture may say a thousand words, but in this instance, your imagination and compassion are required and words are infinitely better at conjuring them up (I hope I can do justice - and I am not going to weave a tale of whispering hubbly bubbly smoke and minarets in some far gone exotic land, that can be saved for the movies and writers wanting to make a quick buck off a Western myth).

Also, before I continue, I would like to clarify that although I now live in one of Cairo’s most exclusive neighbourhoods (so exclusive that I barely consider it part of Cairo), I have not always and I have worked for organisations actively working to improve life for some of the the most unfortunate in this country, so I have a fairly good idea of how life here is for many.

So, back to the platform. It was 7.45am and our train was due at 8am. The platform for the Cairo train is an island between four sets of tracks. We were standing on the platform as it filled up with other Cairo-bound travelers. Hawkers were working their patch selling newspapers and magazines, there were a couple of elderly female beggars moving from passenger to passenger looking for a small act of kindness that would secure their food that day. There was nothing unusual.

A train appeared down the tracks and Mr S commented that he had never seen third class carriages in Egypt. I assured him there were many, particularly on the type of train that was approaching. The engine passed and the first carriage was passing. Inside it was jam packed to the extent that people were hanging out the doors that were by now open. Movement inside the carriage of people wanting to alight made those at the doorways literally ‘pop’ off the train and onto the tracks below. They would then make their way over, in no particular hurry, to our platform.

Once the train jerked to a halt, the work really began. A boy about eight years old jumped off, on to the Cairo bound tracks and took a 1 metre diametre aluminium pot piled full with vegetables across the tracks to our platform. Then he went back and got another. His portly mother, in her long galabeya, sat down on the floor of the carriage and jumped out onto the Cairo tracks and took a sack of potatoes, easily 10kg and heaved it across to our platform. The little boy clambered back on the now moving train while she stood on the Cairo bound tracks waving him off. She then made her way up onto our platform and proceeded to drag her goods pot by pot across the platform to the other side. Once gathered there, she made her way down onto the tracks coming from Cairo, and heaved one of her pots over to the next platform, then made her way over to the tracks coming from Cairo. Just in time, because another train arrived. Doors open on both sides again, this woman then lifted her two pots and sack of potatoes onto the train, clambered aboard and slid in the single pot from the adjacent platform, just before the train left.

This story was repeated many times over, with her train and subsequent ones.

The train following hers, however, was (somewhat impossibly) even fuller. As the engine rolled past along with it came two young men, straddling the train buffers, holding on to the train with flat palms against steel of the engine and the front carriage.

Sure enough, at 7.55am they, as with many others, jumped off the train, onto the Cairo tracks and made their way, without much haste onto our platform. More women with lead heavy sacks and pots made their way across the tracks, either unaware that a train was due at 8am, or not caring much that it was.

The whole scene, in contrast to us holding our first class tickets and waiting for our plush seats in our air conditioned carriage was, and still is, extremely difficult to stomach. Of course I knew that the trains were crowded, extremely crowded and I’ve been squashed up against voluptuous female bodies on the Cairo metro at rush hour, and I’ve heard of people traveling on the roof on Delta trains. Mostly, however, I have not seen it and I was led to believe by the people describing it to me, that it was teenage boys who wanted to be dare devils. Perhaps so in some cases, but this was something quite different.

In all honesty, worse that watching it, was knowing that there is nothing I could do to help. I mean, yes, I could have tried to help the women carry the potatoes etc, but in reality, I would have been a hindrance more than a help.

So this is life in Egypt. You can live in a cocoon and never see anything like this and complain about how tough life is, or you can get out and about and see things what life can be like. The thing is, a poor reflection on me perhaps, it doesn’t stop the grumbling for as long as perhaps it should.

Queue for subsidised bread taken by and copyrighted to Les Parents

There was a little cafe in the wee village I grew up in that offered a ‘clean plate surpise’ for children who finished all the food on their plate. It was a good tactic and the ‘surprise’ ice cream seemed to work with everyone (apart from Lil’ Bro - but that’s a very boring story about the world’s slowest eating child).

Then there was the “There are starving children in the world who would love your food” when those greens were lying around on dinner plates.

Now, chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you have not been to my little village in the Central Highlands, but you are very likely to have heard about the starving children somewhere far away in the world when you were a child.

Recently I was lucky enough to have dinner at a swanky hotel restaurant. It happened to be buffet night so the choice was endless (well, for Cairo anyway): Australian beef, New Zealand lamb, sushi and sashimi carefully prepared by the Japanese chef with produce flown in from afar, mountains of desserts with Swiss chocolate. You get the picture.

