Beiti Beiti Beiti!

Translation: home home home!

Hello friends.

Sorry for the lengthy hiatus. We’ve both been pretty busy with teaching, learning, moving and settling.

We moved into a new apartment, a nice 2 bedroom in the Roushdy / Bokly neighborhood, a 5 minute walk away from work. The apartment itself is full of character and quirks, just like everything in Egypt. So we have 2 bedrooms, a green master bedroom and a pink… pinkalink pink pink pink in your face until you puke pink out of your eyeballs bedroom, from which I am currently writing. We also have an L shaped enclosed balcony area which was used as the cat room / storage area by the previous tenants. When they moved out, we asked the landlord to have the bowab (the super) clean the apartment for us as we are both allergic to cats. Stevie, our roommate at the amideast guest villa told us to not have high expectations for the cleaning job. He was right to warn us.

When we got our keys and surveyed the apartment, we took a quick run through of the house to see how things were. Everything seemed okay, the floors weren’t dirty, the walls were fine, nothing was too dusty and … what… what the… THE LITTER BOX IS STILL HERE. THE OG*#JDF LITTER BOX. I don’t throw tantrums, but I felt that if there was ever a time to throw one, that you have been a great moment for one. Anyways, We started moving around the furniture to our liking, put away one of the 5 couches that we had in the storage area (SO MANY COUCHES) and rolled up some of the extra rugs that were covered in cat hair (SO MANY RUGS / SO MUCH CAT HAIR), scrubbed the decades old grease stains off the kitchen walls and slowly but surely things started to feel a bit more… sane. Somehow we didn’t get around to getting rid of the litter box until about a week later. We already had our house warming brunch party at that point. During that time, the room was officially dubbed “The Cat Room.” I hate cats. Kenny hates them more.

Currently I’m in the pink room, which is the extra bedroom we have that we were going to turn into a zen space… which it already is i suppose, since i’m chillin’ in my pajamas, lesson planning, blogging, chatting and grading at 5 pm on a Monday. This room has pink walls, a pink ceiling, a giant pink dresser, two pink beds pushed up against each other, white curtains with pink trim, a set of pink drawers and a gaudy dark red oriental rug. Oh yeah, and there are pink sheets, pink pillows and flower patterned blankets on the bed. OH MY GOD SO MUCH PINK.

Whatever the case, I’m happy with the new apartment. Every apartment in Egypt has its oddities and quirks. Ours came with a room that had a pepto bismol explosion, a fully stocked kitty litter box, a big stack of newspapers from 2008 and some random drawings of a very miserable looking family. Later this week, when we have more time, we can take some pictures of the place and show you guys the glory that is our first apartment. huray!

Oh also, I know all 4 of you regular readers (Shout out to mama, papa, Laura and Ken!) are eagerly anticipating hearing about our adventures in Nuweiba. The blog post for that will be up in a few days. I’ve been writing it on and off for the past few weeks and Kenny has some amazing pictures to post. I’ll make sure to post some of mine as well.

For the time being, here are some pictures of random things that I took on my phone camera. Enjoy!