Eating Egypt

I love food. It might be my favorite part of being alive. And in my opinion, the best way to explore a new place is through the local food scene. Open air markets, street food, fancy-schmancy restaurants, hole-in-the-wall joints, I want to eat it all! And, man, have I lived in some great cities for eating. I had the world's best barbecue in Central Texas, an amazing international farmer's market in Atlanta, my first pho experience in Orange County, and a plethora of Ethopian restaurants in DC. A little exploring off the beaten path tends to pay off in unexpected ways. Case in point: I had the best sushi of my life in a Japanese restaurant in La Paz, Bolivia - a completely landlocked country. To get around the lack of available seafood, they used trucha (trout) caught fresh daily from Lake Titicaca to make the sushi and sashimi.

Exploring food in Cairo has been more challenging because of the language and culture barriers I touched on earlier. I'm don't yet know how to ask "What is this?", and even if I did, I wouldn't understand the answer. In my neighborhood, the grocery stores and restaurants generally have menus and prices posted in English, but anywhere off the island you take your chances and hope for pictures.

This has led to a few surprises. For example - what would you guess this product is?

Unfortunately, it wasn't butter*, which make it hard to cook my eggs the next day at breakfast.

Milk comes in a box. Pro - it lasts forever and you don't need to refrigerate till after you open it. Con - thinking about what they did to it so it wouldn't spoil.

Egyptians eat a lot of yogurt. I went to the equivalent of Walmart (Carrefour) and they had an entire refrigerator aisle with nothing but yogurt - all unflavored. I asked an employee where the fruit flavored stuff was and she looked at me like I was insane. Really? You're the one with 50 varieties of plain yogurt! I found this mango-flavored stuff at a more westernized store.

Among the many terrible side effects of my last relationship (with a European) was that I developed quite a taste for nice (read: expensive) cheese. I am embarrassed to say how much I spent on these and am guarding them with my life. Passport and credit cards get stuffed in the dresser drawer, but my cheese goes in the locked fridge.

Note the lock. They knew the fat kid was coming to town. 

Speaking of fat kids, I'm really digging the different flavors of potato chips they have here, maybe a little too much. Lemon and chili - sounds weird, tastes delicious.

Anyone who knows me well knows I love me some spiciness, so I went in search of a local variant of my tried-and-true favorite, Sriracha. I found this stuff at the corner store.

Its essential coarsely chopped chilis with the skins left on, so the end effect is more bitter than spicy. Maybe this is what they were going for, but I wasn't a fan.

I was warned by a co-worker in Austin that the fresh produce in Cairo is limited and disappointing, and I'm glad to say she was wrong (she was wrong about several things but that's another post). There are a plethora of juice bars, fruit stands, and vegetable stalls in Cairo. Yes, they're not as "pretty" as the displays in Whole Foods or Central Market, and they spoil more quickly, but they actually taste like real fruits and vegetables. And I guarantee they haven't been irradiated or injected with food coloring. The tomatoes here are unbelievable.

Always red, juicy, and full of flavor. I'm drooling just looking at this picture. 50 cents a pound, I kidyounot.

The juice bars will squeeze fresh cup of fruit juice for you to enjoy in the shop or take home by the bottle. Their hygienic standards may not be the most stringent, but you can't get fresher or more delicious than squeezed-to-order juice.

Mango juice squeezed into a used water bottle.  Dubious hygiene, unquestionable deliciousness.

Speaking of hygiene, I coughed up the money for a fancy, schmancy space-age (not really) water filter so I can drink out of the tap sans Cipro chaser. In actuality, the water here is overly chlorinated (reminiscent of swimming pool water) so pathogens aren't so much of the issue as contaminants. The piping system is absolutely ancient and as a result, a lot of heavy metals have leached into the water supply. From the reports I've read, I gather that drinking unfiltered Cairo water is akin to eating paint chips.

The three chambers filter out different sizes of these metals and particles, kind of like a Brita on steroids. It still tastes terrible, but at least I'm less worried about permanent brain damage.

As far as eating out goes, let's just say I've gained back any weight I lost during my, ahem, "episode" last month. The typical diet is starch, bread, carbs, sweets, and meat. (Oh and unflavored yogurt) Delicious stuff, but it packs on the pounds quickly. Here is a picture of dinner out with my Egyptian colleagues and their families in Alexandria.

