Appliance Shopping

We only have minor upgrades in mind for our Cairo Condo this year.  Linda definitely wanted a new kitchen stove to make baking easier and I thought it was time to upgrade the television screen to high-definition.

We set out to accomplish this early in the trip so we could maximize our benefits during this winter.  We headed downtown with a friend to the appliance district.  Our friend's favorite store in the area has both of our needs covered and he was making some large purchases at the same time so we had bargaining power.

The appliance district is on a single street with maybe a hundred shops along a couple of city blocks.


If one store doesn't have what you want, you won't get to leave - the owner will be on the phone finding someone who does have it.  Meanwhile, sit down, please.  And have some tea.

Linda had very specific needs.  If you recall this post, our current stove requires that the oven be lit with a match and then just keeps getting hotter until you open the door.  It works a bit like grandma's did on the farm in 1900 except you don't have to put wood in it.


Stoves with the features Linda wants are mainly available in larger sizes with five burners or more.  But, we were fortunate to find a smaller four burner model (at a premium price) built for the "European and Italian markets."  Who knew that Italy was no longer in Europe.  Well, of course, they are just calling out Italy since all of the best chefs are known to live there. For now the new stove sits in our dining room awaiting installation. We got immediate delivery but not immediate installation.  We hope the installation will happen soon. Now that should be a real adventure!  Watch for further posts.


The television selection was simpler.  I wanted a 32 inch screen, preferably by Samsung.  Clearly the U.S.A standards dominate the television market - nothing else in the world is sold by inches except televisions.  We settled on a Samsung 32EH4003.  Amazon sells it for $219 but we paid around $290 here.  Electronics come at a premium due to heavy import duty.  The larger the screen, the greater the percentage duty, I am told.  Smartphones go for about double their U.S. price.  So we settled for this smaller and somewhat lower-end unit in spite of "but sir, it is not full HD!"  (It's a 720 scan line unit versus 1080.)  This is a great improvement over our previous TV that is now sitting on the floor looking for a worthy owner.


You can expect a significant improvement in the quality of screen captures that I post in the future.


I had previously upgraded the satellite receiver to an HD model.  No extra charge for HD - still free for my 400 channels and I am guessing that about a quarter of them are HD.  Interestingly, an OTA (Over the Air) channel scan gave me 13 local channels but none of them are  digital.  The Egyptian government hasn't seen fit to put their viewers through the same "buy a new TV or get a converter box" fiasco as in the United States.  Perhaps they have had enough revolutions.  That also means that our old TV will actually have some value to someone.

My 42 Cent Dinner

We were out visiting friends a couple of days ago.  This friend and family live close by and our route home took us by the neighborhood Koshary shop.  Koshary, you may recall from previous posts, is a staple of the Egyptian diet.  This time, we are buying it from a shop on the corner near the Vodafone store.  There are always people in line, no one speaks English, the pace is furious.  And I forgot my camera.  Here is the plastic bag for takeaway offered as a consolation picture.


The price for one person is 3 pounds Egyptian - about 42 cents.  Here is what I find when I get home and open the bag.


The plastic container hold the pasta, rice, lentils, garbanzo beans and most important, the fried onions on top.


The three tied plastic bags contain the "secret sauces."  On the left, a great tomato sauce, then lemon sauce and on the right, just a bit of very hot sauce.  Tomato sauce is found on most things here - there are some exceptions.  We'll talk about one tomorrow.  But tomatoes are coming and going by the truckload.


They are firm and ripe as you would expect from a Minnesota Farmer's Market around Labor Day.  They are a good excuse by themselves  for coming to Egypt.

Linda is following a "much reduced carb" regimen so she stayed with the leftover chicken from the previous night.  (Don't worry, she didn't eat the bread.)


If you want some Koshary of your own, there are a couple of recipes on this blog if you just enter Koshary in the search box at the top.  Otherwise, here are two recipes. 

It's Winter Here. But not too Severe.

When people learn that we spend the winter in Cairo, they are usually curious about the weather and the cost of living.  We arrived during a cold snap this year.  The Cairo Post describes it this way:

CAIRO: Egyptian Meteorological Authority (EMA) said that Saturday will witness a “severe cold wave” across the country, accompanied with heavy rainfall on the northern coast and Cairo.

What that means it that it got down to around 47 the past couple of mornings and only up to 58.  The biggest problem has been some light rain and morning fog.  About 98 percent of our days here are sunny, but this was the view across the street late yesterday morning.


