Upon the arrival of the esteemed Mr. Razi.

Gentle readers.

Tomorrow begins my first day of vacation, marking almost precisely my 3-month anniversary in the city of sand and smog.
Lovely as my life has been here, it’s about damn time.

Cairo, I find, is a month-at-a-time kind of city. Cairenes will tell you the same. It wasn’t until yesterday, accompanied down the busy streets by the long-anticipated and esteemed Mr. Razi, that I realized just how loud the city is. When you’re shouting to someone walking 6 inches away from you and you still can’t hear what they’re saying, you know that the New York Times wasn’t lying when they rated Cairo as the loudest city in the world. The decibel level equivalent of standing 15 feet away from a freight train, to be precise. No wonder people here down sugary tea and cigarettes by the fistful—horns blaring night and day makes you edgy after a while.

So, a break is much welcomed. Here’s to hoping that this week’s adventures will be tamer than the Weekend at the Crackhouse—or, at least, that we aren’t threatened with swords at any point on our journeys.

This weekend will likely find us at the desert oasis of Siwa, famous for its unique Bedouin culture, hot springs, and date palm groves.

In an aside, Ramadan is one big date fest (as in the fruit, right). I never really took to them the last time I was here, as their color, size, and texture reminded me a bit too much of cockroaches. This Ramadan, though, I realized with the rest of the world that they are delicious. At the moment, I’m completely inundated with them, however. On Monday, I bought a half kilo of dried and fresh dates to snack on and share with Nod. On Tuesday, the delegation from the UAE bought everyone in my department (and possibly in the entire building?) a kilo of dates from the Persian gulf. As much as I like them, I’m not sure anyone needs quite that many.

As I was musing over my surplus of dates yesterday with my co-workers, they suggested that I 1. Fry them and 2. Then put them on top of scrambled eggs. What?! But, I gave it a shot this morning. I’m not sure it’s necessary to mix them with the scrambled eggs, but fried dates are delicious, and—sugar coated and fried—strikes me as predictably Egyptian.

In fact, I’m coming to realize just how much my tastes have been adapted to the sugar and grease (actually, make that sugar and lard—the preferred cooking oil here) of Egyptian food. Nod and I stopped by a Ramadan tent last night to break the fast after sunset. I asked the waiter what they had to eat, and he rattled off a list of dishes, too fast for me to keep straight. “Um…let’s have rice, pita bread, and cucumber tomato salad… what else do you have?”
“Kebab, chicken, pigeon…”
Done. Two pigeons, please.
Our little friends arrived with heads (and eyes) fully intact, but bodies stuffed with brown rice. Not really any meat to be eaten off these guys, and I was a little unnerved when I suddenly found a detached pigeon head staring back at me on my plate. But, all in all, not bad.
Nod was finished long before me—citing smaller Ethiopian portions and the large amount of grease Egyptians cook with for a full stomach. I was still ravenously hungry, picking at the rice and fried eggplant and hummus until the waiter started stacking up the tables in the street and looked like he wanted us to leave. Fine—one last chunk of pita bread, and we were off.

I had a small, gnawing headache all day, though, which persisted after dinner as well. I had drunk plenty of water that day, so I wondered aloud if perhaps I needed some more sugar. After all, I hadn’t really eaten that much today. Nod looked at me incredulously. “What about the two glasses of pineapple-coconut juice and the sweet tea you drank?”
“Oh, right. But I meant that maybe I hadn’t had enough sugar at regular intervals today.”
Nod just shook his head. Take that, Rift Valley—let’s see who’s really the king of Type II Diabetes.