St Paddy's gigs

While you read this post, why not listen to a selection of recordings from these gigs by clicking here to load our MP3 page.

Being in Cairo's premiere Irish band means that mid-March is a busy time of year ;-)

We had two gigs lined up in as many weekends which, considering we're used to gigging once a term, was something special.  The first gig was on St Paddy's weekend itself (albeit the Friday rather than the Saturday to allow for a weekend lie-in) and the second gig was the following weekend (as we can't cope with gigs either after or before a school day).

The first gig was at the BCA in Maadi and was their first outside gig since their opening weekend (when a neighbour had apparently complained about the music, making subsequent outside music requests hard to get police approval for). We were looking forward to playing outside as when we play in the downstairs bar the sound bounces around the walls and the size of the room means it is packed and people don't have much room to listen, dance or do anything apart from sweat or stand close to the speakers.

The problem being that this winter has been the coldest and longest that we've known here in Cairo and it was actually pretty chilly on the day of the gig itself and it just got colder once dusk hit. We ended up playing in jackets! The other downside of playing outside that we hadn't really anticipated was the lack of crowd feedback - without the intimacy of the small downstairs bar the crowd was spread out over the whole garden and from the stage we just couldn't get a feeling of how we were going down with them.

We felt prepared for the gig as we had had three rehearsals in the week leading up to it, but when it came to it we were a little fumbly. Listening back to the recording my bassoon became progressively flatter during the evening (probably a combination of the cold and that I was having some difficulty with breathing / tiredness that was affecting the support I could give each note) and was not sounding good at all.

The good side of the evening though was that the Guinness was flowing and our home brewed stout was going down well too (the three rehearsals during the week had provided ample testing time too). Everyone we spoke to said that they enjoyed the gig and thought we'd played well. We had a new singer join us who was fab, Mary. And the sound for us was a lot better outside than it had ever been in the downstairs bar - for once we could actually hear what we, and each other, were playing!

Jump to a week later and we're at the Maadi House in the mid-afternoon ready to get set up for their Post-Patrick's Celebration. The weather has been warming up during the week which is promising, and we're feeling quite rested (as we haven't met up all week).  It's the first time for most of us to go to Maadi House as it's quite an exclusive club - you have to have certain US affiliations to be a member - and so it's a treat to be able to take advantage of their import licence. And take advantage we do - they have imported Sam Adams lager from Boston!

Although the crowd at Maadi House was a lot smaller than we'd had the previous week at the BCA there was something about the set-up of the seating and the lighting (or maybe it was just the temperature!) that made the gig just 'feel' better.  I think we played better too - well it sounds it from the recording anyway!

In the kitchen...

...We've been doing loads of cooking recently.

Yesterday had a whole shelf in the fridge dedicated to two large sprigs of broccoli, nearly 1kg of green beans, tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms and courgettes. All of these we'd bought at the weekend and used some of, but were waiting to be finished in meals this week. We then went to the shop (well four shops actually, by the time we managed to find all the ingredients we were looking for!) and cooked up three different meals - two sets of lunches for work and our dinner. I think we manged to use every pan we have!

So what have we been cooking? Well a large part has been lunches for work during the week. For this we have been cooking soups. The first soup we made was a recipe that Scotty found with loads and loads of veggies in called 'Rainbow Soup'. The first time we made it we mainly followed the recipe (but struggled to find a substitute for spinach, and found ourselves shelling the green beans because we couldn't get hold of decent ones), but the second time we ad-libbed a bit more. Here's our basic recipe;

Rainbow Soup
Fry up loads of onions with diced carrot. Then add other veggies, like peppers and courgette (this was our ad-lib). Then add tomato sauce (we make our own passata as it's cheaper to use the fresh toms than to buy tins - simply boil up tomatoes for 10 mins, remove the skins and then whizz them in a food processor).  Add some chicken stock and green beans. Simmer away and add sweet paprika (we only have normal paprika and soon learnt that you need less of this than the sweet stuff to get it spicy). When everything is cooked then blend away!

