Home Sweet Home

These photos are snapshots of my life here; they are scenes from my neighborhood....

This is a beautiful building a few blocks from my apartment. No one seems to know what it is, if it's a house, a government building, or what it is, but I love to walk by every day and admire it. It's magnificent.

A typical street sign. 1 & 9 are the only numbers that are written the same in English & Arabic

This is where I got my hair cut recently. I had my first haircut by a male stylist and he was excellent

Another bit of Wisconsin in Cairo: an office for Trane company in my neighborhood.

Katie & I got fish when we first moved in. They died 2 days later. Damn toxic water.

Joelle hanging out at our place

Stop signs are not a common thing in Cairo. This is the only one I've seen since I've been here


This guy comes by our apartment every day at the same time and yells "foooooool!" He sells fool, which is a type of chilli-looking food made of beans that is very common here.

Katie in the roots of an ancient tree near our apartment

The pink McDonalds on Road 9. They deliver McNastiness to your door 24 hours a day on motorbikes.

Katie giving Abby a home haircut

Egyptians are surprisingly up to date on all the latest technology. Everyone here has the most amazingly pimped out cell phones; I've honestly never seen anything like them

Beano's...best cheesecake in Cairo

Modeling some of the stuff I bought at the Khan al Khalili market in downtown Cairo

Katie chuggin' a Dew

There is a big difference between visiting a country and actually living there. These are just some observations about what I feel life in Cairo is really like....

~ People do NOT speak Egyptian here; they speak Arabic. Egyptian has not been spoken in Egypt since the ancient times of the Pharaoh’s, and back then it was the language of hieroglyphics.

~ Taxis are incredibly cheap here, and quite different. They are black and white on the outside, and pimped out and decorated in the most bizarre ways imaginable on the inside. I have seen cabs with black lights inside of them, disco balls, flashing lights, 15 mini-mirrors glued to the inside of the windshield, rhinestone Kleenex boxes, stuffed kittens, bananas riding horses, Mardi Gras beads, bunches of plastic grapes hanging from windows…you get the point. Taxi drivers work 18 hour days and are fairly poor. They usually don’t own their cabs, so they have to pay a huge portion of their daily earnings to whoever the owner is. There aren’t any cab companies here, just individuals who own taxis.

There are meters inside of the cabs, but none of them work. You don’t EVER ask a cab driver how much it is to get someplace in town. If you do, they take you for a sucker and a tourist, and charge you as much as you can. The process is to flag down a cab, get in, tell the driver where you’re going, and then get out and hand him the money through the window and walk away. You determine how much you are going to pay the drivers. If it is a fair price, they don’t say anything and drive away, but if you have severely underpaid, he will get out, chase you down, and argue for more money. I’ve never been chased down.

~ The pollution in downtown Cairo is terrible… really terrible. It permeates everything and there is a constant layer of visible smog. I am glad that I am living in the southernmost portion of Cairo because I think my asthmatic lungs would collapse if I were living in the downtown area. The traffic is unlike anything I have ever seen before, and the exhaust systems on cars, trucks, and buses are at least 30 years behind the times. The Environmental Protection Agency would flip if they saw the exhaust coming out of these vehicles!

~ Street dogs run rampant through Cairo. These aren’t dogs that were once pets and have been abandoned by their owners; they are wild dogs that have been born and raised in packs. They aren’t particularly dangerous; most of the time they will run the other way if they see a human approaching them, but some of them do get aggressive with early morning joggers.

Quite recently they have become an extreme annoyance to me because there are several packs of them that hang out in the sand pit behind our apartment building. Every night they gather in the pit and fight, bark, and carry on all night long. This isn’t just barking though; it is more like barking, shriek-howling, growling, and bellowing all combined. It sounds like mutant werewolves are getting together and devouring their prey below my bedroom window every night. Needless to say I haven’t been sleeping well. I can even hear them through my ear plugs.

I read in the newspaper recently that every winter the dogs are executed to try and solve the problem of overpopulation. Egypt is a poor country, so to save money; the executioners are only allowed one bullet per street dog. Some people here are protesting the executions because with only one bullet used per dog, sometimes they don’t die instantly and they suffer. At this point, after not sleeping more than 4 hours a night for 2 straight months because of the street dogs, I say let the fuckers suffer. Is that bitchy?

