Well, only kind of. You see, I was terribly excited about the Vancouver Olympics. First because I’m half Canadian, second because I particularly love Vancouver, third because I was fairly recently over there and saw some of the pistes and fourth, because I love a good show! Mr S was also excited, because other than being a super cycler, he is also a super skier.

The olympian challenge for us was to get the channels that would screen the olympics from our standpoints, i.e. French, UK, French, Canadian and yes, let’s not forget French.

I’ll save you the details which you must know by now involved various handymen, various companies that have no idea what they’re going to screen and us trying not to scream somewhere in the middle.

The end result has been ZDF (have you even heard of it?) and some French regional station from near Mt Blanc that for some odd reason were screening the olympics on alternating days.

I’ve been followed what the time difference and my need for sleep allowed and have made great progress in my German. I even remembered the regional dialects and could laugh at my cleverness for knowing someone was ’speaking with a dialect’ (I couldn’t quite remember which, but hey, it was clever nonetheless!).

Then there’s been Facebook. Seriously, this is a nightmare. Half drunk friends putting “Go Canada!” as their status, or “Will Canada take the gold!” have been greeting me in the morning, but hello, no indication of which sport they were watching!

My favourite is ice-skating. Dancing, not speed. I just can’t get over how I can’t lift my leg more than 45 degrees with a skating boot on, never mind over my head, while traveling backwards, and preparing to do a lift over my partner’s head.

And of course, I like the costumes.

And of course, ZDF and mini Mt Blanc station preferred to focus on ski jumping (my goodness, it lasts days and days) or downhill.

So, it has filled me with unimaginable trills of delight that Tom and Lorenzo have decided to critique some of the skaters’ costumes: faaaaaaaaaaaaab!

UPDATE: Having just reread this, it occurred to me that it sounds like the Olympics haven’t ended – that’s because, in my mind, they haven’t! I haven’t seen the closing ceremony and until I do, every night when I go to bed, athletes are competing in cold conditions on the other side of the world!

Image from www.nostalgiaholic.com

It’s been one of those days. I went to the market. I asked for four of something. They told me the price was 12LE (ok, so let’s get clear we’re not talking squillions here!) for 4. I said, “Ok, I’ll have one.” They cut one off. I handed them a 5LE note, apologising for not having change. They looked at me quizzically.

“But it’s 12LE” they said.
“Yes, for four,” I replied, “So, 3LE for one.” “Oh no, madame, it’s 12LE each”

So, what do I do next?

“Right,” I say, “I’ll give you 5LE for cutting it and you can keep it.”
“No, we already cut it..”
“Exactly and the shop across the road told me it was 3LE per one.”
“But we told you it was 12LE”
“Yes, but I thought that was for the four.”
“No, it wasn’t.”

So, you can see how this continues for a few minutes.

What do I do next?

Wait for it.

I pull another 5LE out of my bag, give them the two and walk off.

Yup, I paid 10LE for something that probably didn’t even cost half of that in the first place and then I walked off without it. Because, and there is logic here, I didn’t want it if it was more than 3LE.

Good going, eh?

Right then. I’m heading out of the lift, sticky, hot and particularly sweaty after just working out. I would like to say I look good, but well, I don’t.  I might even smell, but I don’t especially want to go there. I have a sense that someone is following me. This sense is well-honed from living in Egypt for eight years, but not so well practiced after living in The Hood for the last three. I’m sure I’m mistaken. Paranoid even. I test it out. The real test: I walk on the pavement. Nobody in their right mind walks on the pavement in Cairo. Pavements are a mere concrete border to a dusty, tarmac-ed death run.

Not paranoid: the footsteps follow.

I meander as though I’m not aware of him (oh come on, did YOU think it was a her??) and then move to cross the road. He catches up. He was in the gym. “Hello,” he says like we’ve been friends for ages. “Hi” I say, knowing I’ll see him again in the gym, so will give him the benefit of the doubt: perhaps something fell out of my bag (Right. We know it didn’t, but I don’t want to appear a total b*tch without real cause).  “Did you have a good workout?” His voice falters. He’s nervous. He’s not cocky – just as well because then the “doesn’t suffer fools gladly” side would be unleashed.

My brain is shortwiring: I’m married. Isn’t it CLEAR I’m married. Don’t I have an “I’m married” sandwich board swinging off my shoulders? I go to open my mouth and my throat closes. I simply cannot utter the words that my brain was pushing out, “I’m a married woman!” because that makes me o-l-d! I’m no longer the girl who does x & y, I’m a “married-woman” who does x & y. I squeezed out a terse, “Yes.” and set off across the road.

