We spent most of August in England’s ‘green and pleasant land’, away from the stint of riots which had more to do with, in my humble opinion, opportunist fair-weathered vandalism and thievery than any level of social protest. Our time was spent with long missed friends in either rolling countryside, dramatic North Wales or in lush opulent National Trust houses and gardens; a world away indeed from Cairo, now our home. When it came time to return, I was loathe to pack like some resistant child having to return to school after a long summer holiday having done as one pleased. I also dreaded what I might find at Crane Canaveral. As we were returning over the last days of Ramadan, the holy month of prayer and fasting, I doubted much progress had been made to the crater outside the apartment.
We landed back in Cairo just before midnight. The airport was busy, with the usual round of queuing and waiting. We were lucky being met by a ‘meet and greet’ person arranged through work. It was a painless process and we were reminded how things can be efficiently done in Egypt. Leaving the airport, we went for our duty free and were greeted by a cheerful and witty check out guy who still held his sense of humour on such a busy evening. Husband reminded me how wonderful Egyptians can be when you least expected them to be!
Back at the apartment, I was relieved to find everything in place. However, there seemed to be no toilet paper (!) and there was a leak in the small toilet. Plumbing calamity already! As for the toilet paper, I had left more than two rolls before we left! Our cleaner clearly had a fetish for pink toilet paper and had purloined them! As for the ‘leak’, I decided to call the plumbing experts TG Services the morning after.
After my last fiasco with TG, I decided to call chief honcho Galal himself. He had given me his number and this time I was not going to be messed about with shoddy service on any level. Not surprisingly perhaps, he remembered our last conversation. Considering I must come across as a seriously assertive and unhappy European customer, I’m not altogether surprised. He assured me he would come himself to look at the problem. It took him some time to make it ‘back to the office’ to make the appointment, but indeed he came himself. He was clearly not going to do any dirty work as he was smartly dressed, blinged and waving a mobile phone. He had two minions in tow. One who was dressed in the red TG Uniform with their red bashed-in tool case and the other guy who seemed to do much of nothing other than waving his arms about! I showed him the problem and left him to it. He identified parts which needed to be changed and left with instructions for the uniformed minion. The minion would call him when the job was done and he would speak to me personally to make sure I was happy. Sounded fine by me. Indeed, all were carried out to Mr Galal’s standards and my faith in customer service restored. It certainly is worth keeping such boys on side!
As for Crane Canaveral, it seemed more like Crater Canaveral! There was only a small dilapidated crane at the brother crater on the other side of the railway track and it looked like not much had been done to our crater. I dreaded the end of Ramadan. Indeed, work soon resumed with several cranes and wire cutters, wood and cement Lorries. There was serious engineering stuff going on inside the crater now which would take months and moths if not years of work! Staying at the apartment had to be reviewed. That review came to ‘we need to get out of here’ after being woken two week-end mornings on the trot by pneumatic drills in stereo and a humming mini generator. I started to dread coming home and that is when one knows, it’s time to look elsewhere! So, that is what we have been doing last few weeks. We are using two recommended agents who have showed us some interesting property, most of which seem entirely overpriced given the lack of ex-pats in Maadi now. Maybe these landlords have yet to realise what is seriously happening to the market. We have found an apartment we love on many levels, and although we are prepared to pay more than most colleagues, we are not prepared to be ripped off; American style kitchen or no American style kitchen! We are now at the point of waiting for responses and the negotiating. We may end up staying at current apartment longer than desired but we are not going to put ourselves in penury paying extortionate rental prices. Digging our heels in what we are doing! I’m a firm believer in ‘what is meant for us will not pass us by’.
This week-end is the long 6th October week-end. It is to commemorate one of the Arab –Israeli wars in which I believe Egypt nearly won. My history is hazy on this, but I don’t get the impression it was an all out victory. Many Maadiites and certainly ex-pats have left town for the coast, so it’s a much quieter place and as a result, shopping and walking down Road 9 has been a relatively pleasant experience. The cheery fruit and veg merchant in his grey galabiyya and white turban greeted me with ‘¡Hola! ¿Que tal?’ He knows I speak English and we’ve even had a chat in French, so why he chooses to always greet me in Spanish is baffling but charming. We also bought a new cordless phone as Captain’s Osama’s model seems to be in serious senility mode. The shop assistant at Radio Shack, a slim young chirpy man with excellent English pointed us in the direction of a reliable model which he then demonstrated with a friend from another shop. I thought to myself, only in Cairo will such levels of friendly service feel so normal and joyful. The apparatus has a two year warranty, so, if it proves customarily unreliable as things can be here, back to cheery man I go, maybe entering without a smile this time!
Come to think of it, buying electrical equipment here can be traumatic. This happened with a vacuum cleaner I had to replace as husband’s vintage model finally gave out. Two good friends took me to Carrefour and the peculiar job creating bureaucratic procedure aged all of us. Carrefour in Cairo is clearly an international brand with local standards, much like HSBC bank! The process involved choosing a machine, telling one man about it; man telling another man about it who then goes off and comes back with an invoice. Then one queues ad nauseum with the invoice in a ‘jump the queue’ system to pay for it only to then return the invoice to another who then fetches the machine packed up. Next, one must get it stamped at the far end of the store, the journey to which feels like having to cross the Sinai desert with Moses. Finally, one’s warranty is signed after another queue and one can finally take it home. The whole process took nearly two hours from start to finish. As we drove away, my two pals commented how Egypt could reform to Western European standards if buying a vacuum cleaner proved such an ordeal. As ordeals, go, the automatic chord thing was faulty when I got it home, so I had to repeat the procedure - back to front!! This time, wonderful Sandy jumped the queue but we still had to wait too long to get it exchanged crossing the length of the store in yet another biblical manner. I can only pray the machine will now be fine for at least a year. I do not have the strength to do it all again anytime soon!