The second soup that we made we found the recipe for in the Super Foods book that Fabs gave me as a birthday present. I think it was under the 'broccoli' section, but it could have been under the 'sweet potato' section as both are Super! We don't normally eat sweet potato even though it's usually quite easy to get out here, but this year we have been having it a bit more and so we thought we'd give this soup a go.

Broccoli and Sweet Potato Soup
Fry in a large pan onions, diced sweet potato (one large sweet potato per 100g of broc) and a chopped tomato. Once the sweet potato has browned then add stock and the broccoli and bring to a boil then simmer. Once everything has been cooked then blend and add pepper.

It was this soup that caused us the real shopping trauma this evening; it took us five shops before we found some sweet potato! We've said before how it's rare for anyone to be able to cook a meal out here without needing to visit more than one shop. This seems to be that some shops are better for certain ingredients, some shops are more reliable than others for having the range of ingredients in, and sometimes you forget things! This evening we gave Save Way a miss to start with as they hardly ever have sweet potato, we thought that Kimo would be a good bet but they didn't have any. At this point Scotty took all our other Kimo shopping home and I went a few blocks away to try Seoudi Market. No luck, so I thought I may as well continue another few blocks to Adam Market. This time when he shook his head I asked 'lei' (why?) and he replied that the season is over. That explains it, but it doesn't help the fact that we have two large broccoli stalks in our fridge that need eating. In a final attempt I head to Metro on Road 233. We've found that the veg we buy from Metro doesn't tend to be as good a quality as we get elsewhere but they do tend to have everything in. I strike it lucky when I find four 1kg bags of sweet potato left and leave happy.

After a quick trip to Save Way (because we needed juice and a few other things that it didn't make sense to carry half way across Maadi) we were finally home with everything we needed to cook our planned meals.

First up we made the Broccoli and Sweet Potato soup. Then once this was simmering we started to prepare our dinner of baked salmon with potatoes and green beans. With that cooking we chopped up some peppers and courgette to make an omelette with the six eggs that we didn't eat at the weekend. The plan here was to make an omelet that we could both take in to work for lunch, but once we added extra cheese and remembered about the bacon in the freezer it was a lot larger than we'd planned! Not to worry - we'll just have a few more meals out of it!

After dinner we bagged up the soup into portions and then stuck these in the freezer so we're all set for lunches during the week. How domesticated and how organised we have become!

Will you start the fans, please?

We've been very good of late when it comes to 'charity shop buys'.

If you read my Read the Casbah book blog then you might have spotted a pattern; that I'm catching up with reading books bought in charity shops ages ago and I'm not buying so many more these days. We've been trying to curb back on the number of books we're buying, lugging over to Egypt in our hand luggage, reading, deciding that we like, and therefore lugging them back to the UK to 'keep'. I think it is all the 'lugging' that is making us change our habits. And the kindle.

But this holiday we did do the Charity Shop run along Spring Gardens in Buxton to see what they had in store. After taking a look at the books and the bric-a-brac I spied this top-shelf beauty along with the puzzles and board games. We 'umm-ed and ahh-ed' a while but it just looked too kitsch to be true so we decided to cave in and buy it.

£3 later at home we open it up and discover that while all the pieces of plastic are there, there are no rules! The instructions on how to set the board up where on the inside of the lid so we followed those and were able to get the gist of the games in the four different zones, but we still weren't able to quite work out how you moved between the zones, selected the games or played the final Crystal Dome game.

It was a lot of fun to set up and we're just going to keep our eyes open for a set of the rules on ebay or something in the next few months. Once we've played the game we'll probably be done with it and can return it to the charity shop for someone else to enjoy!

A little trip out

We had a little trip out today, which means we went out of Maadi both days this weekend! 

