Relaxing at Abu Sir

One of our favorite spots near Cairo is  a horse farm at Abu Sir about five miles south of our apartment.  Last year, we visited several times.  It's away from the city noise and quite close to some of the oldest pyramids in Egypt.  A few weeks ago, I noticed that the Czech archeologists working at the Abu Sir site had made some major new discoveries.  You can read the story at this website. 

Our good friend, Roshdy, could sense that I had had a tough couple of days with our Egyptian craftsmen and needed some calming atmosphere.  That was actually just half of it.  I also had been dealing with the Hennepin County Library's eBook system.  More on that in another post.

So Roshdy suggested that we go somewhere for tea to relax and that certainly sounded like a good idea.  He picked us up and we were soon driving into the entrance of the horse farm.


There were some new horses and donkeys to visit as an Australian animal veterinary and rescue group is now operating from this farm.  We hope to learn more about their efforts in the future.

The farm's owner, Mohammed, has built an additional small apartment on the property and we had  chance to view the Abu Sir pyramids from the roof while drinking tea and having a few of the very sweet local mandarin oranges known as Yusuf Effendi.




The mandarins were a good match to the color of the sky as the sun set behind the desert sand beyond the palm trees.


To visit some of those other posts about Abu Sir and see more of the pyramids and tombs there, just click on the Abu Sir label at the bottom of this post.  To find the spot on a map, put 29.896755,31.20352 into Google and press the enter key. (switch to satellite view to spot the pyramids.)

Next Day, Next Craftsman, Next Problem

With our toilet problems behind us, let's talk stoves!

You may recall that we had a brand new stove sitting in the dining room at the end of this post.


We had to remove the original packing box to fit it into the elevator and avoid carrying it up eight flights of stairs.  In fact, this defines the size of our elevator.  It will hold exactly one stove and one good sized person.

The stove installation was scheduled for Sunday between 9 and 3 and the installer actually showed up around 1:00.  The installer was from the "gas company," which was probably a mistake.  We would have been better off with an installer from Universal, the stove company.  As I moved into the kitchen to move some things out of the way near our existing stove, we heard a loud metal bang followed by a screeching noise.  The gas man had lifted the stove out of the box base and was dragging it across the ceramic tile.  I shouted, "No, No, NO, NO!" I showed him the proper way to move the stove by putting it back into the cardboard and then gliding it smoothly across the floor into the kitchen with nary a scratch on the tiles. We were not off to a good start!

The gas man did a good job of preparing the stove with a proper fitting and connecting the unsheathed flexible rubber hose to the stove.  I guess the code is different here than at home.  Next, he swapped out the gas jets on all the burners from LP to Natural Gas.  More on what that's about here for the technically inclined.

There are more safety features on this stove than the last.  That means lighting is more difficult.  Also one burner flame sensor seems a bit iffy. The large burner doesn't work right at maximum flow and only one burner properly turns down to minimum without going out.  The gas man pointed to the logo, "Universal," and told us in Arabic, "not my job," more or less.  We were using a telephone and a friend to handle translation.  The Universal man is scheduled for Wednesday to fix all problems. We were told that it will cost 50 Egyptian pounds to begin the 3 year warranty. We'd call that a buyer protection plan not a warranty.

But, we are both delighted with the stove.  Here I am cooking our first dinner, an Indian chicken vindaloo.  The big burner can be adjusted to both high and low temperatures.  The small burner does a great job of cooking rice without boiling over.  And remarkably, if you pour some oil into the center of a pan, it no longer runs over to the side due to a concave top on the stove.


As for Linda, she couldn't be more pleased.  The oven lights without a match and a "whoosh," and it maintains a remarkably steady 350 degrees without opening and closing the door to act as a temperature control.  Here are her first batch of cookies, many of which have just been delivered across the hall in her "cultural exchange program."

Cairo Craftsmen, Part One

It's been a busy thirty hours or so.  Last night a plumber arrived around 9 p.m. to fix a leaky toilet.  A good friend had located him and brought him over when he was available.  As is usually the case with Cairo craftsmen, he showed up with a cloth bag containing all his tools.  I missed an opportunity to photograph one of those cloth bags - what was I thinking.  I did notice that the bag contained a piece of green broomstick about a foot long.  That, it turns out, was his caulk gun.  He used it to push the caulk out of a conventional tube of the stuff.