They're happier people than they look in this picture!

 I let one of the little girls order for me, and she ensured I got more grilled meat, bread, and mezze than I could handle - and I pride myself on being able to handle a lot. To supplement the feast, she insisted I try a typical rice dish called biram ruz (I think it means baked rice?). It came in an individual casserole dish baked with cream, butter, seasonings, and - surprise! - more meat. A vegetarian's nightmare, a carnivore's dream!

Also - bizarrely - EVERYWHERE does home delivery. Upscale restaurants, fast food, hole-in-the-wall places, grocery stores, even McDonalds (which is all sorts of wrong in so many ways). You don't even have to speak Arabic, this website makes it easy for lazy expats to avoid inadvertently ordering sheep brains or liver or some such Egyptian delicacy you weren't ready to try that particular night. (For reference, the current rate is about 6LE to $1, so as you can see, prices for delivery are ridiculously cheap).

ALSO - very exciting - I had my first Egyptian beer last night! This was somewhat of a challenge because the majority of bars and restaurants that normally serve alcohol (which are few and far between anyway) stop serving during Ramadan. We stopped at two placesy and were informed they were not serving before we finally found a pub that was open and fully functioning. It felt a little like a drinking in a speakeasy. The door was unmarked and inconspicuous, the inside was dark and smoky, and the whole experience felt deliciously taboo.

Not the tastiest, but after a 2 weeks of teetotaling, it sure hit the spot.

Ramadan Kareem indeed!

*The mystery product was essentially Egyptian-style Velveeta.

Things that go "@(#*!!" in the night

The original title of this post was "The Good, the Bad, and the Terrifying". I was going to start with "The Terrifying" and work my way up to a positive finish with "The Good". But I got really into writing about the "Terrifying", so I will have to do this in stages. 

As some of you may have already had the pleasure of witnessing, I am more than a little claustrophobic. Not a huge fan of concerts with people pressed in on all sides (there was an unfortunate incident at Fun Fun Fun Fest last year), commuter airplanes (like the kind I'm forced to take to get to home), and exploring caves - I consider them all to be minor forms of torture. But worst of all are elevators. If there is a hell, and if I end up there (which is highly probable), I guarantee you it will be an elevator, with no AC, stuck between the 30 and 31st floor of a high-rise office building, at 11pm at night after the janitor has gone home. If I've been extra bad, the emergency phone will be broken.

The elevators in Egypt are a special form of terrifying. Take the one in my apartment building as a prime example.

How does it open? Why, when it arrives on your floor, you simply stick your finger in the little hole where the handle should be, pray there is nothing inside to stick you, and pull it open. Then, you are presented with another set of doors.

This is where the terrifying briefly becomes the awkward. The doors swing inward, but they don't like to stay put; their natural inclination is to swing back out at you and stay put in their happy, closed homeostatic state. If you happen to be carrying groceries/dragging a suitcase/wearing a backpack/be over 90lbs, the only way to squeeze in by holding both doors open. This is somewhere on a scale of inconvenient to impossible if you are, for example, carrying groceries/dragging a suitcase/wearing a backpack.

Once inside, the terrifying usurps the awkward fairly quickly, when the lights go out automatically as the doors swing shut behind you. Luckily, I have a flash on my camera, which enabled me to find the floor buttons:

Note the lack of Floors 1 and 2, and the existence of Floor 0, which I can only assume is the dungeon. 

The entire space is the size of an XXL coffin, and its about as dark as one. When it arrives, 8 times out of 10 its not perfectly aligned with the floor. I bit it several times coming home at night (which gave my neighbors a good introduction to colloquial English) before I figured out how to open both doors (after having to set down my suitcases/groceries/backpack) to get the light to turn back on so I could see how far I had to step down.

As I've been around Egypt a bit more, I'm seeing that my elevator is not the worst of all potential possibilities. The elevators at the hospitals I'm working with in Damanhour are on a different level of frightening. They stop a full 2 feet from their intended destination, have no doors at all, and are usually operated by a sweaty, burly man with a key to "unlock" the elevator so it will go where you want it to. Why a key is necessary if there is no door is beyond me, but it does keep the sweaty man busy and employed, so I'm ok with that).

