We made I it here!--though our last days in London were not without hassle! I won’t bore you with the details of getting a dog from England to Egypt but I would swear I filled in as much paperwork as Madonna did to bring Mercy from Malawi.
Entering our new apartment at 4 a.m. Friday as a complete family (it took three hours for customs to clear Shea), was a moment I had been anticipating since we decided to move here last February. It felt heartbreakingly surreal to know that all of us were finally together for more than five days in one place. Despite a lack of furniture (our container was on a “vessel” that broke down en route and is now on another), the apartment more than lived up to my memories—the parquet floors and French doors sparkled in the dead of night from the bright colors of the Ramadan lights now decorating the many towering mosques nearby; the kitchen, finally had a dishwasher, as promised by the landlord; and the kids rooms really were twice the size of their old rooms. We sat up yet another hour waiting for the dawn Call to Prayer, listening to the revelry of Ramadan below—everyone stays up late and wakes early here during Ramadan (more on this month-long religious observance in next week’s post)--and then all collapsed, relieved to be through the worst of the move.
The first five days have been enormously productive—the kids have already started school (today is day four and all of them are giving it a rating of seven out of ten, not bad); we have joined the luxurious Gezira Club (where I have already swum twice), sorted out our Egyptian mobile phones (how not to have Arabic text messages!), celebrated our first family birthday (Florence turned fourteen Monday), and been to two social events (one at a palatial embassy residence)—but it has also been seriously exhausting for me, both emotionally and physically. Beginning the process of living in a new place as a foreigner, particularly when you don’t speak the language is difficult anyway, but even more challenging when the place is as “foreign” as Cairo is after Brussels, Paris, and London.
Everything is a serious hurdle—from taking a cab (I now know how to say “Left,” “Right,” “Go Straight” and “Stay” in Arabic); to walking the dog (I can find no green space for him and have already confronted three wild dogs who were nice enough-- Shea was the aggressive one!); to grocery shopping (there are over fourteen different kinds of mangos, lentils in every size and color imaginable, and vegetables I have never seen before). But mostly it is just the sheer African, urbanism of it all that is so different from anywhere else I have previously lived that at times I feel completely overwhelmed.
The reality keeps hitting me like a punch in the stomach that we are not just visiting, but living here—the sight of so many stray cats rummaging through garbage on crumbling curbs; the overwhelming din of motor bikes and noisy mufflers on thirty-year old cars; women and children sitting on stoops and sidewalks oblivious to the dust and dirt that never seems to settle—this kaleidoscope of quick images sets off panic attacks in me that make me want to greet our ship in Alexandria the day it finally arrives and tell the captain to keep our belongings on board, stow us in the hold, and return us to England immediately.
But then, I suddenly catch a glimpse of an Italianate villa shaded by a canopy of trees or a flowering garden behind an iron wrought fence, and think this is the most intriguing, magical place I have ever been. Zamalek, the island in Cairo where we live, is filled with embassies housed in old villas, and upscale apartment buildings. The Nile splits around it, (not unlike the Seine around Île de la Cité), and it is a popular spot for tourists because of the many restaurants (Japanese, Italian, and French), cafes, shops, and bookstores. Our apartment on the fifth floor has four bedrooms, and an enormous living and dining room. It has multiple terraces, including one the length of the flat that looks out over the Nile bordered by a line of gently billowing palm trees.
The view of the river is spectacular, an ever changing landscape of fishing, tourist, sculling, and even water skiing boats (a questionable activity, I think, given the pollution if you were to fall.) Last night, watching the sun set and again listening to the Call to Prayer, I thought, “I am the luckiest person in the world to get to live here”—though the Call to Prayer is not as beautiful as it could be if the mosques had better sound systems. All of them seem to use the same crackling loud speakers whose scratchy amplification gives it more of an, “Attention all Shoppers,” sound quality than an “Allah is Great” spiritual resonance. Still, it is quite spectacular to listen to it…even five times a day…and less disruptive, noise wise, than when the Concorde used to fly over our London home, making it impossible to even talk on the phone.
So all in all, week one is going well. In fact, yesterday some of my previous expatriate knowledge even merged together in one single, successful experience. Feeling a bit low, I decided to take Shea, who was sleeping happily, out for a walk, learning from my first depressing days in Belgium that getting out is always a better option than freaking out in one’s bed (in that case it was taking Harriet out for a stoll in her pram.) Once out, I saw a woman walking two small dogs and having learned in dog-obsessed England that fellow dog people are the most approachable in the world, decided to catch up with her. When our dogs inevitably greeted each other, and she said, “Bonjour,” I realized I had finally found someone I could communicate with, thanks to my years of living in Brussels and Paris and learning bad French. We strolled together in the neighborhood for a while (Nevine is Egyptian but grew up here with French as her first language); she drove me to the pet store for Shea’ s special dog food (I was down to his last can); and then gave me her phone number (she lives just two doors down). “Mabrook,” I said to myself, and to Shea, of course, who helped make it happen. It means congratulations in Arabic, which seemed the right word as I had just made my first local friend! Oh, and I promise to learn how to put better, smaller photos up this week!