Tailing me come the words “Can I give you a lift anywhere?”.

“Um, yes, that would be splended freaky-stranger-guy-who-has-just-followed-me-down-the-road. It’s dark now, so please, let me get in a metal box that you control and direct you to my home.”

What on earth did he expect me to say to that?!

I’ve just discovered a the answer to a question that has perplexed me for years: why do Egyptian women put on weight after marriage? As a general statement it is the rule. There are some exceptions..but not many. The answer came to me as Mr S headed out the door saying, “I’m just going for a short run” and I pulled my lazy behind up off the sofa to make the trek to the fridge where I then had to extend my arm, grab hold of the door handle, pull the door open, then reach inside, take out some chocolates, close the door and begin the hike back to the sofa. It’s tough, this old life.

As I put the fifth chocolate in my mouth, just after wondering why I was eating chocolate I don’t even like, it occurred to me, that this is exactly what happens after getting married. There are the months of planning, the negotiations that require a fully completed PhD on The United Nations: How to Negotiate with Monarchs, Dictators and Elected Leaders to Get What You Want and Not Piss Anybody Off (Too Much), then when you think you’re home and dry, you’ve got to tackle hairdressers, florists, musicians, and makeup artistes (yes, the E is supposed to be there) who all think they know what you really want..and it relates in no way to the words coming out of your mouth after the “I would like..” part.

Of course, none of that really matters (at least, that’s what the people who insisted those things mattered in the first place, when you were sceptically raising your eyebrow to your hairline, are now saying), you’ve married the love of your life, you had a great time and so did everybody who was able to be there with you on the day.

And you’re totally shattered.

So, going for a “short run”* is not really an option. This is where it gets interesting though. Not being an Egyptian lady, I only had to get married. In Egypt, women (and of course men, but also of course – it is Egypt – in the mixed, not single-sex way) have to buy/rent an apartment, make any renovations needed – and I’m yet to meet and Egyptian who can afford to make renovations on an apartment/house who didn’t, even if nothing needs doing anyway – decorate, and fully furnish the abode before the wedding night. In case you’re wondering, “fully furnish” means everything down to the salt and pepper shaker.

I can’t begin to image the amount of difficulties involved in doing two of the most stressful things of your life simultaneously, with someone you have spent only a little time un-chaperoned with, no matter how much you love them.

Post wedding day then, after the honeymoon, sitting down with multiple boxes of chocolate, tubs of ice-cream, konafa bil ishta** and atayef bil ishta** would be utterly, utterly deserved.

So, not having had to renovate an apartment, I’ll forgo the ice-cream. If you’re in Cairo though and see a hairy fat lady rolling down the street, you’ll know it’s the recently married Grouse post an all-mighty chocolate consumption and now unable to reach her legs to shave.

*More about that in another post.

**If you don’t know what they are, just trust me that they’ll add inches to your hips overnight: ishta means cream…

It may seem obvious to most, but somewhere between planning a wedding 400okm away in a language I don’t understand and efforts to escape the Cairo heat, I have mentally glossed over the point that after the wedding I will in fact be a wife. Yep.

The truely traumatising point about this, is not that I will become a ‘wifey’, an ‘honest woman’ or any other such nonsense. Nope. I’m going to become [cue horror music] an “expat wife”.

Blimey. Golly. Goodness gracious me.

I feel a rebellion coming on: no makeup, no lunches with friends, absolutely no manicures or pedicures, scruffy hair, an extreme avoidance of Suburban/Chelsea tractors oh, and crap clothes.

Hmm. Particularly with that last one, there won’t be too much change. Does it count as a rebellion if nobody can tell you’re rebelling?!

Mr S and I bought our wedding bands this morning. Two hours later I received a panicked phone call, “I tried the ring on on the wrong finger.”
“I don’t think so…”
“Yes, I did.”
“No, really, I saw you do it and it was your ring finger.”
“But it wasn’t that one,  I did it on the fourth finger.”
“Yes, that’s where it is supposed to be.” (Giggles rising in my chest).
“No, it’s supposed to be on the middle finger. My colleague has it on his middle finger.”
“I don’t know why he has it on his middle finger, but it’s supposed to be on your ring finger, your fourth finger, which is why it’s called the ‘ring finger’.”
“I’m just looking online…yes, see, it’s supposed to be on the middle finger. Oh no! I gave him the wrong measurements.” (Giggles now begin bubbling to the surface while this is being said).
“Send me the link, it’s really not supposed to be on the middle finger, guffaw,” (that’s me unable to suppress my giggles), “Trust me with this, you gave him the correct finger.”