There is a good picture of the waves coming in from the Mediterranean at Alexandria along with that  weather report.

When the fog lifts, the view has been pretty decent to the South.  Here are some of the oldest pyramids in Egypt as seen from our rear balcony.



The forecast is for slowly rising temperatures over the next week with highs back in the low seventies at the end of that time.  If you ever want to check on local conditions around us, this link should get you to a personal weather station a couple of miles from us.  If we ever get a hard-wired Internet connection in the apartment, I plan to install my own station.

Tonight we walked down to our favorite chicken restaurant to buy dinner.  We had been told that electric power outages were now a thing of the past, but the lights went out around six tonight, so we took the flashlight and the stairs down to the street.  Lights were out on our side of the street for about a half mile.


The chicken restaurant does a good business in take-away rotisserie chicken but also does kabobs and grilled chicken.  That is a pharmacy next door on the left.


I got a lesson in properly fanning the charcoal here from the owner who always recognizes us.  (Not very many other Americans stop here!)


We bought three half-chickens, grilled, along with salads and bread for about nine dollars.  Meanwhile, I went over to the nearby bakery and picked up four croissants and a pound of date-filled pastries for just under a dollar.  That should give you an idea of the cost of food.  Here was one of the half-chickens after we got back to the apartment.  The lights were back on by then.

Return to Cairo, 2015

With the holidays past, we turned our attention to the annual trip to Egypt and our non-conventional escape from Minnesota winter.  This year, we again had two stops en-route, at London and Paris.  Total trip time would be about sixteen hours if everything went well, and the hour and a half between planes in London proved adequate.  I was betting against it.

This winter hasn't been too bad in the Twin Cities from a snow and ice standpoint.  It has just been rather cold.  This is the first time in three years that I could get all of the Christmas decorations and cords out of the front yard before we left.  Linda posed for a picture but I didn't get up early enough to capture the minus five degree reading on our thermometer.  You can see it was still chilly around noon.


We cleared TSA security easily enough in spite of the fact that I was carrying a heavy Xbox game console for a friend here. The Xbox proved of much interest to security staff in three countries.  We settled in at the gate and Linda thought she heard our name called so took our tickets and went up to the counter.  Perhaps we were getting seat assignments on the London-Paris leg which were still open.

While she took care of that, I listened in mixed fascination and horror as a group travel leader lectured her flock on the criminals and scams that would await them at their destination.  Pickpockets - luggage thieves - con artists.  I was appalled.  After a bit, I asked one of the members of the delegation where on earth they were going?  Nairobi I thought?  No, "London, England," was the reply.  I'm glad we don't have any of those kind of problems in Egypt.


Linda brought back a new set of boarding passes and sure enough, we now had assigned seats on the London-Paris leg.

As we began boarding, Linda pointed out that we also were now in row 4 instead of row 40.  We won the lottery!  First Class across the Atlantic.  Now this is the way flying should be.  Four seats to the row instead of eight and each seat stretches out into a bed.  As usual, I rushed to get our baggage into the overhead compartment, not realizing that each person in first class has their own compartment.  Oh, how the other half live.

While we waited for the second class folks to board, flight attendants brought around glasses of champagne.  I felt like "Wally Bird" in the old Western Airlines commercials of the 1960s.


Once off the ground we were offered complementary cocktails.  Glenlivet Scotch?  Why yes, please - on the rocks - and, make mine a double.  It was served with shrimp and avocado.  I was very happy that Linda had retained her Silver status with Delta via that Portuguese vacation with her traveling ladies during the summer.  We thoroughly enjoyed the dinners before getting several hours honest rest.  (I loved the lobster mac & Cheese.)




Tail winds gave us a seven hour flight and we had ample time to move through security a second time and reach our gate at London's Heathrow airport.  We had once had a very bad experience changing terminals there and have avoided the place since.  Delta/Air France seem to have a smooth running operation though.  The departing flights seemed to all be bound for interesting locations and several well-know London shops were represented in the terminal.  Those $140 "power shirts" were marked down to around $80.  They brought back fond memories of my days at Pillsbury and Dayton's, but I passed.


In Paris, we arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport and passed through security a third time, unaware of the emerging Charlie Hebdo crisis that was occurring downtown and that would bring a manhunt to the area near the airport in a couple of days.  There was an unusual police presence at our gate, though.  Since this was a flight from France to Egypt, there was also one of those poisonous "smoking boxes" close by and there were plenty of smokers from the two countries anxious to get in a few final puffs.



