Tom Restores the Key to the Front Door

Several years ago, perhaps back around the time of the revolution in 2011, our HOA decided to begin locking the front door to our building.  Keys were distributed and the door was locked at night.  I think this discipline lasted only a few days before being declared unworkable due to the number of children without keys.  It could also be a problem for the building's cat population but the broken glass at the bottom facilitates their movement in and out.

 

This year, the practice returned, without much discipline - more of an occasional rare inconvenience.  I acquired one key on my first visit in January but we needed to have a duplicate made.  I headed out with Roshdy to find a locksmith shop.

It's easy to spot a locksmith from the distance in Egypt.

 

 

We checked with this one and he quickly made a copy of the key.

  

 

The charge for the completed key was five Egyptian pounds, about 35 cents.  I tipped the locksmith another five.

The key works fine but the door is mostly left open now. So much for having a "security building".

 

 

 

 

 

Linda Restores the Key of Life

One of the ancient symbols of power associated with the Egyptian Kings is the "Ankh," or Key of Life.  The two depicted here are in the recently opened National Museum of Egyptian Civilization.  They are several thousand years old.

 

 We have had a nice replica hanging in our condo here for several years.  Unfortunately, it broke. We tried gluing it back together but we were not satisfied with the results. In 2020 we searched the Khan el Khalili Bazaar high and low looking for a replacement.  

 

We finally found a good match in size and color but without the requisite gold trim.  Linda brought along a bottle of paint this year but needed a small brush to apply it.  A trip to a local paint store did not yield anything approaching the right size.  A later trip to a book store turned up the perfect artist's brush.

  

 

With painstaking care, Linda applied gold trim to the Ankh.

 

The resulting product is a perfect replacement

 

 and now hangs proudly on our kitchen archway.

 

 

 

Annual Gasoline Price Post - and Other Economic News

Gasoline prices were on the rise again in Egypt at the start of the year.  When I arrived at the beginning of January, 92 octane gasoline was priced at 8.25 EGP per liter.  ($1.99 per gallon)    On January 24th, the price was raised to 8.50 EGP per liter ($2.05 per gallon) without warning, prompting much grumbling. The price is set by the government.

Our local Co-Op station down the block now has a new large electronic sign displaying the price.

 

More surprising was a sudden 14% devaluation of the Egyptian Pound a few days ago, which took it from 15.66 to the dollar down to 18.45 per dollar.  This, like anything else negative of recent note, was blamed on "Putin."  Perhaps anticipating further drops, there has been quite a bit of action at the ATMs in town as Egyptians are looking for a more stable spot for their savings  - perhaps gold?

 

 

With that devaluation, gasoline is now selling for the equivalent of $1.74 per gallon prompting no sympathy from us!

At the same time, the government set a fixed price on the price of unsubsidized bread:

The price of unsubsidized bread has jumped by as much as 25%, from 1.00 to 1.25 Egyptian pounds per round, in some bakeries in the three weeks since Russia’s invasion of its neighbor. Flour prices have risen by up to 15%, said Attia Hamad at the Cairo Chamber of Commerce.

The new fixed prices for flat, round balady bread have been set at 0.50, 0.75 and 1.00 Egyptian pounds for loaves weighing 45, 65 and 90 grams respectively. Prices for 40, 60 and 80 gram small, white fino loaves were set at 0.50, 0.75 and 1.00 Egyptian pounds respectively.

Violations of the fixed prices will result in fines between 100,000 and 5 million Egyptian pounds.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi last week asked the government to set a price for unsubsidized bread because of the recent price increases.

Will any of this affect the price of our bread sticks and lunch rolls? (see previous post)  Time will tell.

In other gas station news.

We stopped in at the gas station two days ago.  While the pump attendant was working, there was no one on duty to wash the windshield.  It turns out that he had come in to work but after an hour or so, found the temperature too cold to continue and went home. It was 64 degrees that morning. Are we sympathetic?

 

 

 

From the Bakery

We needed some snack food, so headed out to our favorite bakery yesterday.  Hamdan, the 40 year old owner, runs this bakery about a half mile away from us and warmly greets us whenever we stop in.  Hamdan is such a big NBA fan that he knew about the MN Timberwolves even before meeting us. That's Hamdan below in the dark blue galabeya, tending his shop.