~ There are also a lot of street cats in Egypt, but because cats are quiet and mind their own business, they don’t really bother anyone here. Sometimes they get into the apartment buildings and rip through the trash, but that’s the worst of their crimes. Every time I walk down our street I see several little groups of street kittens playing together, and they’re so damn cute I just want to cuddle them and take them all home with me. But then I think about what diseases they could have, and I change my mind.

For the first two months we were living here, there was an enormous gray cat that would come and snoop through our garbage every night. (Katie & I always put the little trash bags outside of our apartment door at night before we go to bed because the bowab takes them away each morning). Although most of the street cats here are cute and innocent, this creature that was invading our garbage at night was the most terrifying cat I have ever seen in my life. I’m not kidding. We were honestly scared of it. It was the biggest cat I have ever seen, and it was mean as hell. If Katie and I were going out at night after we had put the garbage out, we would always look out the peep hole before we left to see if scary cat was out there because he would growl and hiss and leap at us if we came out of the apartment while he was eating out of the garbage.

Then one night about a month ago while I was out and Katie was home alone, she heard terrifying sounds coming from the hallway outside of our apartment. She looked out the peephole and saw scary cat and another cat fighting to the death. Katie told me that she had never heard such screeches or sounds in all of her life, and they carried on for about an hour and then there was a sudden, eerie silence. She looked out the peephole, and both cats were gone. We haven’t seen scary cat since then, so I don’t know if the other cat killed him and ate him or drug his corpse off somewhere, or what happened, but he’s gone and he hasn’t returned. I like to think the other cat pushed him down the elevator shaft. Rest in Peace, scary cat. I still shudder when I think about his freakishly large face peering back at me every time I looked out the peephole at him.

~Shisha smoking is very common in Egypt and in many other Middle Eastern cultures. Shisha is the Arabic word for hookah, the large pipes of flavored tobacco that people smoke together. Smoking shisha is an essential part of Egyptians' social lives, and it is very common for women and men to get together with their friends at cafes and smoke shisha and talk for hours.

~Cairo has the most incredible assortment of fresh juices I have ever seen. Every restaurant that you go to has a special section on the menu just for juices. They have every type of fruit juice you can imagine: papaya, strawberry, mango, pomegranate, peach, cantaloupe, lemon...you get the picture. The most popular type of juice in Cairo that all of the locals drink is called karkadeh, which is Arabic for hibiscus. It is really sweet and delicious, and chalk full of vitamins and antioxidants as well. The waiters squeeze the fruit for you and sometimes they whip it up in blenders with milk, yogurt and a little sugar. It's unbelievably good.

~ The men of Egypt. Where do I start? When I think of the men in Egypt, I automatically think of two things: smiles and stares. In general, the people here have a great sense of humor and the men are always smiling, laughing, and joking around. There are also many men who own shops and stores who sit or stand outside for hours waiting for customers to come into their stores. To pass the time, they gawk at women and verbally harass them as they walk by. Imagine living in a city where you felt like you were walking past a construction sight on every single block of every street, and you will get the feeling of what it is like to be a woman living in Egypt. The street harassment is terrible here, for Egyptian women and foreigners alike, although foreigners get harassed much more often than local women.

The men don’t say anything degrading or threatening, or curse at you, but it is the degree to which they stare and the way that they talk to you that makes you feel like they are molesting you with their words. Many foreign women can’t handle it and end up leaving the country as a result. You have to have a thick skin and just get used to it; it’s simply the way things are here. I can sometimes stop these men dead in their tracks when they try harassing me by giving them an ice queen stare or by swearing at them in Spanish. They don’t know I’m swearing at them, but they do know I’m saying something bad, and they usually stop what they’re doing immediately and look like guilty little school boys after I let a string of Spanish curses fly at them.

I read an article in a magazine that suggested that most of the men here harass women because it is the only thing that makes them feel empowered. Egypt is a third world country and many of the people are poor and struggling and feel like they have no control over their lives. However, as bad as the street harassment is here, I have never felt safer than I do in Egypt. I know with certainty I can walk down the street at any hour of the night in any neighborhood and nothing will happen to me. I can leave my apartment door unlocked and not have to worry about anyone even thinking about entering. I can also leave my purse and phone unattended while I’m at a restaurant or a café and know that no one will take it. The people have a very strong sense of morality here, they really do, and they take great care not to do anything that would bring shame to their name or the name of their family. And a man would NEVER dare to lay a hand on a woman in any way or do anything to physically hurt a woman. In Egypt, it is seen as the lowest of all lows to harm a woman.

