|
Happy
New Year!
|
|
|
Most of us
celebrated New Years Eve in Dawson Hall. We ordered pizza from Pizza
Hut (quite a treat here in Egypt), watched It's a Wonderful Life,
and had a champagne toast at midnight. |
In my flat,
the cockroaches were having a New Years Eve party of their own! For
a week after we returned from Israel & Palestine, my kitchen sat empty and
got regular doses of Raid. |
|
|
|
|
Matt and I
decided to start the new year with a clean (or at least cleaner) Dawson
Hall. We cleaned the floor in the common room and spent a few hours
on our hands and knees scrubbing years worth of dirt out of the rug.
It was a lot of work, but the yoga sessions we have on that rug are now
much more enjoyable!
|
We also used
a hairdryer to defrost my freezer and we spent another evening pounding
the dirt out of my living room rug and scrubbing it in the bathtub.
It is nice to have at least a few clean things in Egypt! |
|
|
|
|
I have to
start here by apologizing for the gruesome photos. In January we
celebrated a Muslim holiday, the eid al-adha. One part of the
celebration is the slaughtering of animals in the street. Each
family who can afford to do so buys an animal (sheep, goat, cow, etc) and
slaughters it, sharing the meat with family members and those who cannot
afford an animal. |
Garbage
City, or the moquattam, is the area of Cairo where most of the city's
garbage is dumped. The area is fairly densely populated and many of
the people living in Garbage City survive by sorting through the trash for
items that can be used to make money. There is an organization
working in Garbage City to train young girls to weave rugs out of scraps
of material, mostly from factories. They also have a paper recycling
project where women make paper by hand and turn it into greeting cards,
gift bags, and other paper products. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This
preschool is used to educate the children of those who work in the weaving
and recycling areas of Garbage City.
|
|
|
|
Cave churches
at the Moquattam
Far
left: Rachel and I getting mobbed by Egyptian girls, excited to talk
with foreigners - this happens to us often!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Breaking
news on the cooking front!
Molasses + Sugar = Brown
sugar
No more searching for
recipes without brown sugar or buying unreasonably expensive imported
brown sugar!
|
|
If
you have known this brown sugar "formula" forever or if it is
printed in every Better Crocker cookbook, please humor me and pretend that
our discovery was as ground-breaking as it felt! |
|
Anybody
want to play Monopole?
We found this Egyptian game
in Dawson Hall and had fun using Egyptian pounds to buy and sell
property in Cairo. The game takes just as long to finish as it when
it's called Monopoly!
|
|
One
night during the vacation, five of us got dressed up, had sushi for
dinner, and went to see the Cairo Opera rendition of Madame
Butterfly. The sushi wasn't spectacular and the opera was, well,
Egyptian, but we had a good time and it was well worth the 15 LE ($2.50)
we paid for the opera tickets! |
|
|
This
month I started playing ultimate frisbee on Fridays with a group of
Sudanese, Egyptians, and western ex-pats |
|
|
|
|