Jack's Cairo Chronicles

It was seems like a lifetime ago, I posted this.

The woman who took our cats when we went to Cairo, recently moved back to the east cost. Roscoe was up for adoption again. The woman wanted us to just house sit him long enough for her to get settled. But there was no way we (cough I cough) could take him back and give him up again.

So he came “home” to end his days with us. He is 15 or so years old now. He was a feral kitten that was abandoned and not even weaned when KD found him.

He has far outlived his expected life span. But he is ours again.

And even though he prefers The Good Doctor’s lap, I no longer go to the bathroom alone.

Dr. Hawass has resigned as the head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

He is the unnamed person of

http://www.cairochronicles.com/jack/?p=88

Snork.

Some people are asking where I am getting my info.

Twitter. Easiest way is to look for me as bigjackt and then follow who I am following. (I dont retweet everything)

Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/elshaheeed.co.uk

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Operation-Egypt/185645434794129

Another lesson I learned while in Cairo came from an American Ex-pat from “the south”. (Atlanta area I believe).

Apparently in her culture, you can say just about anything negative about some one as long as you preface it or follow up with “bless his|her|their heart(s)”.

He is dumber than a box of hair, bless his heart.

Bless her heart, but isn’t she just a tramp?

Invaluable code really. The Good Doctor and I have just shortened it to

Bless his/her heart

when we want to express some negative thoughts about someone.

Veerrrrry handy.

So it has been 1 year since we returned to he good ole USA.

Life continues. We miss some friends. We miss some of the travel. We miss some of the weather. We don’t miss the pollution (noise or air). We don’t miss the insane traffic. We miss the level of comfort our incomes gave us in Egypt.

We miss meeting some really “interesting” ex-pats.

I am apparently still good at pointless rambling though..

We are trying to plan a short vacation (1 week or so) on the cheap.
Work is crazy busy, so getting away for longer is hard.

2 (or so) years ago we had a vacation coming up and I wanted to be able to
see where we could travel to for about $X from Cairo.

I wanted a tool that would let me put in a departure point and enter in an amount and have it give me a list of fares.

There was nothing like that at the time.

There is now.

http://www.kayak.com/explore

Fun to play with

A quote from a book I read recently titled:

The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“The foreigners one meets tend to live life in a vivid and eccentric sort of way, and when you listen to their tales of high adventure in the South Seas, you find that you are subsequently ruined from a conversational point of view, that you can no longer even pretend to be remotely interested in someone’s trip to the mall, or their thoughts about the stock market, or their opinions about the relative merit of a football player, and soon you will be branded as aloof, simply because once, on a faraway island, you heard some pretty good stories.”

Another one of those reminders about how different things are here. Not always better, not always worse, just different.

Yesterday I went to the pharmacy to get a prescription filled. The nice lady behind the counter checked and they did not have the item I required.

She offered to phone the pharmacy across the street to see if they had it.

I said that would be great and that I would do some other shopping while she did that.

I go through the store to get the other items I needed and returned to the pharmacy window.

The nice lady says:

Yes, they have it across the street. Here is your prescription.

and she handed me the doctors prescription sheet and smiled.

I blinked.

I blinked again.

Then it dawned on me.

They are not going to send “a boy” scurrying across the street to fetch my medication for me.

I WAS GOING TO HAVE TO WALK OVER THERE MYSELF. IN THE RAIN.

ay da?!

And this is supposedly a civilized country!

harumph.

Stolen from another blog I read, Egypt’s version of “The Onion”.

El Koshary

Tonight I get on a plane to NYC. This is the first time I have flown domestically in 3+ years.

And it is the first flight since we arrived back in the US in July.
…. that is 5 months since our last flight.

In 3 years in Egypt I am pretty sure we never went that long between flights.

We are doing something wrong..