The show itself was enormous. Imagine a football pitch, with a large stage on each corner. On the centre spot is a fifth stage, which is linked to each of the four corner stages by a 25-metre runway:
The shot above shows the full scale of what was put on. In the foreground you can see one of the six speaker towers we needed to use in order to provide sufficient coverage of the 'arena' without suffering too much delay. Each side also had a projector screen to relay a mix of pre-recorded videos and live footage of the show. On the ground, each stage looked like this:
The light and sound setup at each end of the arena was about the size of a stage at a small festival! As a sound-geek it was absolutely brilliant to work with such a colossal setup, and get to play with some seriously nice kit.
Alice returned to her role as Stage-Manager-Extraordinaire for this show, and worked tirelessly to get every one of the 240 people taking part to the right stage at the right time. It really was phenomenal to have achieved such a feat, and was without question the biggest show we've ever been involved in (and, somewhat sadly, will probably be the biggest show we'll ever do).
As respite from putting on this event, we also brewed 40 pints of cider for Dave. His mum visited a few weeks ago and brought a John Bull cider kit, which we brewed for him using our equipment. It's nice to have the fermenting bins and an insulated box to do it in - we're getting the hang of controlling the temperature using ice-packs and chilled water, and so successfully managed to brew the cider well below the ambient temperature of the sweltering heat of Cairo summers. I'm still on the lookout for further insulation, though, and want to extend the box so that it completely covers the fermentation vessel. At the moment the FV is a bit tall for the box so it's not completely enclosed. A bit of an extension should fix it :) Anyway, we bottled the cider a week ago and it's clearing nicely. The sample we had left over from bottling seemed pretty good, but with some time to carbonate in the bottles and allow the yeast to settle out it should be quite a reasonable drink. Advice on the web suggests mixing it with a bit of apple juice if it's too dry, but on first tasting it actually seemed to be okay.
This week we've welcomed Laura and Effie to Cairo. They're out in Egypt for about 2 and a half weeks, and started off in Cairo. Due to a delayed flight from the UK they had a very tight connection in Vienna, so their bags arrived a couple of days after them. Fortunately the sausages were still cold so we've frozen those and look forward to a sausage-and-mash dinner sometime this week!
Along with many other goodies they brought out a Coopers Australian Pale Ale kit. I run some adverts on my history revision website that pay me in Amazon vouchers, and there are some homebrew stores that allow you to buy from them using Amazon vouchers. So, ultimately, my educational website pays for my beer! Our previous brews had been 3kg kits, which come ready mixed apart from adding water and yeast. This one needed sugar adding so we also got them to bring a bag of 'brew enhancer' which is a mix of dextrose and spray malt, and is said to taste better than straight brewing sugar and definitely better than white cane sugar. Since the bottled cider had had nearly a week in the 'climate control' we boxed them up to settle, and started the Coopers over the weekend since we wanted to take advantage of the (relatively) lower weather temperatures at the moment. It's ticking along nicely, so will be bottled in a week's time and then left over the summer to condition. By the time we get back in September it should taste divine!
On Friday we went with Laura and Effie to the pyramids (Giza, Saqqara and Dashur), and on Saturday took them around Islamic Cairo and the Khan. Although Alice took a school trip to the pyramids earlier in the year, this was my first time to actually stand beside them. Even when we visited the Giza plateau in the September when we first arrived we only went to the Sphinx and didn't bother with the pyramids since we'd had a pretty rubbish day. It was nice to finally go back, and not feel hassled by the hawkers. I've found that our manner means they rarely bother us but if they do they give up quite quickly and target someone else. "Ana mish eyes" (I don't want...) is a brilliant phrase: not as aggressive or rude as "imshi" (go away) but more assertive than a simple "la" (no). It confuses them, too, and usually just results in a "you speak Arabic well" rather than continued determination to sell us junk. I liked following this up with "shukran, an aish henna, fil Ma'adi" (Thank you, I live here in Ma'adi) which really seals the deal and sees the hawker trotting off! It was also our first time going to the tourist restaurant that Sayed has taken our other visitors too near Saqqara, and we were pretty impressed. It's nice to know what we send people out to do!
Other random thought - Gad at Attaba is brilliant. We first went with Matt and Becky when they were out here, and returned yesterday with Laura and Effie. It's an Egyptian fast-food restaurant, but has a secret 'eat in' area out the back. Three shawerma, two plates of chips, koshary, three cans of coke and a bottle of water...all for 50LE and within a stone's throw of our little walking tour around Islamic Cairo!
