Our air conditioner now has a nice long pipe, and it was cheap (to us...)
Sunday, 31 August 2008
Saturday, 30 August 2008
The Khan, the felucca, and the Pharaoh's Revenge
So it sounds like a C.S. Lewis novel, but I promise it's not and doesn't feature any strange metaphors. However, it does feature us gabbling on about the past couple of days and some shots of our trip to the 1000-year-old settlement of Khan Al-Khalili and standing on the roof of a mosque at sunset. Yes, it was just as amazing as it sounds!
Settling in and cleaning the apartment
The first few days in the apartment have been (unsurprisingly) pretty mental. However, we've got pretty much everything fitted that should be, and everything clean that needs to be - so it's slowly starting to turn into home.
A tour of our apartment
We moved in on Tuesday, and recorded this as soon as we were in, but it's taken until now to get it on t'internet!
Part 1
Part 2
A day off to clean the apartment and then a shopping trip
We’re pretty sure that no one has been living in our apartment for the last year. We had expected living in Cairo to be a dusty experience, but the amount of dust in the apartment when we moved in was far more than normal. It’s funny – because in the UK if you are renting out a place you will make sure it is cleaned beforehand so that the tenants leave it in the same condition. Out here though, it seems from speaking to some of the other newbies that we have all had to spend at least a bit of time cleaning our places before properly settling in. I don’t mind cleaning too much, and have grown used to it after spending the weekend cleaning Petworth Gardens before we moved out. Cleaning the kitchen out here though was a bit of a nightmare as none of the air con units are anywhere near the kitchen and so it was roasting in there! The most frustrating thing about cleaning the apartment though has been my hair…. Somehow we always manage to clean during the early afternoon or just before we are going out. This means that although I can have a shower after cleaning I cannot wash my hair – this is because in Egypt if you leave the house with wet hair it is unanimously assumed that you have just had sex. I may have to buy a hair drier to avoid offending the bus drivers at 7am in the morning then!
A few times last year I reacted really badly to insect bites on my ankles. Twice they inflamed so badly that walking was difficult for a few days – I kid you not! So I was really worried about moving over here and being crippled each night by the blighters. I brought out with me some super-strong repellent that we bought in Hungary last year and two tubes of Antisan and two packets of antihistamines in case I did get bitten. When we did our first big shop for the apartment we also bought some plug-in liquid repellent stuff. So it has been nearly a week now and although I have put repellent on most evenings, I haven’t done it for all. We have also been out to a river-side restaurant one night and spent dusk in a felucca on the Nile another night, and so far I have been bite free. Fingers crossed it remains that way!
It was a tough call, but we have decided to turn down an opportunity to go horse riding at the pyramids I our first week. When we saw this activity on the programme we were both so excited as we’d read that this was an amazing thing to do and to do it in our first week would have been perfect. However this is an optional activity and the other optional activity for the same night is visiting the Khan Al-Kalili. Our first thoughts had been “we really want to see the pyramids and it would be good for someone from the school to show us how you can go horse riding there, as this is likely to be something that our visitors (yes – you lot reading this!) will probably want to do”. But then we were told that the trip to the Khan would be with one of the existing teachers who is an expert in Islamic history and would be able to show us around the place. So we have decided on this option, as the pyramids should be more straight-forward (we hope) to suss out, than navigating around the hustle and bustle of a street market that has been in the same spot for two hundred or more years!
A few times last year I reacted really badly to insect bites on my ankles. Twice they inflamed so badly that walking was difficult for a few days – I kid you not! So I was really worried about moving over here and being crippled each night by the blighters. I brought out with me some super-strong repellent that we bought in Hungary last year and two tubes of Antisan and two packets of antihistamines in case I did get bitten. When we did our first big shop for the apartment we also bought some plug-in liquid repellent stuff. So it has been nearly a week now and although I have put repellent on most evenings, I haven’t done it for all. We have also been out to a river-side restaurant one night and spent dusk in a felucca on the Nile another night, and so far I have been bite free. Fingers crossed it remains that way!
It was a tough call, but we have decided to turn down an opportunity to go horse riding at the pyramids I our first week. When we saw this activity on the programme we were both so excited as we’d read that this was an amazing thing to do and to do it in our first week would have been perfect. However this is an optional activity and the other optional activity for the same night is visiting the Khan Al-Kalili. Our first thoughts had been “we really want to see the pyramids and it would be good for someone from the school to show us how you can go horse riding there, as this is likely to be something that our visitors (yes – you lot reading this!) will probably want to do”. But then we were told that the trip to the Khan would be with one of the existing teachers who is an expert in Islamic history and would be able to show us around the place. So we have decided on this option, as the pyramids should be more straight-forward (we hope) to suss out, than navigating around the hustle and bustle of a street market that has been in the same spot for two hundred or more years!
Internet a go-go(ish)
Hello there,
We're writing this from our new internet-enabled apartment. The connection is painfully slow (we're going to look into upgrading it later) and keeps dropping, but at least it's better than traipsing over to Costa Coffee all the time!
Now we're connected we've got a few vids of our recent days to share, so they'll be appearing over time as the hamster-powered internet burns itself out trying to upload to YouTube! Keep your eyes peeled...
We're writing this from our new internet-enabled apartment. The connection is painfully slow (we're going to look into upgrading it later) and keeps dropping, but at least it's better than traipsing over to Costa Coffee all the time!
Now we're connected we've got a few vids of our recent days to share, so they'll be appearing over time as the hamster-powered internet burns itself out trying to upload to YouTube! Keep your eyes peeled...
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
We've moved in!