The crisis was finally averted with wikipedia coming to the rescue (thank heavens for pictures!!).

“Oooh, thank Good*. I was really sweating. I saw his ring and I just started sweating. Really, I could feel the sweat.  I thought I’d given the wrong finger for measurement.”

Yes, I’m all loved up, but come on, how adorable – and hilarious!!

*The Lord’s name in vain with a French accent.

I have just finished reading The Cloths of Heaven by Sue Eckstein. It has come to Trailing Grouse on part of it’s African tour. The Cloths of Heaven is set in West Africa, where it follows the lives of a number of expatriates in their small world. We meet a wide range of characters from the British High Commissioner and his Cruella de Ville wife Fenella, a Lebanese trader who is not as two-dimensional as he may appear, and Bob Newpin, a nasty little time-share trader. We follow them and others as their lives weave through the story of Daniel Maddison, a rather green diplomat on his first posting.

The tale is a complicated web with characters as complex as they are diverse. The characters are extremely real, to the point where I found myself debating whether they were verging on caricatures of expat stereotypes, rather than innocently chosen players. The conclusion I reached, was that it didn’t matter as they were absolutely believable and interesting.

The manner in which the the story unfolds is genius: short, choppy sections at the beginning are connected by subtly shared settings, times or atmospheres and throughout the book, time is creatively unfolded. Aside from the writer’s obvious skills, the story itself is a unique, modern tale of fiction based on the tough reality of life in an outpost!

If I could have asked for anything else from this book, it would have been that it was longer, so that the complexity of the characters, their relations with each other and themselves be teased out a little more in the beginning. Perhaps I just wish it had been longer because I wish I hadn’t reached the end yet!

When I was growing up in my wee Highland village in Scotland everybody was white. We didn’t think about it, but the fact was, nobody in the area was anything other than white.

We were taught that skin colour didn’t matter. I don’t know how exactly, whether it was at home, at school or at Sunday school, or a combination of them all, but we were. As a result, we had no reason to think about it: everybody was equal, whether they were standing in the playground with us or a dusty school yard in Mozambique.

Then I moved to Edinburgh. It was in the days when almost everybody in Edinburgh was white. There were some people from Pakistan, but again, neither I nor any of my friends thought anything about their skin colour. Why would we? It wasn’t an issue.

When Michael Jackson’s “Doesn’t Matter if You’re Black or White” song came out, I agreed with the title, but kind of couldn’t see the point. I mean, would you sing a song saying, “It doesn’t matter if you wear blue socks or purple”?

Lil Bro had a friend in his class who used to commute, aged about 12 from Glasgow to Edinburgh every day and back again (a 50 min train ride). Once a week this friend would stay the night in order to do some after school sports that my brother also did. After about a year of this, I asked Lil Bro why his friend didn’t go to school in Glasgow. “He’s been bullied there. A lot.” he replied. It seemed strange really, why not just go to another school in Glasgow? “He has,” said Lil Bro, “He keeps being bullied.”

Now, Lil Bro’s friend was a really nice chap. Friendly, charming and intelligent but not a geek, nevermind absolutely gorgeous (although I didn’t want to admit that to my bro, being Big Sis and all that..). I couldn’t figure out why he would have problems with bullies.
“Why is he bullied?” I said.

“Racism.” came the response. I did a double take. What on earth was he talking about? “He’s black, duh” Lil Bro said. It took me a few moments and then I realised that well, yes, he was.

Since then I’ve become somewhat more worldly, including experiencing a small bit of the other side of the coin (subject of minor level racism). I have to admit, however, that I have always worked on the assumption that racism in the West is over, because for me, both in my interactions with people and in what I learned, skin colour was such a non-issue, there was nothing to discuss.

It hasn’t been until this year that I have begun to understand fully that racism wasn’t dead, isn’t dead, in the West. The hoopla about the US having a black president, followed by a lot of what has been said about Michael Jackson’s life has really brought home to me that the world I lived in didn’t exist for many, many people.

And just how privileged I’ve been, because of something I considered pointless to think about.

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 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.