The 9 p.m. arrival was not unusual.  Plumbers, electricians and carpenters doing repair work come after finishing their day jobs.  Or, at least, the ones that our friends bring us seem to usually arrive then.  This was not a problem for us but did cause a bit of an issue for our friend whose wife had a dentist's appointment for 9 p.m.  As we say, "everything is different here."

Back to the toilet problem.  The main bathroom toilet was dripping when flushed when we arrived last year but the leaking stopped before we were able to get a plumber on site.  I elected to leave well-enough alone.  This year the leak returned and didn't go away.  Obviously, some part of the joint was drying out and separating.  Think rigid porcelain and plastic joined by plaster and you will understand the problem.

Egyptian toilets don't have a waste exit underneath with a wax ring connection to the waste stack as do American toilets.  The waste goes out the rear and into the stack.  Note this "before" picture.


My first inclination was to apply a layer of 3M tub and tile caulk to the joint externally and let it go - but why not call in the professionals?  After assuring that the plumber was going to bring his own rags (Cairo craftsmen are notorious for using your nice new towels to wipe the floor) and that the job included cleanup - another rarity here - we were ready for the plumber's visit.  The plan was to cut out the existing waste pipe, move the toilet out, install a new flexible pipe and reconnect to the stack.  And, re-seat the toilet, of course.

The plumber pulled a floppy saw blade out of his bag and began cutting on the existing plastic pipe.  I went to the closet, opened my tool box and offered my hack saw but it was too late, he had already finished the cut.

An hour later, I inspected the finished job and we (especially Linda) didn't like the re-caulking around the base of the toilet.  It was pretty much caulk on everything including the floor and toilet base.  Well, that green broomstick pushing the caulk out of the tube doesn't exactly lay down an even bead!

The toilet now seems to work fine and there is no leak.  As for the final appearance, well, you be the judge.  As for me, the wax ring system, hidden from sight, seems more desirable.


We'll see how long this works.  Stay tuned!

Friday Shopping Tour

We haven't established a daily walking routine yet this year.  We thought we should get outside today, though.  So we decided to head over to one of our favorite "market" streets about a mile away.  We arrived at about a quarter to one so Friday prayer services were just ending.

Now I imagine most Americans picture the typical Egyptian family dressing up, getting in the car and heading to the Mosque.  This is not quite how it works.  Dad and the older boys head to the nearby Mosque, generally on foot.  Mom and the daughters and very young boys stay at home and cook a delicious dinner.  Friday noon in an apartment building brings a delightful mix of aromas as the ladies prepare that special meal.

Dad and the boys are not going far.  There is usually a mosque on every block.  In the high-density areas where we were headed today, not everyone can get inside.  Not to worry, though.  There are loud speakers where the Imam's message is broadcast to all nearby people.  A large number of men might block the entire street as they listen and pray.  There is almost no traffic moving at this time anyway.  You might describe the converging sounds from several nearby Imams on loudspeakers as a cacophony.  No matter what the subject, it is almost always delivered with a high level of emotion and intensity.


As the prayer sessions break up, the men disperse and return home.  Quite a few were picking up a few extras for dinner from what we could see as we finally were able to move down this street.



This is a view down one of the side streets emerging onto the shopping street.


I'm sure that this is the kind of high-density housing that brings smiles to the faces of urban planners.  Interestingly, if you find the right street and crop the photo carefully, it almost looks vacant as you glance west to the Great Pyramid.


But let's get back to the market street.  We had taken a few pictures last year and had copies to share in case we met certain shop owners.  We were looking for one in particular and asked at several shops.  We didn't find any repeats from last year but did make some new friends.

One place we stopped was a fresh meat store, one of several along this street.  These ducks and chickens were likely on someone's dinner table tonight.  Bunnies are also available.  The shop owner was anxious to have his own picture taken today.


We stopped at a vegetable stand to inspect the kolkas.  Kolkas, also known as Colocasia is a root vegetable not seen much outside of Egypt.  It is sometimes known as Taro in English.  It tastes very similar to potato in a soup also known as Kolkas.


Naturally after some discussion, the shop staff wanted their picture taken.


There was a nearby bakery and I picked out a few items to take home.  This required another picture.


We eventually made it to the Grand Pyramids Hotel where we stopped for some freshly pressed strawberry and mango juice.

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.