Taken during the foam fight from the jacuzzi yesterday - I SO need a haircut!
Hi everyone
Hope that all is well with you wherever you are, if you are in Victoria you will be beginning to feel the autumn chill in the mornings by now I have no doubt. Egypt is still going well, life is kinda quiet at the moment what with the state of play with the search for a company, but that’s OK too – I’m looking on it as a holiday period (and if I get too bored there’s always housework!) Just joking. Masry is finding it difficult not going to work every day I think also. Yesterday we slept in until 11.30 am – unbelievable! Mind you, he stayed up until 4.00 am watching TV but I didn’t have that excuse, I was asleep by 1. I’m beginning to get excited about coming home – one month today until I leave. I have a 9-hour layover in Dubai which will be awful, I get in at midnight and leave at 3.15 I think it is – I hope there’s some spare floor somewhere. I leave to come back on 9th July, although if we needed to change it Emirates seem to be OK about that.
I am looking forward to seeing everyone and maybe having toast and Vegemite. Also looking forward to seeing what’s in the clothing stores although in the big malls here there is a good range of quality clothing, although often not for my size. Masry says for me to basically take an empty suitcase and bring back a couple of suitcases full of stuff and clothes and shoes etc. So hopefully I won’t have much luggage to worry about when I come.
Life is mostly taken up with Mohamed meeting with the lawyer in his search for a company or with the drivers or whatever. I am leading the quiet life mostly in the house. I was never a big TV watcher but now I really appreciate that big 46” of screen and all the channels (although there’s not too many in English).
Sunday we had Rania and Hagar and Rania’s husband Allaa and her boys Lewi, Mohamed and Omar over for lunch. I was up early, cleaned the floors and the bathrooms and then started cooking. Masry cleaned windows. The meal in the middle of the day is the main meal here, when you have meat (if you are having it at all that day) and I had bought meat and was attempting a couple of Egyptian dishes, kabsah, meat in rice and kofta – meatballs in a sort of almost curry sauce. I bought the spices in packs made up and the recipes were on the pack. Thought I couldn’t go wrong. WRONG!!!! The kofta was really a disaster but honestly I don’t know what went wrong. It had yoghurt in it and that sort of curdled but from the minute I added the spices it smelled really bad. I thought it smelled just like vomit but I kept thinking maybe it’s supposed to smell like this! WRONG!!!! Everyone was terribly polite, but Masry gave me the secret signal that told me it wasn’t good and not much of it got eaten. Except that I threw it into the rubbish and put it outside the door overnight for the doorman to collect and a stray cat got in and it was all over the doorstep because it ate all the meatballs and left the sauce everywhere. So the cats obviously liked it. Nearly made me ill to clean it up.
And as for the kabsah – I bought rib fillet to use for the meat and thought that should be excellent but it was SO tough. I have seen Australian meat to buy frozen but it is almost 3 times the price of local meat. I could tell as it cooked up it would be tough, and the rice part didn’t work properly either, the rice was supposed to be all separate grains and fluffy but it must have had too much liquid and so it went gluggy. (The recipe said use 6 cups and reduce it to 3 cups – but how do you tell that in the saucepan?) And it also said use 750 grams of rice and I don’t have a set of scales so I probably blew it on two counts. But everyone ate that (in desperation I suppose) and we did have vegetable soup (and I have that down OK) and cheese and salad and toshi (pickled vegetables, green chillis, olives and lemons, I think it’s delicious and it is eaten with almost every meal) and bread and fruit and juice and tea, so I hope that everyone was full enough. I’ll keep practising. I really need that recipe book and to stock the pantry with spices etc. Next time I’ll make the kofta from scratch if I can find a recipe on the net. (Found one today)
Maybe I need to bring a couple of recipe books back with me for casseroles etc. Mind you one of the big supermarkets has all the Women’s Weekly series of cook books but they are fairly expensive (for Egypt, probably cheap for Australia). But maybe I should pick up a couple.
The boys are beautiful (Omar is SO cute and this week he let me pick him up lots and I even got a kiss) but loud and they like to run and squeal and push each other around. They give Rania a bit of a hard time, Omar smacks her back if she gives him a tap and he’s only 2! I asked her was she going to have any more and she said no no no, these 3 were more than enough and gave her a headache. Mohamed says that the little Mohamed in particular is a problem in the street every day for something. He’s always laughing – I think he’s probably a "ratbag" rather than a bad boy.
It’s always a little bit of hard going as both sisters don’t speak very much English (Hagar speaks more than Rania) so we don’t talk a lot, but I like them both very much and I’m sure it will get better. This week they looked through the photo album of all the kids.
Allaa invited us to their house next Friday which will be nice. Hagar thinks her fiancé will visit her there and it would be good to also meet him. So I hope that works out. But one thing I am learning here is that you have to be very flexible. Yes means maybe and maybe means possibly and no means we’ll see what happens and maybe it will be yes. And if a meeting is set for 11.00 am then anything up to abouat 12.30 is very acceptable. So when Masry says his sisters will be here at 11.00 to 12 and they arrive at 1.30 then that’s all OK. Mind you I was grateful - there was lots of chopping and grating etc. to be done and I wouldn't have been ready on time anyway.
This weekend has been a holiday for Christians but Masry couldn’t tell me what for. But putting two and two together it may have been for Easter as I know that the weekend just gone was Easter for Ethiopians. Yesterday Mohamed went to get himself a special fish lunch – we ate on the roof. We ate on the roof not only because it was a really nice day but also because it was the vilest smelling stuff I think I’ve ever smelt. Even Masry admits it smells revolting but he says it tastes wonderful. It’s called Alte Fork – salt-fermented mugli fish. It looks like sort of a whole half-rotten raw fish in slimy oil stuff and I simply cannot describe the smell. Masry says his hands etc. will smell for about 2 days even though he soaked in the jacuzzi for about 45 minutes. And he had about 3 litres of water to drink – he says he’s still sooooo thirsty. But he did tell me that all Egyptians would be eating fish on this day so maybe that supports my Easter theory.
So here I am at the net café while Masry goes to the lawyer yet again about a company and then he says it’s City Stars and a movie which will be nice. We didn’t go to one last time we went coz there wasn’t one that appealed but I hope we can today. It's just be nice to be out.
I’ve got a really sore little finger – we had a foam fight while the jacuzzi was filling up yesterday and in the process I hit my little finger really hard straight on the end – you know how you can do that? It didn’t seem to do a lot of damage, just hurt a bit, but it’s getting harder and harder to bend it and it’s fairly swollen. Hope it’s OK.
Masry says to say hello. I still don’t know if he’s coming to Australia at any stage, but I’m hopeful, although I know it will be difficult. I keep telling him how upset everyone will be if he doesn’t come. But it really will depend on what is happening with the vehicles and the company.
Anyway, I‘d better go, sorry there’s not much exciting news. I expect Masry back at any time and as it's 2.30 we'll both be starving by the time we get to City Stars.
lots of love
Lyndall
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