In other (non-terrifying) news, work is killing me. One of my projects was just denied the funding source we were counting on and I've been scrambling to revamp our budget for FY12. Ah, the joys of public health in the time of economic recession. As one of my friends who works at CDC put so eloquently "Same sh*t, different continent".

Next post will be all about sunshine and rainbows and puppies, I promise :)

Miss you all.

I'm (living) on a Boat!

I haven't moved yet, but I just found an apartment to move into when my month here in Zamalek is up. This is my new neighborhood:

Those are houseboats! I'm not sure exactly from this view, but I think mine is second from the right. The Kit Kat houseboats (named for the cabaret that used to be where the mosque stands today) have a long and storied history. They were the (supposed) scene of WWII espionage, bohemian debauchery, and political intrigue. I'm sure that while many of these stories have been spun into mythical renditions more than precise history, the houseboats also hold many secrets and more than a few legends steeped in the truth.

My future roommate, Ryan, is a Fulbright scholar studying at the American University in Cairo. This did give me pause, since Egypt is a fairly conservative society and women living on their own invite suspicion, let alone women living with a male to whom she is not related or married. I was assured by the current tenants (Ryan's current roommate is a woman working for the British Council in Cairo) and the landlord that the rules are not the same here, and that given their history, Cairenes dismiss the boat tenants with a resigned shrug rather than angry disapproval. The houses are highly private as well, so its possible people won't even make the connection that I live with a male (since there are other females in neighboring apartments on the same boat). The boats are moored about 20 ft below street level, and hidden by trees and foliage, so people walking by won't be able to see the goings-on down below.

Anyway, I think the benefits highly outweigh the risks - I get to wake up and have my coffee and breakfast on the Nile! I get to see egrets and crocodiles and sailboats every day! I get a cool breeze off the river at night, and a daily respite from the hot and dusty streets of Cairo. 

Life in the Big Mango*

See, I told you - this blogging endeavor is going horribly. I've been in Egypt for two weeks today, and I just uploaded my pictures from my camera - a grand total of 18, 5 of which were the interior of my apartment, and 3 of which were repeat shots of my first Egyptian breakfast.

Typical Egyptian breakfast - juice, fuul (stewed beans with toppings of tahini, tomato, and pepper), 'aish (bread) and Nescafe (instant coffee - more on coffee later). Scenery not typical. This is not my apartment.

  Point being - I've gotten off to a poor start in documenting my Egyptian adventures.

  To be fair, I've really only started feeling ok in the past few days. A large part of it was the epic episode of Pharoah's Revenge (like Montezuma's Revenge, get it? OK, I'm done) last weekend. But an even bigger factor in my feeling unwell was the immense culture shock.

  Egypt hit me like a ton of bricks.

  Before I arrived, I thought I was fairly worldly, open-minded, and adaptable.  What I hadn't considered was that I had never traveled somewhere I didn't speak at least some of the language, or have experience in some form of the culture and religious tradition. I've only been to South/Latin America and the Caribbean, in addition to a brief vacation to Switzerland (I know just enough French to be dangerous).

  Absolutely everything is foreign to me here - the language, the clothes, the transportation system (er, or lack thereof), rules for gender relations, the role of religion in public life, etc. Having to consistently process those elements and make decisions when your brain would normally be on autopilot is exhausting.

  However, my downstairs co-worker has me set up in a cozy little apartment upstairs from he and his fiancee with a view of the Nile for a month until I can find more permanent digs. The inside is typical middle class Egyptian (they have a penchant for heavy, ornate furniture.

Zamalek (my neighborhood)

Nile and the National Bank of Egypt

Nile in the background

 

  I like being by my co-workers (see previous post) and I love the neighborhood, but I was hoping to have a roommate and this place just isn't big enough for two unrelated people (its two bedrooms but they bump right up against each other, and the living room is quite small). I'm checking out a few tomorrow and hope to have something lined up soon.

  I'm learning where and when its appropriate to take pictures, so hopefully I'll have some more interesting things to look at posted in the near future. Until then, lots of love from the Big Mango.

*Cairo is sometimes called "The Big Mango" (a nod to NYC, the Big Apple). Also like NYC, Cairo never, ever, EVER sleeps. Seriously. More on this later...