Zidane fi kulli makan!

Zidane fi kulli makan!

Went to watch France-Portugal on the rooftop of the Marriott last night...why didn't we discover this place sooner??? I've never seen anything like it before, really. It's a huge rooftop bar/restaurant with a giant screen and televisions scattered throughout. Plenty of comfortable couches staggered in a pseudo-stadium layout for lounging and stuffing your face with hot wings, quesadillas and the like. Definitive ex-pat/tourist/wealthy Egyptian little luxury. It made watching France school the pants off little Portugal all the sweeter.

It's the end of the week again and I am so, so, so, so glad. Blake went to the embassy today to apply for a new passport but they told him to come back because his photos were not exactly 2"x2" square. I tried to get the mandatory UNESCO form 250 (Curriculum Vitae) to apply for a job (after wandering all over Garden City trying to remember how to find the damn office), but apparently the person in charge of such things is not available today, prompting the receptionist to tell me the one thing you don't ever want to hear from someone who has something you want: "Please call me in two hours."

Translated, that roughly means: "Call me in two hours, at which point I will probably tell you that the person in charge is still not in yet so can you please call back again in another hour? I will probably be out to lunch when you call again. When, two hours later, I come back, and if I answer the phone then, I will probably tell you that you need to fill out form XYZ which you must pick up in person but will not be available til next week, probably the day after the deadline for submitting your application for this position. Which, oh, come to think of it, we have already filled."

I don't know why I keep thinking that I will somehow be able to hold a "respectable" job in an international organization when I know full well that my tolerance for anything remotely bureaucratic is negative one gazillion. I have the patience of a crack addict in withdrawal when it comes to this sort of thing. Not so helpful.

Cairo is No Dushanbe

Cairo is No Dushanbe

Oh man. This fresh off the wires from a friend who is studying Persian in Dushanbe (Tajikistan, that is):

yesterday i went to get some passport pictures taken. i went to the place, had a photo taken and came back later in the afternoon to pick them up. when the cashier handed me the photos i said 'this is not me.' she insisted it was and upon closer inspection i realized that she, in fact, was correct. it was me. i was wearing a grey borat-style suit and the background was as white as possible. i may just be imagining things, but it appears as though my face was 'shined up' and whitened. another friend here agreed that i was both whiter and shinier.

i yelled at them and asked if it was a joke, but i simply got blank stares in return. the entire office was against me. they insisted that 'passport pictures must be like this'. 'i have to be wearing a stupid, fucking grey suit?' they were shocked. then i asked if i they could give me a blonde afro and a black moustache next time and they said that it could also be done. in fact i could get a beard if i wanted to. maybe i'll get a little tipsy later on this week and go and get one of those done too. once i get access to a scanner you will see.

This beats my rat story by a mile.

Enjoyed a leisurely morning in Midan Falaki with Blake this morning in an attempt to get passport pictures taken. Had a nice over-airconditioned coffee at Costa and ended up having to kill time in Hurriya (Seven, not Stella, at that hour of the day). That place...it's the kind of joint you never ever want to see renovated because it would just kill the character and ambience completely, right down to the crappy, faded paint job and the remnants of Stella labels stuck on the mirrored walls.

So I have my first published translation clip in the Ibn Khaldoun newsletter this month. To be honest, I feel queasy about it. First, there's the fact that it's an interview with the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood (and believe me, those guys read *everything*). Second, it's a pretty liberal translation, which when you're translating the words of someone like Muhammad Mahdi Akef, you really don't want to cock it up and mistranslate.

But I guess you have to get experience somehow. Hopefully I can keep doing translations for the center's newsletter and keep collecting clips that will - inshahallah - improve in accuracy and flow.

Happy Independence Day (while it still lasts)!

Happy Independence Day (while it still lasts)!

So once again, I've managed to miss out on Fourth of July festivities. Apparently the annual festivities that take place out in the suburb of Ma'adi (aka American ex-pat central) were on Saturday (Canada Day, as one clever colleague noted). What's a girl gotta do to get some grilled weenies and fireworks around here?