Cairo is an exhausting place to live. Nothing really works out as you think it will. Every small chore takes twice as long if not longer than anticipated. Arranging to have anything done brings on ulcer level amounts of stress.
Mrs Captain O and I have now made vocal acquaintance, maybe too many times for her liking. Captain O is out of the country a lot more no longer flying for Egyptair. She is beginning to understand how often things go wrong at the apartment and how much her input is necessary in her absence. The satellite TV went on the blink shortly after we came back. We suspected maybe parts had been stolen like last time. We depend on Al Jazeerah for our news and reported the problem to Mrs Captain as Captain O was in Lahore or somewhere equally exotic. After various phone calls in English (she is a natural French speaker), a trio of men turned up two hours later than expected and then spending two more hours retuning. These were guys she got the Bawab ’I have no sense of time’ to arrange as she has no numbers to call and no doubt her housekeeper deals with such issues. She is a woman who is not used to dealing with ‘domestic issues’ as there is no doubt domestic minions to do so. We then had the lighting issue. There are too many light circuits in this apartment, and most of the transformers cannot cope with Captain O’s lighting fetish! When the main light system in the kitchen blew, Mrs Captain returned to her native French language, sounding more and more stressed as the electricians who were meant to come never showed up. In the end, she did not return my calls or texts. Clearly my world had shattered her demeanour to the point of not being able to cope. I resorted to TG and it was they who explained what a rubbish lighting system had been put in place! At regular intervals we can expect transformer to blow as they get overcharged...so blow they must!
We have always like Captain O. He is a charming landlord and very willing to help. Just before the summer he came to collect rent with his four children all of whom had once lived here. They walked in after him like Captain Von Trapp’s brood and were impeccably behaved. I almost expected Maria with a guitar dressed in ole drapes! He has put up the rent for this year as is his right but he has not made us sign a year’s contract. Instead, we have a rolling month on month agreement with a month’s notice to move out. He will not be surprised we do want to move out but may find it almost impossible to re-rent to European or American ex-pats with Crater Canaveral right outside! The road has also accumulated more and more amounts of rubbish since we’ve been back. The rubbish dump at the end of the road is taking longer to be cleared and never seems to be clear now. There are also two more ‘dumping’ points at road corners which were never there before. I have no idea where the ‘Clean Egypt’ fervour has gone. It seems to have flown away in the wind like the many used carrier bags.
The traffic levels also seem to have escalated. It is grid lock at times, once taking nearly an hour to get back home when usually it used to be 25 mins max. My ole boy driver Salah sometimes takes me on what I call the Prison Road hugging the back streets and passing shanty hamlets. It’s dirt track all the way and it is fascinating to see life behind the well used highways as the poorer quarters of Maadi awake and go about their business buying flat bread or selling wares on donkeys. It’s almost poetic if I wasn’t so stressed about getting to work in one piece!
I have also discovered from a good friend and colleague at work that dossiers were kept on ex-pats working here. Our rubbish used to be rifled through and we were always subtly watched. She told me of instances when associates were bundled away out of the country for their own safety from known drug dealers or literally fetched to leave the country by the Secret Police after undesired homosexual associations! I asked if such things still happened. She said not recently that she’d heard of, but who knows in these ‘interesting times’ that we live in.
Cairo is in ‘interesting times’. The educated middle classes don’t think much needed change will really take place for another four years. They don’t know who to vote for in the elections to come and they fear the religious parties will take power, if only initially. We had a wonderful Lebanese meal with a group of such bright young things and whilst we enjoyed our cold and hot mezzes on a balmy balcony in Heliopolis, they were unsure how their country would come out of the Arab Spring. We walked around the area after dinner and admired the almost Far Eastern colonial feel of the quarter. It is a much more affluent area than Maadi with wide boulevards and white hybrid styled architecture. I liked it very much and would happily return to take photos and enjoy lunch there. Something to aim for on my dark days when I am no Cairophile!
I have also become aware of the asylum seekers in Cairo and their rather creative method of getting asylum status! One maid of a good friend, an Islamic girl from Ethiopia, claimed herself to be a Christian and persecuted Eritrean who had had to escape to Libya for her own safety. There she embroidered a story of abuse and colourful encounters to beef up her case. My ever helpful friend found holes in her story and together they composed a more plausible piece of fiction for the authorities! The process took many months, including back handers for the translators who translated these fictitious tales of woe. I told my dear friend she had a future in such enterprises given her proclivity to spot spurious stories!! Needless to say her maid won the case and subsequently did a runner from her employ. Odd type of gratitude indeed! I wonder where said maid will end up. More likely than not, frying pan into the fire....
The days are still hot here but the evenings are becoming more breezy and balmy. It is the sort of weather to have a chilled G&T on a balcony and look up at the new moon. Maybe next time I write I shall be doing just that... Inshallah...