Bread is a big part of the Egyptian diet. You likely have seen it pop up lately in the news since Egypt imports a great deal of wheat from Ukraine. (This article says Russia and Ukraine supply 85% of Egypt's wheat while this article says that Russia insists there will be no problem.)  Egypt has a vast subsidy program that helps supply the round flat loaves of common bread that appear with almost every meal at about ten percent of cost.  

In addition to the simple round loaves, bread products can be found in many forms. There are bakeries on nearly every street and if you don't have a bakery on your street, you can just go a block further and around the corner you will certainly find one.  We picked up four different specialties to bring home.  

 

These included a pound of crispy bread sticks and a pound of delightful sweet sesame covered "S"s.

 

Tom enjoys the soft pastry bread treats for breakfast and Linda enjoys the smaller buns for lunch sandwiches.

 

All together, we paid around four dollars for this bakery visit.

Eggs

We needed a few more eggs before we leave for home next week so I walked down the street to the convenience store.  They keep their eggs in front of the deli meats case.  (Eggs are not refrigerated outside of North America - see, for instance:)

All sizes are kept together, you choose your size or color as you pick them out and bag them.  I brought along my own carton but most people just put them in a plastic bag - Egyptian eggs have thick shells.  Once home, I compared sizes of the six I chose.  They ranged from 52 grams (small) to 68 (large). One would do well to weigh the eggs when baking cookies.

I paid 2 EGP apiece for the eggs, about eleven cents.  One might do a bit better at an egg store like this one but it is about a half-mile away.

I blogged about one of the Christian egg stores back in 2017.

Fruit and Vegetables

We have several choices of "green grocers" in the neighborhood now selling fresh fruits and vegetables.  Having an attractive display can help pull in customers.  We appreciated the effort made by this merchant to catch our eye with his apples at the back of this street market.

 

Those potatoes in the foreground are selling for 6.50 EGP per kilogram.  That is sixteen cents per pound.  Most fruits and vegetables cost more - around twenty-five cents per pound is typical.

 

Steak on the Grill

Our son, Terry, always comes up with great Christmas gifts for the kitchen.  This past year he gave us a grill to use over a burner of the stove here in Cairo. We brought it with us and were excited to use it.

Finding good grilling meat here is not easy.  A friend suggested we try the entrecote at Carrefour.  Entrecote is the French name for a thin rib-eye.  We picked out a couple of thicker pieces with some nice marbling and fired up the grill/stove.  

 

 

The results were very good. It was not as good as we find in Bloomington but the price was $5.00/lb vs $14.00-19.00/lb.

 

Our second try at a steak dinner was much less satisfactory.  The butcher cut the steaks too thin (French style?) and there was very little marbling.  I called it tough beef and Linda declared it nearly inedible. In fact, she cut up a sizeable portion and fed it to the appreciative cats. The grill has worked very well for chicken though, without any problems..

 

 

Finally, the Garlic Has Arrived

 It has been an unusually cold month of March in Cairo.  Usually by the last weeks of this month, bougainvillea and other tropical varieties are in full bloom but not this year.  (See this old post for pictures.)

 

Daytime highs have been in the low to mid 60s for the past two weeks.  Even the garlic is late.  Just yesterday we saw the first truckload of garlic coming into town.

 

 

See previous garlic post here. 

Update: At the end of March, we saw this load coming in (slowly) from the Fayoum area along the new Ring Road extension:

Repairing the Tile, Egyptian Style

It turns out that we did not use any of the newly purchased tile described in the previous post.  Gentle prying around the edge of the loosest tile released it with no damage.  A neighboring tile was easily removed also.

Our tile setter arrived on Friday afternoon, just after prayers, as shops around our area were reopening.  We headed first to this cement store.

It wasn't until I looked at the photo that I noticed that the shop is nestled into a small open spot next to a neighborhood mosque.  This shop caters to the low volume customer and is happy to break down mortar and grout by the kilogram.  We picked up  bags of mortar, brown sand and grout (known locally as "white cement."

