Sham El Nessim

Yesterday, the park in front of my house on the Gamat-al-Dwal al arabiya road was filled with families out on a picnic. They were carrying baskets of food and drinks and had laid out mats on the grass. The children were busy playing whereas their parents lazed on the mats and enjoyed the salted fish, coloured eggs and spring onions.

It was Sham-el-Nesseim, a non-Muslim, non-Christian festival that has been celebrated in Egypt since the Pharonic times (around 4500 years ago). “Sham” in Arabic means “sniff” and “Nessim “ means “breeze”-therefore this festival literally means “sniffing the breeze”.

The day starts with families having breakfast together-salted fish (fiseekh), boiled coloured eggs and spring onions are the staple on this day. These foods have Pharonic symbolism-for example salted fish symbolizes fertility and welfare, eggs symbolize new life and green onions are thought to keep the evil eye away. Families spend the day together, going to the parks, near the river Nile or by the sea.

My landlady’s mom who stays just below us offered us some boiled eggs-she called it the “Egg of Upper Egypt”. Apparently this form of coloring the egg is very popular in Upper Egypt-the egg is boiled with onion skin and kohlingen, an Egyptian spice. The onion skin imparts the eggs with a brown colour. She served it with “dukka”, another Egyptian spice, which has as its base hazelnuts or chickpeas together with pepper, coriander seeds, sesame seeds and cumin seeds. The ingredients are ground together to a coarse powder. “Dukka” can also be used as a dip for breads along with olive oil. There are many recipes available for dukka - you can find one of them on http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,1591304,00.html

Daylight Saving Time in Egypt

It has been four days now since Egypt re-set its clocks-advanced it by one hour, to be precise. But the battle to adjust to the changed time still continues-the body clock continues to “live in the past”. Mornings are disrupted- at “dawn”, it is still dark outside. My friends with children have been complaining that making it to the school on time these days is a herculean task.

Egypt practices daylight saving time between the last Thursday of April andthe last Thursday in September. This year the change was made at midnight (local time) on 24th April (Thursday)-one second after 23:59:59 became 1:00:00 on Friday. We arenow at three hours ahead of GMT.
Read more on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_around_the_world..

The rationale behind this practice is to make available longer daylight hours in the evenings for activities after the normal working hours. Also the electricity consumption decreases since it is daylight for much of the waking hours. Hence the term "daylight saving time"-you save the daylight for the waking hours!

However, there is still much debate on the merits of practicing daylight saving time. Inconvenience, disruptions in schedule etc are some of the points against this practice. India too used to practice daylight saving time for a few years but the practice has now been discontinued.

For us Indians in Egypt, for six months we will be closer to the Indian Standard Time-we are now only 2.5 hours behind India! And in my six months in Cairo, I had to wait for the daylight saving time to start to enjoy a cup of tea at sunset on a working day with my husbandJ

Ordering food at home in Cairo-Otlob

For days when you don’t feel like cooking and you can’t even be bothered going out, otlob provides the best alternative-ordering food at home. And it is extremely easy to use-log onto www.otlob.com; register your self and voila! –you have access to the some of the best restaurants in town! All the menus are in English and even the support staff speak very good English. This service is primarily aimed at the English speaking expatriate community and is very convenient as it does away with the hassle of conversing in Arabic.

I have been using this service for some time now; there have been some minor hiccups at times-small differences in the total amount, sometimes a delay in the delivery-they ask for a minimum delivery time of 45 minutes.

However, last night, when I ordered on Otlob, I had a huge surprise-I had ordered from “Arabica”, a restaurant in Zamalek. My total bill on the Otlob site showed LE 51.5. But when the restaurant delivered the food to my house, their bill showed an amount of LE 84.5-a difference of more than LE 30 from the Otlob site. When I called up the restaurant, I was told that they had a new menu and the bill was according to this new menu-the menu on Otlob had the rates according to the old menu. There was nothing to do but pay up!

However, I did register a complaint on the Otlob website and they got back to me within an hour-the guy who called me up from Otlob offered profuse apologies and assured me that the complaint had been forwarded to the right persons within Otlob to ensure that such errors do not occur in the future. Had been quite upset with the mix-up but was happy to see the response of Otlob-they take the complaints seriously!

RESPONSIBLE TOURISM

These days the pace of life is faster-we want to accomplish a lot of things in a shorter span of time. Unfortunately, this applies when we take time off too! Our pleasure trips sometimes leave us feeling more tired than rejuvenated – the sight-seeing is done at a punishing pace; no sight is to be left unseen and no adventure left untried.

Egypt has some of the world’s oldest engineering wonders and some beautiful treasures and sights. Since moving to Cairo a few months back, we have visited a number of “tourist” places and my enjoyment has at times been marred by the attitude and acts of some of the tourists.

A visit to the Crystal Mountain in the White Desert is to enjoy the beauty and vastness of the landscape -picking a crystal as a souvenir or keepsake will only deplete nature and probably not even occupy “shelf-space” in your house after a year. Using a 4x4 to get closer to the rock formations definitely saves time and energy but the tyres over the fragile rocks will soon grind them to rubble and the very formations that are drawing such crowds will disappear! Visiting the desert in the age-old way i.e. walking or on a camel is more enjoyable!

