Al-Qahira ... in sha'allah ...

Another week jam-packed full of not very much, in which I have had a whale of a time.

Last Sunday, my landlord Bishoy drove Danielle and I up to City Stars, which is in Nasr City. Or maybe Heliopolis, I can't remember. It is the most enormous shopping mall I have ever imagined, let alone seen. We were there all afternoon, and probably saw less than a quarter of it. My aim for the trip: to buy a nice pair of jeans. Outcome: no jeans, but I did buy teabags (green tea with mint), a cream coloured sheet and 2 pillowcases, and fish and chips. Yes, fish and chips. In the food court (one of many) was a place offering "English style" fish and chips - I went for the "Oxford" menu, which was battered cod and chips. It was pretty good, just there was a distinct lack of salt and vinegar, and they also gave me 3 pieces of pitta bread with it. It's not called that here, but that's basically what it is. Other menus included Windsor, Cambridge, Pimlico, etc etc.

Wednesday was a fun day. I like to call it Wet Wednesday, or The Day Rosy Broke The Flat. The previous day, I had bought myself (at great Egyptian expense) a box of porridge oats. Knowing myself the way I do, I knew it was unlikely I would actually get up in time to make porridge, so ina display of incredible forward planning, I made porridge in the eveing, put it in a glass bowl in the fridge overnight, and put it in the microwavegrilloven in the morning. I had previously put glass bowls and plates in the microwavegrilloven with no problem. But this time it was not my day. I returned to the kitchen to find that the bowl had utterly disintegrated while I got dressed. Whoops. Luckily the porridge was salvageable, so I still got my breakfast. In the lunch break between classes, some German students (I think they were mostly from DAAD - German Academic Exchange Service - but I'm not sure) put on an Arabic play in the Kalimat garden. It was in Standard Arabic (foos'ha) and I'm afraid I didn't understand very much of it at all, but it was still very funny. I got to sit in the sun with my upper arms immorally exposed to the vitamin D while we watched it. I went home and attempted to do an online grocery shop, but found that our internet had broken, so I had to go out. I bought loads of fruit (many of you will be wondering now what on earth has got in to me - my only excuse is that fruit is ridiculously cheap here!) and vegetables (more usual for me), and also went back to the fair trade craft shop and got a rug for my bedroom. I took a taxi back (with much getting-my-shopping-bags-stuck-half-way-through-the-door) and battled my way into the flat, to find Danielle and 2 of her friends trying to get the internet fixed, with apparently very unhelpful phone advisers. I showed off the rug, and went to wash my fruit. Just as I finished washing the guavas, I switched off the cld tap, and the tap came off in my hand. Despite the fact that I had switched the tap off, water suddenly went everywhere. I mean everywhere. Really everywhere. And kept going. I tried to get the tap back on, but it wouldn't go. For the next 10 minutes, we (myself, Danielle and her 2 friends) were trying all the different taps, nobs, buttons and twiddles in the flat, trying to find the one that switched off the water (this was after Danielle had tied the tap back on with a piece of ribbon, to stop the water making quite such a mess). Jab came back and found the right tap straight away. Men, hey? The situation was stabilised, but we obviously couldn't use any of the taps, flush the loo or use the shower, so we had to get a plumber. As a result of all this, I couldn't cook what I had planned to for dinner, so I had fruit for dinner. My world is turning on its head, n'est ce pas? The plumber came, brought his son, and they fixed the water. The cold tap actually now looks like a cold tap (it was red before) and matches the hot tap. We got him to improve the shower while he was at it - you now actually get a shower rather than a tiny waterfall. I then dropped my mp3 player onto the tiled floor. Luckily it didn't seem to mind too much. When Jab found me cooking later on, he tried to take the knife away from me and stop me using the gas stove.

It's that time again - the bad news from Cairo. Claire, one of my American friends, was telling me that in one of her classes at AUC (American University of Cairo) there were 2 Egyptian girls arguing that the catcalling etc from men in the street is really truly honestly the men doing the women a favour by pointing out to them that they're doing something wrong - dressing inappropriately, doing something they shouldn't be, or being somewhere they shouldn't be, etc. It is the woman's fault, she was asking for it. The teacher was an Egyptian, and she wore the hijab, and told them that was ridiculous because she is always completely covered and still gets it.

Rikke and I went to Claire's flat in Zamalek the other night, and she told us that the next door neighbours were two Egyptian girls who had some men over at some point, and the police confiscated the keys to their flat. They haven't been seen since. Westerners, it seems, are allowed to break the rules, but any Western men living togther often get told they can have girls over as long as they're not Egyptian girls.

The verb to get engaged - I can't remember what it is, but for a man it is active, and for a girl it is passive. I think that is quite interesting.