What I’ve learnt in the last three months!

Glen:

1. Bukra in Egyptian means, literally, tomorrow but in reality it doesn’t (especially when followed by the word, inshallah, “God willing, hopefully”)

If you ask an Egyptian to sort something out for you tomorrow then they will say Bukra inshallah. What they really mean is yes tomorrow if …. ‘it rains tonight’ (it hardly ever rains here!) ‘the Red Sea parts again’

I’ve learnt that the Egyptians don’t have a word for tomorrow!

2. Not wearing socks for three months make your feet rough.

Even after discovering and using a device that looks like a cheese grater and then using something like an emery board only bigger, the sort of thing that would be more suited to being used on a horse, my feet aren’t smooth. In fact the bottom of my feet resemble the rough side of Velcro!

At the side of our bed I have a small carpet mat and many times these last few weeks I’ve got out of bed to make a coffee only to find the mat had stuck to one foot. I’ve turned this into a positive now and I also step on the mat on Mandy’s side of the bed and walk around our tiled floor apartment with my very own ‘Axminster’ carpet under my feet!

3. Lager is best drunk quickly

This is an obvious one, drink quickly and it doesn’t get warm, also you can drink more ; )

4. It’s very dry and dusty here (this one is for Mandy)

You know how some people see the glass half empty and others see it half full, well I think the dust here illustrates this perfectly. I’ve never really been into dusting back in the UK, I am with Quentin Crisp on this one, he once said, (on why he doesn’t clean his apartment) “After the third year, the dust doesn’t get any worse.”

Mandy on the other hand would see the benefit of dusting at home and in fairness the house looked good for a week or so. Now here, in Egypt, you can dust at 8 am and by 9 am it looks like someone opened a tub of Johnson’s talcum powder and sneezed! For Mandy this is definitely a glass half empty situation but for me it’s half full, this is the perfect place not to dust – it’s just not worth doing!

5. Taxis, yes you knew they would get a mention didn’t you.

They are numerous, they outnumber private cars by ten to one. They beep their horns to get your attention, not once, not twice but, well they don’t stop beeping their horns. You can shake your head, you can wag your finger (thanks to Denise for that one) but most will still beep. They will reverse up the road to offer you a lift. You will often see five in convoy, the first will beep but you say no and he passes, the second taxi has seen your ‘no’ but he will then beep, as will the third and the forth! Some taxis will also drive nearer to you as you walk down the road, by nearer I mean within centimeters, and shout out the window “taxi” (well they actually shout tax!) I think their logic is that punters are not getting in their taxis because they are hard of hearing so they drive closer to the said punter just incase they didn’t see their bright orange car or hear the beeping!

6. Egyptian voices are set to loud.

For some reason the Egyptian race as a whole have evolved with a slight vocal limitation, they don’t have a volume control. Their larynx is set permanently at loud! This enables them to talk to their mate who is a hundred yards away, unfortunately it also means that when they are stood next to each other (below our apartment at six o’clock in the morning) they also shout at each other. It sounds at first like they are having a major argument and it’s just about to turn nasty, then unexpectedly they break out into laughter! (Our ex neighbour, Roy, would fit right in here!)

7. Egyptians are a happy lot.

Generally they are, they smile easily, they seem genuinely happy most of the time, if you try and say the odd badly pronounced Egyptian word to them they love it. Like most people around the world I think 95% of them are good. I think the Egyptians are a little more happy than most because they don’t have a word for tomorrow, they live for today. If you don’t have a tomorrow then there’s a whole lot less to worry about. I can imagine them thinking, today is another sunny day and this funny white, well not so white, man is making a fool of himself by trying to say the word tomorrow in Egyptian, so they smile ; )

In the last three months I’ve learnt that I like it here