On Friday we were out for brunch with the Prebs and Flossie and her Andy.  Not that we needed much of an excuse to have a brunch, but it was meant to be a belated birthday brunch.  I managed five courses which is well below my usual average.

First course was salads and dips (while we were waiting for Flossie and Andy to arrive). Second course was warm mezze which was really delicious. Next time I think I'll skip the cold salads (especially as I wasn't eating smoked salmon or cheese at the moment) and so two plates of this. They had a really good minced meat baklava, great samousak and moussaka. I also had something I'd not had before which was a layer of rice, a layer of cooked chicken breast bits and then a layer of white sauce. Pretty tasty and sort of like a left-over turkey dinner meal!  Next I had some of the Thai green chicken curry which I had been warned was very hot. It was good and maybe I could have had a larger serving.  My last 'main' dish was some of the braised beef which Scotty had been going on about all day (he'd had two servings already!) along with vegetarian lasagna which was also very nice.  We had dessert envy when we saw someone with a large chocolate bomb, but in the end I didn't go for that, but went for a chocolate cup, a small tartlet of apple crumble and a creme brule.  All were very good (the creme brulee was far better than the 'parmesan creme brule that I'd had as a starter which was just a bit odd, and the apple crumble was pretty tasty and sweet), but by this point I was feeling very full.  I wanted to have room for a crepe, but knew it wasn't really possible without dire consequences.

We left the buffet at about half four, but we were in no rush to leave as the weather outside was pretty miserable (for Cairo, of course).  The wind had been lashing away all afternoon and it was drizzling and cold.  We took a taxi back to Maadi with the Prebbles and all vowed that now we had eaten that much there was no need to leave the house, or even the couch, for the rest of the day.

(We did actually end up leaving the flat to go shopping at about 8pm as they say it is always a good idea to go food shopping when you aren't hungry... and we really were not hungry! We ended up buying cereal and popcorn and then going to the Prebbles to eat it - not really sure how that happened!)

So on to Saturday (today) and after yesterday's excursion this should have been a day of 'apartment time', especially as the weather hadn't changed too drastically.  However I wanted to try and get out to the Khan and take some photos for someone in the UK who wants photos of staircases (and apparently there are two prime examples of staircases in Islamic Cairo). We check on a map where we were going and decided that rather than getting a taxi to the place we were going to (which we were not very familiar with), we would get a taxi to the place we were very familiar with and then walk. This turned out well and it was a really nice walk north of Midan Hussein towards Bab al Nasr.  On our way we took some photos for the new website project.  The streets were really nice and quiet as it was only just noon. 

When we got to Bab al Nasr we found that it was being renovated and the outside stair access looked pretty good. This was a good sign, but the bad sign was the positioning of the port-a-cabin in front of the stairs.  This to us was a strong indication that they might have the Gate renovated, but they didn't want anyone visiting it just yet.  Some boys running a near-by stall showed us how you could squeeze past the cabin or jump over the low wall, but we decided that we would wait another month until it looked a bit more open.

Our walk back to the heart of the Khan took us on the road parallel to Sharia Muezziz.  We'd never been along here before and it was a really lovely walk. The street was being renovated as Muezziz had been and so long stretches were dug up (up to 1m below street level) to lay pipes, then other areas were being prepared for new flagstones.  One block had also been renovated into traditionally fronted workshop spaces.  We kept straight and managed to find our way back into the Khan proper (via our favourite 'electronic weighing scales' district) and then into a taxi back home. 

The trip didn't take us too long all in all. On one hand we didn't achieve very much as we were unable to get into the Gate to see the stairs properly and we only took a few photos for the website project. But on the other hand it was good to get out and remind ourselves how easy it is to get into an interesting part of town, how nice it is to explore and how much we enjoy it!

You want to watch you don't get blocked in, mate!

We walked out today to discover that the army were back on the street. They weren't all over Cairo by any means, in fact, this army vehical was the only one we saw all day. We figure that the are out and about because this weekend is the anniversary of Mubarak stepping down and various strikes and marches have been called.

