Catch-Up 2: My Apartment

The experience of getting my apartment here is definitely a story worth a post of its own. Robert, our director, spent his summer securing apartments and host families for us before we got here so that we could move in as soon as possible. Our first night in the city we stayed in a “budget hotel,” which in Egypt is… well, an experience. We were slated to meet our families and move in to our apartments the next day and for most of us that’s exactly what happened.

My roommates and I, on the other hand, were in a taxi headed to our apartment when we got a phone call from the realtor. The landlord, as it turns out, had taken our deposit from Robert and then turned around and sold the apartment. So we turned around and went back to the hotel. Staying another night in the hotel was not an appealing option, so instead we bunked with Kelly and Andrea, two grad students from the program who had a few extra beds in their apartment. I don’t’ want to go into too much raving detail, but they’re awesome, by the way.

We stayed at Kelly and Andrea’s for something like a week while Robert found us a new apartment. As anxious as we were to start settling in, we didn’t take the first apartment we saw. It was super fancy, a little on the expensive side, far from our friends, not on any tram or bus lines, and our Egyptian roommate, Salma, was far too ready to claim the gold encrusted master bedroom without any discussion.

The apartment we finally moved into a week later is much more my speed. With the plaid couches, bulky wood furniture, and shelves full of World's-Greatest-Grandma knick knacks it looks a bit like something out of a seventies sitcom, but it's located on a tram line that runs straight to the university and is only five blocks from the Corniche. We’re also within easy walking distance of at least nine other apartments affiliated with the program which makes getting together to do homework or hang out a lot easier.

Much like the situation with the master bedroom in the first apartment, Salma mad sure to claim the only bedroom with air conditioning, but my American roommate, Leila, then insisted I take the bedroom with the balcony. I love said balcony. It’s like a sunroom, because it’s walled in by sliding windows. There is the downside that Leila and Salma are always wandering in and out of my room to hang their laundry to dry, and when the wind gets really strong it sometimes rattles the doors and wakes me up, but it’s all worth the tiny glimpse of ocean I can watch while drinking tea.

In case you hadn’t figured it out by now I’m living with two girls: Salma, an Egyptian engineering student from a small village in the Delta, and Leila, a fellow student from UT. I feel blessed by my living arrangements. Leila and I mesh really well, probably because she’s so easy going, and while Salma and I have our differences she’s always willing to help when we have language questions, and I can’t deny that I get along with her better than most Egyptian girls. She’s very down to earth and has a number of endearing qualities. For instance, she watches reruns of Um Kalthoum concerts every night on television and has this dependent streak born of living so long with her family. The running list of things she has asked us to do for her includes: lighting the stove, turning on the air conditioning, plugging in the space heater, ordering takeout, flushing the toilet, starting the washing machine, opening a bottle that was not stuck in the first place, unwrapping a tea box, and explaining the use of a shower curtain. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Our second month here, however, we did get a chance to see what Salma’s life was like before the apartment. She was kind enough to invite us to visit her family in her home village of Mahmoudia for an engagement party. It was a fun weekend, and a beautiful glance at Egyptian country life. Her mother is an engineer and her father a lawyer who owns a kitchenware store. She has three sisters and a brother – two younger, two older – and she’s the only one who lives away from home. They were spectacularly hospitable, and I felt much more welcomed and at home than I had at the last wedding I went to.

The last thing I should probably mention about my apartment is the internet, and why it took me so long to get this blog going in the first place. Internet companies in Egypt suck, and my land lady… oh! My land lady!

So, side note: My landlady is this sweet old lady named Doctor Hurriya. She bought this apartment for her son to live in, but he recently moved to New Jersey for work, hence why we’re living here now. Unlike most landlords she lives right next door, which is really convenient when we need something. The power went out once a month or so ago and she brought us over a candle. She even offered to let us use her car if we needed to go anywhere, but I don’t intend to take her up on that one. My only complaint, and it’s a tiny one, is that she doesn’t really like to speak Arabic with us. She lived in America for ten years getting her doctorate, so while she has a heavy accent her English is perfect and even when she tries to speak Arabic with us she usually slips back into English anyway. Considering some of the problems other students have had with their landlords speaking English is a downright gift.

Anyway, back to the internet.

So I started the process to get internet in the apartment the day we moved in. It took a few days for them to install the telephone landline (they don’t have cable here), and then Doctor Hurriya told us that she’d worked it out with the technician so we just had to call the company to turn on the net – except she’d ordered us the same net she had which wasn’t fast enough to do more than check e-mail. She didn’t seem to mind going back to order the faster one though. So in a few days she knocked on our door to give us the receipt and ask if the internet was working. And it wasn’t. And so started the month long routine of calling the company, being told the problem was fixed, waiting a few hours for the internet to come on, and then having to call them again. Doctor Hurriya tried to help us, she was on the phone with the internet company as much as we were, but the language/age barrier was a problem. While I had figured out what the problem was, I couldn’t explain it in Arabic. And when I explained it in English to Doctor Hurriya, she didn’t understand the technology well enough to explain it to the company. In the end Doctor Hurriya called an engineer to come out to our apartment and take a look, because I obviously didn’t understand what I was doing if my explanations didn’t make any sense. It was for the best though, because his bill wasn’t too high and he was able to reach the same conclusions I had, but then call the company and explain them in Arabic. It was a source of great frustration for the month, but at least the internet is working now – if still too slowly for you tube downloads or video chat.

And so concludes the story of my apartment.