Watching the sun set from the Sinai Mountain or star gazing in the desert with a chilled coke/ beer for company maybe idyllic but leaving behind the empty cans/ bottles contributes to the degradation of the environment and is nuisance value to the later tourists. Camping in the desert is adventurous; lighting campfires and singing, talking around it is entertaining but the burned out camp fires and other garbage left behind is not appealing.

The entrance fees to the Egyptian Museum is high – but it is not a license to go strolling beyond the “no visitors beyond this point” signs. Some people are hard at work here cataloguing and describing all the archeological findings for our better understanding.

The centuries old tombs and mastabas have lovely painted reliefs – we are lucky that they are still in good enough condition for us to admire them – don’t be tempted to touch them! And do we really need to talk so loudly when we are inside the tombs – the paintings and the frescoes are beautiful enough to leave us “speechless” – the moisture from our chatter may harm the reliefs and the frescoes. Giving “baksheesh” to a guard to allow you to use your flash in tombs will give you a good picture to be the focal point of a dinner party at your house, but will harm the paint of the reliefs.

It is only fair that we respect the sentiments of the people of the country that we are visiting, whether it is in the manner of our dressing and covering the head and removing the shoes when entering into a mosque. Scrambling on the rocks and the toppled statues in the temples at Luxor may give you a better vantage point for your photograph but you may be stepping on and erasing important historical evidence.

Most of these things are just a matter of common sense; we can do our bit to preserve what we have been fortunate enough to inherit-WE OWE IT TO THE FUTURE GENERATIONS!

Dowry Practices in Egypt

Had dinner last night at an Egyptian friend’s house- we are vegetarians (well, actually “eggtarians”); the friend had taken pains to prepare a vegetarian meal. The meal was scrumptious –Lebanese style dolmas-capsicums, tomatoes, zucchinis, onions cored and filled with delicately spiced rice and boiled. For the Indian touch, the friend had added some Indian spices to the rice and the outcome was mouth-watering. The vegetable had been boiled to perfection-firm enough to be easily “knifed” and yet the rice stuffed inside had been cooked through.

My friends are a newly married couple and everything in their house is new. My friend’s wife showed me around their tiny apartment – while doing so, she pointed out the stuff that “she” had contributed to the house as part of the marriage contract. For the first couple of times, I felt odd when she said this but then I realized that she was stating this very matter of factly and without any trace of “show-off”. Then my friend started on about the stuff that he had contributed-soon this escalated into a discussion about the prevailing dowry practices in Egypt.

The man is responsible to provide the house, the curtains and the furniture. The woman is responsible for providing all the kitchen appliances and pots and the pans. Crockery, cutlery, bedclothes also form part of her “dowry.” And one cannot forget the children’s room which has to be fully furnished and equipped, even before the marriage!

Of course, all this frank discussion did sound a bit strange to us-but my mom who was with us reminded us that in India too, the dowry system is widely prevalent and a bigger dowry gets you a “better” husband. In some communities in India, where the dowry amounts involved are huge, the parents start accumulating funds for their daughters’ wedding on her birth. In India, it is usually the girl’s family that bears the entire onus of the wedding expenses, in addition to providing the dowry. Sometimes, the dowry may also include a furnished accommodation for the couple.

That evening, I came away with a lot of thoughts on the concept of dowry-should the union of two people be so fraught with “material” considerations. The maid who works at my house is Egyptian and she too has told me on several occasions that she needs to accumulate money for her dowry-to buy all that is part of her contribution to the marital home. But on second thoughts, all this obsessions with the material aspect of a marriage may be “practical” and provide the married couple with some amount of financial security.

Egyptian Colloquial Arabic

It is been a month now that I have taken a break from my Arabic class and it looks like the break will extend to another month since there are no classes happening for Level 3-not enough students to hold the class. I am not complaining -I need time to digest all the grammar.

Arabic is similar to French in the sense that it is an inflected language. The words change to reflect the person, number and gender. For example, the verbs are marked for person-first, second and third. But that is not enough; the verbs also change to reflect gender and number. Whew! So many things to take care of! Adjectives follow the nouns that they qualify-for number and gender! And there is more inflection but I am not getting into it here.

But the thing that has really got me in a tizzy is the “plurals”. In Arabic, the nouns do not only have a plural, they also have a dual, indicating two of the noun. For example a month is “shahr”, two months is “shahren” and three and above months is “shuhr”. But the catch is that for number beyond 10, the noun is again referred to in the singular- i.e. 12 months would again be "hadashar shahr. "

And the pronunciation is another thing-some words require you to make a gargling sound-for example work, which is transliterated as “shughl”. Apple in Arabic is “tuffaha” and the “h” is pronounced as if you are trying to blow out a candle! The letter “q” if it appears in the beginning of the word is silent; if it appears elsewhere in the word, then it is pronounced as a “k”. And then of course, there is the “Ain” letter, which has no equivalent in English-you know you have pronounced it correctly in a word when it comes out sounding as if you are choking!