Our first thought though on seeing that they had backed up onto the pavement outside the Grand Mall was that they were going to get fenced in later on once all the taxis and Grand Mall shoppers turned up and started parking on the street!

Specially sourced mead

W've been keeping these special ingredients for a mead and today we made one!

Our special ingredients were; Siwa water, honey from Siwa and honey from a monestry that the P's visited last year.  To these we added the juice of an orange, one orange cut into eigths, two dozen sultanas and yeast reclaimed from our recently brewed stout.

It's sitting in the kitchen at the moment for the first stage of fermentation as we think that the back room is actually going to be too cold for it for the time being!

Making Help for Deaf & Mute

It must have been some time last year when this guy first knocked on our door.  He was Deaf/Mute and came with a piece of paper / flier which asked for a donation of 1LE in return.  We of course gave him the money and smiled nicely.  He then would come back every now and then; knocking on the doors in the building and near by to ask for money in this way as he could not get any other way of earning a living. We would always smile and be welcoming and sometimes we would see a friend of his in the street by the Grand Mall doing the same thing to whoever would pass him by.

He comes by pretty regularly now and every time I try to have a bit of a conversation with him. I only know a few signs in BSL, but it isn't likely that these (or the finger alphabet) would translate for Arabic Sign Language, so it is mainly through gesture that we communicate on our door step. Past conversation s have included him asking after Scott (he points to his ring finger and then shrugs his shoulders and looks quizzically at me), him asking if we have been away (making the sign of an airplane taking off and then hugging himself indicating the cold of England!), his questioning if we have any children (him pointing to his ring finger and then making to rock a baby and using his hand to show increasing height and then looking quizzical whilst shrugging his shoulders) and talking about the weather (whether is be the rain, too cold or too hot through various gestures).  

One of the more interesting conversations was when he had visited about half a dozen times and this time he rang the bell as Scott was practising the guitar. When I opened the door and we started to talk, he gestured playing the guitar and pointed at me to ask if I played. I thought this was a bit suspicious at first (!) but then realised that the guitar was now lying on the chair behind me for him to see. He told me that he played the drums. He came by with his daughter once too, but I wasn't here then.

A few months ago though when the outside door was properly installed to the building we came across a slight hitch in the arrangement - he could very well buzz for our flat, but couldn't communicate with us on the intercom to know he was there.  The first time this problem arose the bowab was around and he buzzed us. But this wasn't much help as obviously he was saying 'that deaf/mute guy who always comes round to your flat is here for you' but in Arabic and hence I had no idea what he was on about! The bowab brought him up for us (I think this was partially the bowab being a bit over-protective) and we had only a little chat this time. During the conversation we worked out a code; he gestured to me that pushing the bell two times would mean it was him - system sorted!

Our most recent conversation when he visited today was interesting as it was about the football violence and tragedy that occurred last night. He started off by miming kicking a ball and then punching to ask if I knew what had happened. I nodded and made a sad face to confirm that it was a tragedy that this had happened. I had to ask him to repeat a few signs then to get the next part of the story, but he was describing to me how the army had stood by and let this happen and maybe they were involved (the sign for army is stroking your shoulder / epaulet, but he clarified this for me by also doing a salute).  He said that the people were crazy and that someone had lit a firework and put it in a child's face. I mimed to him that I heard that fireworks had been thrown on the pitch. We both agreed that people were crazy and that football should be about happiness and not fighting.

So, there you go - an interesting conversation this evening about yesterday's events!  We wish we could do something more than just give this guy money when he comes round, but there doesn't seem to be. I think it is just good that we can be nice to him and he said today that he walks up and down the street and the houses, but he likes coming here. 

Here is one of the leaflets that he gives us each time. Maybe I should try and learn some of the signs. I do the 'love' one to show friendship, but what I enjoy about this leaflet is the fascinating choice of signs / words!