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:
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.
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. |
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.
Not to be cruel, but this is the most hilarious description of elevators in Egypt I've ever read.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you don't have to go far to have an exciting adventure, that's for sure! :-)
ReplyDeleteI'm glad the postcard made it to you, and 2 weeks isn't bad either. Yay!