We're just writing from Costa Coffee (!) in Maadi - this is beside the Maadi Grand Mall (which isn't that grand really) and has internet access for just 50p for an hour (but is really slow so we can't upload a video yet).
We managed to move into our apartment yesterday as planned. It is really nice and looks like it did in the pictures (which you can never be too sure about). They have given it a lick of paint and today should be installing a new air conditioning unit in the main room. The place was really dusty - we expected it to be dusty and know it will always be dusty in Egypt, but we think that no one has lived here for at least a year because of the dust in the kicthen and wardrobes. So yesterday we went to the Carrefour supermarket and bought lots of cleaning stuff (along with some Egyptian cotton sheets to sleep on of course). We'll clean some more rooms today, but also hope to explore to "Road 9" where there is a guitar shop and a nice linen shop we want to look at.
You can see where we live on the map here
The mall is marked A and is the flat-iron shaped building at the top of the screen. Below it you can see a roundabout. Between the two, on the right, is a first apartment block although you can barely see the gaps between the apartmetn blocks so they appear to merge into one. We're on the right-hand side of this first building on the 3rd floor (although Scott insists on calling it the fourth as he counts he ground floor as the first floor). We have a balcony to the front which comes of our living/dining room, a second balcony to the side that comes off the master bedroom and guest bedroom, and a third balcony at the rear that comes from the "bonus" room they didn't show in the phographs! It's a kind of 2nd lounge that doubles up as a spare bedroom.
We were quite tired after moving in and doing some cleaning yesterday, so started to get ready for bed around 10.30pm. We were about to turn off the bedroom light when our doorbell started ringing manically. So we threw some clothes on to see what was going on. Outside the door was a man with a huge telly on his back that he had just carried up the three flights of stairs to our apartment! It turns out this is the landlady's son and he and some friends were dropping off our TV and a new air conditioning unit for the living room. The telly only gets arabic channels at the moment - but he knows someone who works for Orbit, the satellite company, and so we can call him to set something up if we want to. We'd better get back soon actually, as the air con engineer is coming this afternoon to fit it and we are going to try and pay our rent to the son if he comes too.
Until we get faster internet we can't put any video tours of the apartment online, but we promise we'll share them as soon as we can!
We managed to move into our apartment yesterday as planned. It is really nice and looks like it did in the pictures (which you can never be too sure about). They have given it a lick of paint and today should be installing a new air conditioning unit in the main room. The place was really dusty - we expected it to be dusty and know it will always be dusty in Egypt, but we think that no one has lived here for at least a year because of the dust in the kicthen and wardrobes. So yesterday we went to the Carrefour supermarket and bought lots of cleaning stuff (along with some Egyptian cotton sheets to sleep on of course). We'll clean some more rooms today, but also hope to explore to "Road 9" where there is a guitar shop and a nice linen shop we want to look at.
You can see where we live on the map here
The mall is marked A and is the flat-iron shaped building at the top of the screen. Below it you can see a roundabout. Between the two, on the right, is a first apartment block although you can barely see the gaps between the apartmetn blocks so they appear to merge into one. We're on the right-hand side of this first building on the 3rd floor (although Scott insists on calling it the fourth as he counts he ground floor as the first floor). We have a balcony to the front which comes of our living/dining room, a second balcony to the side that comes off the master bedroom and guest bedroom, and a third balcony at the rear that comes from the "bonus" room they didn't show in the phographs! It's a kind of 2nd lounge that doubles up as a spare bedroom.
We were quite tired after moving in and doing some cleaning yesterday, so started to get ready for bed around 10.30pm. We were about to turn off the bedroom light when our doorbell started ringing manically. So we threw some clothes on to see what was going on. Outside the door was a man with a huge telly on his back that he had just carried up the three flights of stairs to our apartment! It turns out this is the landlady's son and he and some friends were dropping off our TV and a new air conditioning unit for the living room. The telly only gets arabic channels at the moment - but he knows someone who works for Orbit, the satellite company, and so we can call him to set something up if we want to. We'd better get back soon actually, as the air con engineer is coming this afternoon to fit it and we are going to try and pay our rent to the son if he comes too.
Until we get faster internet we can't put any video tours of the apartment online, but we promise we'll share them as soon as we can!
Tuesday, 26 August 2008
Monday, 25 August 2008
Wireless in the Hotel
I'm typing this on the laptop on the Hotel's wireless connection - we bought an access code for three days for the same price as a months access normally!
We felt we had to buy an access code, as we needed something to do as our apartment "isn't ready"
This morning we packed all our bags as we were told as had an apartment ready and so would be moving into it today - with about 40 other new staff who also had arranged their apartments before arriving in Cairo. Yet when they read out the names for who should go on each bus they eft us off! We were then asked if we had heard that our apartment would not be ready - our answer being to look at our 6 huge suitcases that we had just lugged downstairs and say "no".
Everyone was originally going to be staying in the hotel for a week and then moving to apartments, and so it was only when we heard that this had changed to 2 days in the hotel that we started to psych ourselves up for an early move into an apartment. Ironically our internet connection is due to start in the apartment today...maybe that's what's holding thing up? Who knows - it isn't worth trying to second guess what the delay is, or how long it will be.
We'll just go back to steaming the creases out of our "smart-casual" clothes ready for the dinner tonight and maybe have a dip in the pool and a drink at the pool-side bar later (i.e. a bar that is actually part of the pool, so you can have a dip and a drink at the same time).
Sunday, 24 August 2008
London > Cairo
Sorry about the picture quality of this- we're trying to work out the best settings to get video from the camera to the computer to YouTube!
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