As one may expect, there are many differences between life in the US and life here in Egypt. In no particular order:
We have a mosque right across the street from our apartment, and this is the minaret. We hear the call to prayer 5 times a day, and at first it took a while to get used to. At night, the pack of wild dogs join in. It’s a real auditory treat!
Here is the minaret by night.
These little delivery motorcycles are everywhere. In Egypt, you can get ANYTHING delivered very cheaply. Some things we’ve ordered include: a birthday cake, an inhaler, and bottles of premium Egyptian beer (shout-out to Stella). We can get all our groceries delivered within an hour or so, and a delivery fee is very cheap. Deliveries in Egypt are a very convenient part of life in a country that has many inconveniences.
Across the street from our building is an international preschool. On the way home, we’re met with this parking situation. Parents park in the middle of the street to pick up their kids, but nobody seems to mind.
Street dogs are everywhere. And cats. Clearly Bob Barker’s message of the importance of spaying and neutering your pets did not make it to Egypt.
While that first street pooch looked quite clean, most look a bit more hardened like this.
Cats are also everywhere. The lucky ones hang out around nice businesses and get fairly well taken care of.
Others wander the streets and pick through trash for their meals.
The elevators here are really small. This photo was a little tricky to take. We live on the 5th floor (that’s the 6th floor to you Americans…) and usually Kyle and I take the stairs. The kids insist on taking the elevator but worry 95% of the time the power will go out and they’ll get stuck. This is a legitimate fear. It has been unusually warm here, so there are daily hour-long power outages. This happens all over Cairo, and your outage time is based on who the heck knows. Most people I talk to have different outage times, and we never know when it’s going to change. When we arrived, our outage time was 7:30 – 8:30 pm. It’s now noon – 1 pm (which we much prefer, since we’re usually at school).
Proof of the heat! Guys, I have no idea how to read Celsius but I’m trying to stretch myself and have a growth mindset and blah blah blah but basically I know that 37 degrees is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit so in conclusion it was super toasty that day.
This was the darkest I’ve seen the sky get since we’ve been here. The students were extremely worried that a storm was coming. It did rain, though. If you look at the track you can see the faintest hint of precipitation. The students were super excited. At lunch I tried to convince the Egyptian kids that a slight mist was not rain, and they responded by asking if we would have rainy day recess (insert eyeroll here). The Egyptian girls taught me how to say “a little bit” in Arabic (shway, rhymes with high) so I got fancy and used that phrase as much as possible for the rest of the day. Definitely earned some street cred for that one.