It was as I reached for my plate and realised I had to decide what I would eat that it suddenly occurred to me how obscene this was. The world is currently facing a crisis of food. Multiple causes of course, but the end result is rising prices on the international market.

No doubt wherever you are in the world, you’ve noticed that your pint of milk costs more, that a loaf of bread is more expensive than a year ago and that fuel prices are rising. More than likely you’ve absorbed these costs, albeit begrudgingly.

Egyptian’s too have faced price rises over the past year, but the effect is incomparable to what we have felt. According to a World Bank study in 2005, one fifth of the Egyptian population live in poverty with a further 13% just above it. Baring in mind that prices were significantly cheaper back in 2005 and wages (for those that have a job) are not much different, it is probably safe to say that a good part of that 13% have now dipped below too. Add to that the size of the population: the UN’s 2007 estimate is 77 million. All in all, that is about a third of a lot of people.

The problem in Egypt is compounded by essential governmental subsidies on wheat and fuel (amongst other things). So, while the Egyptian people have been experiencing rises, they have not yet felt the full brunt of the international market’s gains. The government, however, has seen subsidy payments eat further into its budget and logically, cannot sustain the situation for ever. In a country where much of the population is dependent on the government, difficult times for all may be ahead.

While I have a curiosity in things such as this and am lucky enough to have had an education combined with experience that provides me with a modicum of understanding about daily life for the ‘average’ Egyptian (ok, who exactly is ‘average’ is an issue in itself) most expats do not. For somebody arriving in Egypt to Maadi or Qatameya, living in a comfortable apartment/villa with a team of staff, getting used to a new country, it is absolutely understandable that life struggling to buy bread that costs about US$0.01 is extremely hard to imagine, even though it’s on our doorstep. It is also not that easy to see as our normal hang out places are quite removed from the subsidised bread queues.

I am not apportioning blame: this is a local problem caused by a global phenomenon. It cannot hurt, however, if those of us who live cheek-to-jowl at least in global terms, offer a little more patience, and perhaps at the very least slightly larger tips, to those who are in our lives and are struggling to eat half decently, while we gorge at the smorgasbord life has given us.

Do you remember sitting in the classroom after swimming class? Plagued by the smell of chlorine that just won’t go away?

Nope, it’s not a line from some cheesy legal commercial inciting legal action against swimming pool maintenance workers, it’s me right now.

I definitely wouldn’t mention it had I been swimming, primarily not to annoy those of you suffering in colder climes, but that is unfortunately not the cause. It’s my shower. Sometimes it is worse that others, and it’s something I’ve always noticed here. Today, however, unless my sense of smell has grown to Pinocchio-like proportions, it is the worst for a very long time.

My stomach churning is only half the story. Having followed my normal morning ablutions, the mixture of the chlorine and the soap and shampoo seems to have induced a spell of finger skin peeling.

I may have to take my carbon bootprint (further) off the scale and start washing my hands with bottled water…

The image is of the Maadi Club Pool..also heavily chlorinated at times and rarely frequented by me for that and other reasons.

I can
and do
bitch and moan and whine with the best of them about you,
but
I don’t hate you by any means.

Driving along the busy Autostrad facing your gleaming
Mohamed Ali mosque
towering over shacks and tombs in the teaming
City of the Dead,
your streets litter strewn,
cars passing on the way to the slaughterhouse
live animals tied to the roof
I am disgusted,
yet somewhere,
at the core of my being
I cannot imagine
that I will leave you in just 18 months.

But
whatever it is
I love so much about you,
old city,
too precious is it to write:
those who came before me wore out the words.

So I love you.
Passionately.
And, at times
dislike you.
Intensely.

And perhaps that is all I can say.

Youssef was talking to the mango farmers.

“What does your father do?”

He knew this answer was going to be the end of their conversation - it always was.

“We’re zabaleen.”

“Oh right,” said the farmers looking at each other.

Youssef’s family lived and worked in the rubbish collecting area of Cairo. Bottom of the social ladder. If, indeed, it even registered on the social ladder.

The next day Youssef met the farmers again at his post in the delta. His stint of military service was over half way through.

“Do you come across mangoes?” the farmers asked.

A bit of a stupid question really, most of Cairo’s refuse ended up with the zabaleen.

“Yes.”

***

And so it was that one young man with one of the country’s dirtiest jobs, came to be the first and only mango seed collector in his area. Summer months are spent working 24hours a day collecting the discarded seeds of the city’s favourite fruit, drying them and transporting the kernel to his friends in the delta for replanting.