The four or five hour flight from Paris or other European City to Cairo usually offers a nice view of the Dolomite mountains before settling down to parallel the Italian coast.  This day was no exception.



We arrived just a bit late at the International terminal in Cairo a couple of hours after sunset.  We quickly cleared passport control, customs and were met by a good friend who took us to our apartment after a stop to pick up a few groceries and bakery goods for breakfast.


 
It was our smoothest and most pleasant trip to Cairo yet.

Bear Season

We see an occasional black bear up at the lake near our Wisconsin cabin.  This year, Linda saw bears on three different bicycle rides.  Last year, one walked right by the living room window early in the morning, apparently on a routine food patrol.

Our next-door neighbors got a good picture of one strolling through their yard at night in October.

About the same time, and some fifty or so miles to the west, near Sandstone Minnesota, a hunter had a close encounter with one of the furry creatures after wounding it.  The result was a hunting story to be recounted 'round the campfire for many years.  YouTube version here.

Autumn on the Gordon St Croix Flowage, 2014

Autumn passes quickly in the northland.  Four weeks ago, the foliage was at a peak on the Flowage.


Two weeks later, the color was gone, but the view was still colorful.


I came up on Saturday evening to finish the closing chores for the season.  Yesterday morning the geese were paddling upstream and I took the picture on the left before starting to cover the pontoon boat for winter.  The picture on the right is from this morning.  Quite a change was underway.


But everything was done in time.  The dock is on land, so is the pontoon.


Evenings in the Adirondack chairs are just a memory.


And another cabin season has passed like the setting of the sun.

Our Favorite Winter Sport Is in Jeopardy

The Africa Cup.

Football (soccer type) is big in Egypt.  And it doesn't get any better than the semi-annual Africa Cup matches.  Egypt's remarkable triple championship in 2006-8-10 is a great conversation topic with any male Egyptian.

But, this year's host, Morocco, is demanding a one-year delay due to the Ebola crisis.  And, possible substitute host nations are also reluctant to welcome players and fans.

Rest assured, even if the tournament is cancelled, there will be football on TV in Cairo coffeehouses.     

Thinking About Egypt

It's about two months before we depart for our annual winter stay in Egypt.  Much of the news this year seems to be positive.  This article in Financial Times from a two weeks ago notes considerable progress in the Egyptian economy resulting from steps by "media savvy" president Sisi.

Sisi had a strong team, popular support, and had raised $8.5bn via local bonds to invest in a high-profile project, the widening of the over 30 km of the Suez Canal which some had estimated was employing 100,000 people. Half the money was thought to have been raised from the informal “under the mattress” economy.

 And the eternal optimists in the Ministry of Tourism are once again back to forecasting major increases in both tourists and dollars.

I was at a party last week where a middle-school teacher asked me to describe what Egypt is like.  That's an impossible task, beyond "everything is different."  You truly have to experience the country to understand that phrase.  Walking down a crowded city street at 11p.m., watching young boys in a barber shop getting their hair cut, savoring the pleasant mix of odors from street-food vendors and taking in the cacophony of music and bargaining at a hundred small shops can only be experienced, never described.

It is very hard to describe the third world to a first world resident who has never lived outside of our economic cocoon.  Sometimes it feels like we travel to a different planet for three months out of the year.  That was really brought home to me today when I read two newspaper articles.  The first, in the Wall Street Journal described a multi-evening project by a Washington, D.C., education researcher who built a spreadsheet to categorize, organize and track her child's toys - truly a "first world problem!"

She created a spreadsheet that labeled more than 100 household toys by category (arts & crafts, building sets and games) and developmental level (baby, toddler or preschool). Then she brought most of them to basement storage.

Every couple of weeks, she selects a few to bring upstairs. While the system has helped keep the house tidier, “it’s still amazing,” she says, “the amount of clutter.” ...

The second article, a remarkable personal story in the New York Times, described a Rwandan orphan, plucked out of a garbage dump and now studying at Harvard.

“I took him to where I was, cleaned him up, changed his clothes, dressed the wounds on his body and eventually sent him to primary school,” she said.

In first grade, he finished at the top of his class. It was a sign of grades to come: straight A’s in high school, followed by a seat in a senior high school specializing in the sciences.

Human are remarkably adaptive beings.

It has now become a bit easier to share Egypt with readers of this blog.  Google Street View now features several popular Egyptian tourist sites.  Just follow this link and choose one of the Egyptian sites to tour.  Most have been featured on this blog.  For example, the Hanging Church, shown below.  Once you have picked a site, use your mouse to take a "virtual walk" through the area.