There are times when I am trying to speak in Arabic and I land up using the French equivalents; I guess since both are “foreign” languages for me, some overlapping is bound to happen!

Chase to Borg Al Arab

I now know what the passenger in a car chase in a James Bond movie feels like. A couple of weeks ago, our car zigzagged at more than 160 km/hr on a busy road towards the Burg-al-Arab airport in Alexandria. …. the car zigzagged, from the first lane to the last and then back to the first and so it went for a good half hour. No, we were not participating in a warm-up to the Grand Prix-my husband was booked on a flight to Dubai and he was going to miss the flight!

We had left Cairo early enough to be able to reach the airport on time; but we had not done our home-work. Alexandria has two airports-The El Nouzha airport, located around 7 km to the south-east of the city centre. Air Arabia, Bahrain Air, Egypt Air are some of the airlines that operate their flights out of this airport-(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Nouzha_Airport). On reaching the El Nozha airport, we realized that the Emirates Airline, on which my husband was booked, did not ply from El Nouzha! We did an about turn and rushed towards the Borg Al Arab airport, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_al_Arab_Airport), the second airport that serves Alexandria and which is 25 km from the city centre.

Our progress was hampered by the fact that there are no street signs indicating the direction to the Borg al Arab airport and a couple of times we took the wrong turn and had to stop and ask for directions. One need not come into the city, when traveling to the Borg al Arab; it is accessible from the Alexandria Desert Road. Apart from the Emirates, this airport also caters to Lufthansa and the Turkish airlines.

After much ado, when we finally reached the gates of the airport, our driver asked the man at the gate whether it was in fact the Borg Al Arab (there is no sign here in English indicating the name of the airport), we heard the man say “Insha’allah it is!” and we wondered whether our woes had just begun.

Alexandria in One day

I have visited Alexandria a couple of times before but it has been more for its beaches and spending a relaxing time; maybe some sight-seeing, if time permits But when I took my parents, who are visiting us, to Alex, we knew we had just this one day and had to make the most of it. And though this is not an itinerary that I had thought through in detail, rather something that I worked out on the spur of the moment, things fell into place pretty nicely and we managed quite an action-packed day! Of course an early start is essential; coffee and breakfast at Masters, halfway to Alex, gears you up for the day ahead!

The Meditteranean Blue

Am putting down the sights in the order that we visited them. Check it out!

KOM-AL-DIKKA- Our first stop- the only roman amphitheatre in Egypt. It seemed like a miniature version of the amphitheatre that I had visited in Jerash, Jordan. But it is excellently preserved and serves as a good introduction to the advanced acoustics prevalent in the ancient times, when no microphones were needed for the actors to be heard by the audience. A separate ticket is required to visit the “Villa of the Birds” containing some beautiful mosaics. Of course, the mosaics are not as elaborate or as beautiful as the ones that I visited in Paphos, Cyprus-but definitely worth a “dekho”

POMPEY’S PILLAR – was next on our itinerary, but in hindsight, we felt that we could have seen the monolithic granite pillar from outside the gates. Nothing much to see here- though, apparently, this was the site of the first settlement in Alexandria. Now it is little more than a mound of rubble.

CATACOMBS OF KOM ASH SHUQQAFA - provide a glimpse into the Roman burial practices. Apart from the many decorated tombs, you can also see the banqueting hall for the grieving relatives at this Roman burial centre. Cameras are not allowed.

At this point, you can take a break for lunch-try the Egyptian fare at Mohammed Ahmed, where I had my “full of fuul” (see earlier blog entry)

BIBLIOTHECA ALEXANDRIA - The highlight of any visit to Alexandria is the architecturally impressive Alexandrian library designed by a Norwegian architectural firm (Children below the age of six are not allowed inside) The library can hold up to eight million books and is aesthetically designed to allow for maximum natural light to come through; at the same time, the design and the inclination of the glass-paneled roof protects the books from the elements. The copier at the library can print any book in the library in 20 minutes! Though the bibliotheca does not yet allow for borrowing of books, it offers browsing and copy facilities for a nominal fee. The visiting hours are curtailed on Fridays from 3-7 pm. The entry ticket entitles you to a free guided tour. We took the English tour at 3.30 pm on a Friday. Their re-vamped website is now functional at http://www.bibalex.com/

FORT QAITBEY – on the eastern end of the Corniche, is built on the remains of the ancient Pharos lighthouse. Beautiful views across the Mediterranean Sea can be enjoyed through certain “look-out posts” from inside the fort. There is a small souvenir and fish market outside. You can stroll right up to the sea and feel the salty sea water spray you as it hits against the rocks. Great spot to view the sunset.

CRUISING THE CORNICHE: From Fort Qaitbey to the Montazah Gardens, the drive along the Corniche is not to be missed…with the outdoor cafes and colourful apartment blocks on your right and the sea to your left, the entire stretch is extremely picturesque and the drive exhilirating!.

Tired and exhausted? The perfect antidote to the tiredness from a day of hectic sightseeing?-Spend an hour at a roadside café, on the Corniche, relaxing with the locals and tourists over a Shay Bi Nana (mint tea) and shisha tuffah (a hubbly bubbly with apple flavour). You are now ready to head back to Cairo!.