Besides the shisha smoking, catcalling, and joking, the men in Egypt are also good dressers. No matter how poor a person is here, they take great care in their appearance. Most men wear tight fitting jeans with long sleeved shirts or t-shirts, and many of them have eyeglasses as well. The frames for glasses in Egypt are one of my favorite things here; everyone who wears glasses has a really stylish, funky looking design for their frames. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it kind of makes me wish I wore glasses myself.

~ The women of Egypt are very modest, yet stylish. Cairo is a huge city, and even though the majority of the women are Muslim and wear head scarves, they do it with an amazing sense of fashion. I have to take a moment to explain the head scarves. It is different in each Middle Eastern country, but in Egypt, when a woman reaches puberty, she decides if she wants to wear the veil, (head scarf), or not. Muslim women believe that their bodies are sacred, and that only their future husbands should be allowed to see them.

Many Muslim women believe that the hair is the most sensual part of the woman’s body, so they choose to wear a head scarf to keep this part of their bodies covered and to ward off men’s lustful thoughts and stares. The veil is only wrapped around their neck and their hair; it doesn’t cover their entire face. In part of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, it talks about the prophet Mohammed and how his wives wore veils to show their modesty and devotion to Allah. So, many women here also choose to wear the head scarf for religious reason as well. But, it is the woman’s choice to wear head scarves or not to wear them; nobody else decides for her. There are many Muslim women here who do not wear veils.

The older women in Cairo usually wear head scarves and galabayas, which are like housecoats that come down to their ankles and have long sleeves. The younger women, however, dress very chic and though most of them wear the head scarves too, they also wear designer jeans, slacks, or floor length skirts paired with long sleeved tops. If a woman is Muslim, whether she is young or old, then only her hands and her face will be showing.

~ Marriage: men do not have more than 1 wife here. A couple meets, falls in love, gets engaged, and has a big, beautiful wedding with the bride in a white dress and the groom in a tux just like back home. Brides and grooms-to-be also have bachelorette and bachelor parties before they marry, but they are very different than those in the States. For a bachelorette party, women get together and have their hair, nails, and makeup done, and then they have a hafla, (an all-girls party), with dancing and lots of food. They also usually get henna tattoos done together during the bachelorette party.

The guys have bachelor parties, but not the kind with strippers, one night stands, and alcohol. The groom-to-be’s party usually involves his entire family and many of his friends. A couple who is getting married also has an engagement party with both of the families and all of their friends together. Engagements usually last a couple of years, simply because the couple needs that much time to get things ready for their future life together. In Egypt, men and women live with their parents until they are married, so when a couple becomes engaged, they don’t already own toasters, microwaves, dishes, furniture, and everything else on their own. Everything they have is their parents', so it takes them time to save up money and buy what they are going to need for the home they are going to have together once they are married.

~ There is a bizarre over abundance of twins and male diabetics in Cairo. In the school where I work, there are at least 3 or 4 sets of twins in each grade. There are honestly about 36 sets of twins just in our school alone. And every other guy I meet here is a diabetic. I’m not exaggerating. I don’t know if this has to do with genetics or environmental factors or what the reasoning is, but it’s kind of strange.

~Egyptians love Michael Bolton, or so it seems. I hear his music playing at almost every restaurant or cafe I go to.

~ Sometimes I don’t feel like I am really living in Cairo because there are so many foreigners who live in Maadi, my neighborhood, and I wish that I was living somewhere else. But, most of the time I am really glad that I live here because Maadi is such an incredibly beautiful neighborhood. The streets are quiet and peaceful and they are lined with so many different trees and flowering bushes. Some of the trees are amazingly old and have huge, twisted trunks. I love to take long walks here and just get lost and take in all of the scenery. Each street has its own unique feel to it, and everything is so lush and green and bursting with life. And the best part of all is every day the sun shines here. Every day.