The thing that really chaps my hide is that the U.S. Embassy doesn't even bother to let those of us who actually took the time to register our presence with them know that these sorts of things are going on. Meanwhile, just about every other civilized embassy in Egypt regularly hosts parties and special events to which their nationals are - gasp - invited. The only Embassy funded events those of us who don't work there ever hear about are the Marine parties, which are about as much fun as walking into a baladi bar in your underwear.

So thanks, U.S. Embassy, for denying us the small joy of celebrating of our ever-withering patriotism by eating grill food in our bermuda shorts. Guess I'll just have to drown my patriotic sorrows in the Germany-Italy match tonight instead.

Hey, I Actually Can Speak Some Arabic! Kinda!

Hey, I Actually Can Speak Some Arabic! Kinda!

Last night Blake and I had our first meeting with our new Arabic tutor, Muhammad, who is probably the favorite tutor of foreign graduate students and research fellows in Cairo. I was a little nervous since Blake and I brilliantly didn't have much of a plan in terms of what we wanted to cover and how we wanted to split up the time, but it actually worked out quite well in the end. At least once a week, we'll have class together with Muhammad in which we just read an article in the paper out loud and then discuss it. It's the kind of obvious exercise I never really did successfully in CASA that somehow seems to work really well now. All things considered, it's kind of sad that I'm sharing Arabic tutoring sessions with Blake (even if he the beloved Tufl ma3gazz of the entire ALI faculty), but I really enjoyed yesterday and learned a lot. I've also been studying vocab from the first Media Arabic textbook, which has already been incredibly helpful (and I haven't even finished the first quarter of the book) - the sooner I start filling the gaping whole in my knowledge that is vocabulary, the better.

What else. Job hunt: still sucks monkey nuts. At least I finished that interview I've been trying to translate for over a week. Not my best work, but it's good practice, I suppose. I went browsing in the AUC bookstore this afternoon for some inspiration: Paddy Fermor, Freya Stark and Ella Maillart were all there to taunt me with their ridiculous exploits and page-popping prose. There was a spark of an idea for a project in there somewhere...except that I'm supposed to be looking for a respectable desk job. Right. Sigh.

(Btw, I wish I could take credit for the brilliant photo, but I can't - I ganked it from a story the NYT ran a few months ago on sleep.)

Putting the "Far" in "Faraowla"

Putting the "Far" in "Faraowla"

So last night, I went to watch the Brazil-France match at the cafe in front of the Umm Kalthoum hotel in Zamalek. During the World Cup, they've set up a whole sidewalk cafe with tv's etc, so it's a really nice atmosphere, especially in the evening when there's a cool breeze coming in off the Nile. (They've put in a huge new Cilantro next door as well, so there's a nice stretch of sidewalk cafe action going on now, just in time for the summer. It's all very Euro-posh.)

So there I am, sipping a nice, cool strawberry juice with some friends when something suddenly drops out of the sky onto our glass table with a solid THUD, bounces onto my lap for a moment and then slowly slides to the ground.

As I glanced down into my lap, I thought it was rock. A rather large, dark grey rock. Looking up, it wasn't clear where such a thing could have come from, seeing as we were sitting under a huge canopy next to the entrance of the hotel. Did someone throw a rock out a window at us? Were we being targeted because we were the only western foreigners sitting in the busy cafe?

It was at approximately this moment that I noticed this rock had a tail. A rather long, skinny, dark grey tail. And when the woman at the next table jumped out of her chair shrieking, I knew that this was no rock, but rather, a *rat* that had mysteriously fallen out of the sky and nearly nose-dived into my fresh strawberry juice.

I'm not sure if this is a good sign or a bad one, but I found it hard to do anything but laugh at the situation. Only in Cairo could you sit in a relatively posh outdoor cafe enjoying a pleasant evening and have a rat hurl itself from several stories high into your lap, prompting you to say to your waiter: "Lo samaHt, mumkin a3Seer faraowla taani, a3shan kan fi far fi da" or "Excuse me, could I please have another strawberry juice because there was a rat in this one?"