Our next stop was a small paint and hardware outlet where we purchased a plastic tarp.

  

The final stop was at a "plastic shop" where we bought a tub suitable for mixing mortar.  All told, I was in for about ten dollars at this point.

 I was unsure why we needed the brown sand.  It turns out that I had missed something during my previous visits to construction sites.  I usually have looked closely at the basic framing of the buildings along with electrical and plumbing work without inspecting the tile installation.  (You can click on the "construction" tag on this post to see all my previous posts on the subject.)   Notice the pile of sand on the floor at this work site below.

Now, you can google "ceramic tile," thinset, thickset and any number of related terms but you will not find a step in the process that says, "spread a bed of sand about two inches thick on the floor, before beginning."  As always, we  say, "Everything is different in Egypt." - and it truly is.

Chipping away the 3/4 inch of mortar beneath our tiles revealed our bed of brown sand.  Obviously, some shifting had taken place.  This was a great revelation to me.  I have long wondered how cracks could appear in the tile floors of relatively new buildings, such as the new Museum of Egyptian Civilization;  I now understand.

With loose tiles popped off, and the mortar chipped out, our man was now able to level out our sand bed and layer in a new mortar bed.  He mixed the mortar out on the balcony in a basin and mixing ring that he had supplied, using water from the newly purchased tub.

 

After replacing four tiles, it was time for tea; then grout was applied to the tile gaps. This guy must be somewhat of a perfectionist, an unusual thing in Egypt, as experienced by us. He just couldn't help himself so he also filled some other gaps in the original improperly grouted tiles.  The result seems fine both physically and aesthetically.  

  

 

Our installer asked for 250 EGP (about $16) for his afternoon's work.  I tipped generously but kept the plastic tub.  We disposed of the tarp and old mortar in traditional Egyptian fashion. It was thrown over a fence into a vacant lot. Perhaps someday someone else will have to deal with it.

More photos at this Flickr album.

 

Shopping for Floor Tile

This year, we noticed a few loose pieces of ceramic tile on the floor of our condo.  One, in particular, was actually rocking and crunching in our bedroom.  We sought a professional opinion from a tile-setter who confirmed that we had a problem.

He hoped that we might have a few extra tiles in storage since removing the loose one could result in chipping or breaking.  We had none.  So, we spent an afternoon looking for a match.

This took us first to "tile street," in the heart of commercial Giza.  Businesses here tend to gather by type and a full couple of blocks of tile vendors can be found across the street from plumbing fixture shops.  With very limited display space, the street is utilized as a showroom.  

The line of toilets, sinks and bathtubs lying on the street is a bit jarring - so much so that I completely missed a great photo opportunity: a young woman covered head to toe in a niqab departing the area carrying a stainless steel kitchen sink under her right arm,

 

Doesn't everyone buy their new toilet on the street? These fixtures seem to be smiling.

 

Linda checked out the displays in several of the small tile shops.

 

 

It turns out that our biggest problem was not matching the color or pattern. We had a size issue.  When our apartment was constructed fifteen years ago, square tiles, 30 cm (about 12 inches) on a side was the norm.  Today, as back in the U.S., tile is larger - 30x60, 30x90, 60x60 are all the modern style.  30x30 tiles were not to be found on "tile street."

Clued in by one of the shop owners, we headed down to the high-rent district along the banks of the Nile.  The stores here were of an entirely different character - as upscale as any design studio you might encounter in Edina or Woodbury back home.  We visited two of them.

 

 

Sliding panels of tiles lined a long hallway near massive displays of shower heads and faucets.  

 

Mahgoub (since 1948) has anything you could imagine in tile and fixtures.  They also had a small army of salesmen in suit and tie to show us around.  We soon located a selection of "old-fashioned" 30x30 tiles and were able to order a minimum package of ten tiles that looked to be a good match to our floor.

 

Here is the new tile placed on the left side of this photo. It's a perfect match with the old tile on the right.

 

It was an interesting afternoon exploring the resources available to the various strata of society.  Of course, tea is offered to the customer, no matter which store you visit.