Enjoying the morning after - Cairo 05.18.09

As many of you know, yesterday was my birthday. It started out in a decidedly inauspicious manner, but thankfully ended on a much higher note...due entirely to the efforts of my beloved. Here's how it all went down.

On Saturday evening, I had gone out to a little Italian café with my friend Amb. to work on our Arabic. We'd each bought something nominal to justify our presence in their air-conditioning, and mine happened to have been an espresso. I didn't think twice about it, until I found myself sitting in the lobby of the hotel at 2am on Sunday morning. To be fair, I *had* been doing battle with Linux and trying to get everything squared away so I could Skype with Anna in the morning, and I *do* tend to get a little engrossed in my work...but not to that extent. My eyes had been heavy for a long time, but in that way where even if you can't keep your eyes open, you're not going to be able to sleep, either...know what I mean?

So, anyway, that meant that bedtime and wake-up on my birthday were only a tish over 4 hours apart. And no rest for me, either, since Sunday is the first day of the workweek...so I dragged my carcass off to the office for the single worst day of work so far. I spent the entire 10 hours there in a sort of fog. Part of it was certainly the lack of sleep (you know that sensation where you feel like you're having to push through molasses every time you move? Yeah...that was me all day), but the other part was the heat.

Sunday was the first day of truly oppressive misery since I arrived. It was like the worst days we had in Benin, and just as sticky. Compounding this problem were the three power outages we experienced during the day (the first of my time in Cairo, which makes me think maybe they were related to thousands of air conditioners snapping on at the same time), which naturally took with them any hope that our fans could keep us comfortable.

Anyway, putting these things together made for an extremely long day, such that I nearly fell asleep standing up while riding the metro back to downtown. I made myself walk back to the hotel, since I needed to stay awake until at least nine o'clock.

WHY did I need to stay up until nine? Well, this wasn't totally clear. I suspected Anna might have lined up some sort of surprise, but I couldn't be sure. All I knew was that the Big Boss at the Mayfair called me aside on Saturday and said that he was going to need my hand with something on Sunday. When I told him I was available right then, and that I'd probably be at work until at least 9:30 the next day, he told me to just do my utmost to get back by nine and we'd deal with it then.

Well...in classic non-U.S./German/Swiss fashion, the idea of a fixed hour for some given occurrence proved to be -- how shall I put this? -- malleable. I parked my tuchus on the couch by about 8:00, and did my best to remain upright and make small talk with folks. Nine came and went, though...and then so did ten. At this point I IMed Anna, who had been hanging out online waiting to hear how things went, and told her I was going to call it a night.

When I tried to leave, though, my buddies the Ahmeds refused to give me my keys! "No sleep for you tonight!" said Ahmed, so I parked my behind back on the couch and spent another 45 mins. chatting with G. and trying to predict the broken plurals of various vocab words the other Ahmed chucked my way. It finally took Amb. getting up to go pack - she was planning to move out on Monday morning for a hostel closer to her language school in Heliopolis - for them to essentially say we were going to get the show on the road.

They called me into the big boss' office, where I found a massive birthday cake! They'd laid out sodas, plates, etc. etc. for a little party, so G., Amb., the hotel staff and I chowed down...at 11 pm. The cake was amazing - half of it was a vanilla layer cake, with pears in buttercream icing between the layers, all topped with rows of cherries, apple slices, and pineapple slices, and the other half was layers of dark chocolate cake held in place by chocolate mousse, all topped with a hard chocolate ganache - and incredibly rich. Between about nine of us I think we killed off maybe a quarter of it...which meant the rest was supposed to come with me. Yikes! That's the LAST thing I need - a massive cake sitting in my little mini-fridge and calling my name every day.

Well, we cut it off two-thirds/one-third, but the staff refused to take the larger portion and sent it upstairs with me. So if I can figure out a way to get it to work, I'll foist off all those calories on them...if not, well, I guess there'll just have to be a whole lot more walking in my future.

Anyway, it was a wonderful little surprise. Anna had tried to figure out how to make me feel special on my birthday, and got the idea of doing something like this...so she called up Ustaaza, who then had Cowboy A. place a call and line this up. 'Twas wonderful!

...of course, all the sugar and caffeine from the soda meant that I couldn't sleep anyway...so I was up until 1 am. Thankfully, I was already planning to stay home from work on Monday to try to take care of a visa extension. I'm not in danger of being illegal or anything, but if I don't get my visa extended, I'll be forced to leave the country for a moment and then re-enter. Of course, I never really get to do all the traveling I want to do when I'm in a given area -- I tend to get there and just kind of hunker down until my sojourn is over -- and this provides a built-in excuse to go see Petra, which has been a lifelong dream of mine since the first time I watched "The Last Crusade." Unfortunately, this solution is MUCH cheaper than that would be, and as cool as Petra would be, it's not the sort of thing you really want to do just by yourself...so I'll be getting the visa thing fixed, and spend the rest of the summer (and my life, if I fail to get back to the region like I've promised myself I will) trying to convince myself that this was the better choice.

Dealing with the visa extension involves descending into what several bloggers have described as a "Kafkaesque nightmare," the central government building known as the Mugamma. Apparently the entire process can be greatly facilitated if you have a letter of affiliation, though, so that was step one -- hoofing it over to Mohandesiin and actually setting foot inside my future school to snag one of these. It being the day after my birthday, and sweltering hot, on the way back I decided to seek refuge in the Donut House I featured in one of my first little videos home.

This wound up being a better idea than a reality. I had one of those discouraging conversations wherein the person waiting on me stared blankly at me no matter what I said until I turned to English. Further, apparently in Egypt when you order milk to go with your donut, they think you mean HOT milk -- essentially a latté without the espresso -- which is, surprise of surprises, NOT refreshing. It does not serve to cool you down relative to the outdoors, neither can you quaff it in a gulp; it was only with utmost restraint that I avoided buying an ice-cold smoothie to quench my thirst. Ultimately, though, I decided that I'd probably already had enough sugar in the last 14 hours, given the previous evening's festivities and the cinnamon donut I'd just gnoshed (and which rivalled the best such donuts from Yum Yum in CA, or Mr. Donut in El Salvador) and resisted.

It was a little odd to me that I was the only American in the joint, since I never think of donuts as being particularly big hits with anyone but Americans. It *was* 11 am on the second workday of the week, but still -- it was basically myself, the pink-and-black-attired workers, and a half-dozen Egyptians who appeared to represent a broad range of occupations. Who knows. I'll have to ask around to find out what other Egyptians think about donuts.

Anyway, today has proven to be quite restful, largely because I decided to leave the Mugamma for first thing tomorrow morning. I hear it's best to get there around 8:30 - not 11, when the staff are already 75% of the way through their workday - so I'm going to *try* to sneak it in before work tomorrow. We'll see how it goes. That means, though, that I'm going to call it a night early...so a HUGE "Thank you!" goes out to my beloved Anna, and I'll write some more soon.