I just read an interesting article from Egypt’s Daily Star (nothing like the UK one!). It is about men looking for foreign (note they actually use the word ‘blonde’) wives to finance them. I have seen this sort of thing time and time again here, with the foreign woman usually being a tourist when she ‘falls in love’ and not understanding that her beau could actually have ulterior motives. Why should she? He says such beautiful things to her, makes her feel so special, so wanted. He is so romantic (it’s a shame she doesn’t understand Arabic or she’d realise when song lyrics are being translated). Later comes the demonstrations that ‘he’s not like that’. Frequently divorce is on the horizon. Soon after that, I don’t know what happens with her, but he remarries: IT’S BUSINESS.

So, here it is, at last, in English and straight out of the horses’ mouth so to speak.

“Look at this plush block of flats,” said Mahbub, a taxi driver from Luxor, as he pointed to a white building shining across a field in the heart of Al Buaarat village in Luxor.

“It belongs to Redah, a friend of mine who has been married for the last few years to a Dutch woman. They bought the land from one of the villagers and they are likely to gain much out of selling the flats to the khawagas [foreigners],” said Mahbub.

“Why are you raising your eyebrows in surprise?” asked Mahbub. “The taxi I am working on was gifted to my brother by his French wife. She is 10 years older than my brother Alam who is 19.

“She goes back to her country for six weeks and comes here for a fresh honeymoon before she leaves again. My family owns a small plot of green land on which we are planning to build a block of flats with the help of my brother’s wife. She’s also got us a boat that we operate between the east and west banks,” said Mahbub…“There is no future here other than tying the knot with a blonde woman,” stressed Mahbub. “My diploma in agriculture is useless and I can’t keep driving a vehicle owned by my brother. You know the way out so why wait? One is already falling for me but I won’t give her the time of day until I am sure she’s ready to meet all my requirements.”

From Daily Star January 7th: Influx of Foreign Residents is Changing Upper Egyptian Ways.

In fairness, it also works the other way round: girls looking for a blonde husband. And this I’ve seen too, far less frequently. And I have to add that one of the most difficult things to watch is a friend being taken advantage of, especially one who refuses to see what everybody is pointing at.

While I understand life in Egypt is tougher by the day, it surely can’t be fair to enter a marriage you believe is for love, when the reality is that an entire family is plotting how to cajole you out of your money.

Words, beautiful or not, are cheap.

There is one cow left in the whole of Cairo and it is in my neighbourhood mooing its lonely heart out.

It’s vocal cords won’t be straining for too long.

I can hear the frame being erected to drain its body of blood after its sacrificial slaughter.

I had arranged to be picked up from the mall/shopping centre at Door 1. This isn’t any old shopping centre, it’s huge and still expanding. The distance between alternative doors is great. So, I get to Door 1 to find a throng of people arguing with security who are not letting them out. There seems to be no reason for not letting people out, just that that’s the decision. The argument gets heated and one little wifey pushes her way through, only for another security guard to jump out to block her way.

Now, out on the road, where the car is supposed to come, are policemen who make sure that cars do not wait. People can jump in, but that’s about it. If you’re not there in time, the car gets moved on and it’s another 15-20 mins before it can get back. A total pain in the arse.

So, realising that I don’t have much time left now, I run down to Door 2. I get outside and then find that for some reason you have to do a very large circle in order to get to the pavement outside Door 1, and I definitely don’t have time for that. So, leaping into action, I secure my purchases under my arm and run to the barrier (in red on map) and jump over it. At this point security from Door 2 come outside and start shouting at me. Undeterred, I continue my jaunt.

I’ve drawn a map to help explain this because it is so nonsensical that you’ll get lost otherwise (as did I).

(click image to enlarge)

After leaping over the second barrier, the cries of “Madame! Madame! Madame! Madame!” coming from Door 2 security begin to come a little closer. Not to be stopped mid-flight I pick up speed and mount the third barrier.

By now, security from Door 2 has attracted the attention of security from Door 1 who rushes to the last barrier in my way. “Don’t let her get through! Stop her! Stop her! Madame! Madame stop! You can’t go that way! Stop! Don’t let her get through!” is resounding through the forecourt.

Obviously realising that the mad foreign woman is not to be messed with today, security from Door 1 indicates that I can continue over this barrier (luckily there was a hole that I can get through instead - I’m not that athletic). “No! No! No! She can’t do that! Madame! Madame! Come back! Come BACK!” poor Door 2 security is still shouting.

To no avail however, because I get to the car just before the policeman moves it on.

Security from Door 1 was right: I am not to be messed with today. An argument at 7.30 am with the internet company (delightful details in another post) didn’t put me in the mood to deal with stupid systems.