Linda's Flight to Portugal

Linda's flight left at about 2 p.m. from Minneapolis and took her to Philadelphia.  From there, U.S. Air flies directly to Lisbon.  The actual trans-Atlantic flight is only about six and a half hours as compared to our usual seven and a half or eight hours to Amsterdam or Paris.

She left just about on time, although after spending about a half hour on the taxiways before takeoff.  I tracked the flight on FlightAware.com  Here are the top flight tracking websites.


FlightAware is a fun site to use because it gives up-to-the-minute data on altitude, speed, heading and position.  Here she has just taken off, crossed the Jersey shore, and is at 21,900 feet (Flight Level 219 and 466 knots speed are visible in the second line of green print under the plane.)


Her plane joins the large contingent of flights that cross the Atlantic from West to East every night.  Her plane will be staying south of most of them.  Flight Tracker loses real-time tracking about three hours into the flight and provides only estimated data until the plane lands.


After six hours and eleven minutes, Flight Aware confirms that she has arrived. 





I'm still waiting for a text message from her but I know she is on the ground.

Update: a bit later.

• The delay leaving Philly was due to a fox on the runway
• The delay in texting her arrival was due to a long passport line.

A Visit to the Minneapolis Airport

Linda and her "traveling ladies" are headed for Portugal this evening.  I took Linda and one friend to the Minneapolis airport late this morning.

Well, it's really Minneapolis St. Paul International, (MSP) but if you get a nickle every time someone says that, you are never going to be rich.  I only travel a couple of times a year so I have missed out on the latest woe to befall our beloved Minneapolis airport.  It seems that on most Tuesdays and Wednesdays, there is no parking available at Terminal 1.  This leaves you three and a half miles from the parking lot at Terminal 2.  That is three and a half miles plus some elevators, escalators, a train and a tram to get back.  Good luck.  I hope you left early.

I've been to a lot of airports around the country - but they are no match for MSP on the confusion scale.  The problem starts with the airport having two terminals - on opposite sides of the main runways, no less.  For a metropolitan area with two downtowns separated by a river, maybe this makes sense.  Life was easier when the two terminals were called "the main terminal" and "the charter terminal."  People could usually figure out which terminal to go to.  If you were on a real airline, you went to the main.  If you had a cheap ticket to Vegas or the Caribbean, you went to the charter terminal.  But governments do what guv'ments gotta do and gave the charter terminal a name -- The Humphrey Terminal.  It was named after an old-time Minneapolis Mayor from sixty-five years ago. (Alternately, name the last ten vice-presidents of the United States beginning with Joe Biden.  The one before Spiro Agnew was Hubert Horatio Humphrey.  I guess local politicians think HHH had a memorable name - but recall that Jimmy Carter called him Hubert Horatio Hornblower at the 1980 Democrat Convention!)

Obviously, with the charter terminal having a name, the main terminal had to have one too.  So the best known Minnesota aviator, Charles Lindbergh, got the call.  All of this took place in 1985.  Every 40-year old man on the naming commission (we didn't have women back then) had seen Jimmy Stewart play Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis as a twelve-year old.  It was a no-brainer!

Alas, it is now 2014.  No one can remember who is more famous, and thereby entitled to the bigger terminal, Humphrey or Lindbergh.  In fact, if you ask a Gen-Xer who either of them are you will be lucky if you only get, "beats me!" Our guv'ment geniuses solved this problem by spending 1 (or 2.2 depending on what you read) million dollars renaming the terminals 1 and 2.  The earlier dilemma was highlighted in this NBC news article.  So the signs on the road now direct you to those two terminals.  Problem solved?  Not really.  I guess the airport commission folks don't travel much - or are not very observant.  The key to useful signage in most other cities is not having simple, memorable names like 1 and 2 or A and B.  It is having the little United, Delta, American, etc. logos up on the sign.

This is all for introduction to the worst example of signage at any airport on earth.  Take a look at this:



If you just got off the tram at the airport in Terminal 1 and want to know what airlines are at this terminal (and why on earth would anyone want to know that!) you just get down on your hands and knees and look at this sign, fourteen inches off the floor.  What!!!!!

Here is what you will see if you are down at ground level:


And, did you notice the map legend on the lower right side of the first picture?  There are 49 different icons defined.  Let's celebrate the new "in" word and call this an iconic disaster.




I leave it as an exercise for the reader to see if all 49 of the icons are actually used on the map.