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!
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