Exit 2006

Happy 2007!!!!

Hello friends! Just a short post from me to wish you all a happy New Year! Over here in Egypt it's already been 2007 for a full hour while most of you are still living in 2006.
To be honest 2007 could have started better, but hey, there's still 364 more days to come :-)
No, basically, Stino, you'll be happy to hear that we're not celebrating New Year here either. Not all of us in any case. Some unlucky ones, like me, have to do a kind of practical test tomorrow that starts in the morning and lasts 12 hours and needs lots of preparation, so that's what I've been doing today. So no days off for NY here. We had a day off the day before yesterday though, for the moslim feast 'Eid'. We had a BBQ with lamb and went into Alex(andria) to relax and smoke shi-sha afterwards. I hunted all around some shops looking for Egyptian jewellery but didn't find what I'm looking for yet (and I know what I'm looking for ;-) ).
Who knows, maybe this year?

Happy boxing day!

And MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Christmas in Egypt was a strange experience. There is no such thing as Christmas here, so no Christmas decorations, no Christmas music etc. The fact that it is sunny and warm makes it even more surreal to me. 'I'm dreaming of a white Christmas'...
Basically, there was no getting-into-Christmas-mood time, so when it was finally the evening of the 24th, after a long day of work, everybody from a culture used to celebrating Christmas was starting to feel down. Thank goodness we still managed to get a Christmas dinner organised at the nearby hotel! And surprise: the hotel personnel had even made turkey! Ok, not stuffed, but still, I was so happy when I saw that!
After dinner we all started dancing and also the bellydancer was there again. A bellydancer for Christmas, how absurd :-)
I left the party around 22.30 and joined some others on a trip to Alexandria for midnight mass. It was beautiful! The mass was held in the huge (size of a large church) chapel of the only catholic school in Alex. There were Christmas decorations and a nativity scene, and there was a choir that sang all the classical mass christmas songs: adeste fideles, silent night, ... The mass was partly in French and partly in Arabic, but I felt suddenly so at home there I was almost crying. And what luck: I was sitting next to a couple from Arlon that could speak Dutch! We got home around 2.30 to find the party over because everybody had got so drunk they went to bed early =D
Yesterday after a lazy morning we all headed to Alexandria. The original goal was to do some sightseeing, but me and some others ended up having a loooong Christmas dinner in a marble hall of a fancy hotel called 'Windsor Palace'. So you can imagine...

Fata Morgana

After two months in Italy, I arrived in Egypt last Sunday, where I will be living the next three months, together with 11 girls and 17 guys. This also means I just added a new country and continent to the list of places I've been. That gets me up to 4 continents now, I personally don't think that's such a bad score for my age :)

The first two days we lived in a hotel. Here's a picture by night and by day, taken from my room:

Impressive huh? It's just a pity it's a just a little too cold for the pool. I hope I can try it in March. We're making up for missing the pool by sitting outside and smoking 'shisha' at night. They look (and smell!) great and come in all flavours, apple, lemon, mint, rose... you name it. Yesterday evening we moved into villa's in a compound. They're beautiful on the outside and ok inside. Anyway, I have a room with a wooden floor and a big window with a desert view. I didn't take pictures of yet but I'll do that soon. We have a pool table in one of the villas and English TV (hurrah!) and there's a playstation coming soon :-)

The atmosphere here in Egypt is very different from Europe. There's people outside everywhere, shops don't close till midnight and even though there's definitely not as many cars as in Belgium, the cars there are make a lot more noise at night. The desert road between Cairo and Alexandria seems to be quite a busy place place after all. Oh year, and there's a Mac Donald's along it!

On the whole, I'm not really culture-shocked. I'm more just in a bit of a haze about being here and my surreal life living in a white marble villa that looks like it could have belonged to Alladin. I really like it. Ah yeah, and I like the food too by the way. Lots of vegetables and they really know how to make them! I had egg plant and artichok yesterday, and it tasted brilliant. Even though my taste buds loved the food from the start, my stomach had to adjust to the spices a bit in the beginning. You know, it's that situation where you eat a lot because you like it and then spend the next hour surviving the stomach cramps. I learned my lesson and am taking it more easy on the quantities now :-)

Finally for those of you who are wondering if I still look the same, here's a picture I took of myself with a little help from the hotel room mirrow:

You see? No need to worry about me!

Who cares about my weight?!

And here IS the next post :-)
I've done a lot of nice things the past two weeks. But didn't have time to tell you all about them yet, as I had an online exam for my job this morning, and was studying for that in every little slot of time I had the past days. The exam is passed now, in every meaning of the word, and I have time to tell you one of the funniest things that happened since I came here.
A couple of days ago, my two flatmates and I were walking up to our building after work. There was a lorry in front of our door with some men standing around it, looking slightly worried. One of them came up to us and asked us if we could help them for a minute. We said 'yeah sure', and to our surprise they asked us to get into the back of the truck. They had apparently just deflated their tires quite a bit, and an instinctive glance upwards told us what had happened.
Our building has a ground floor, and a first floor that juts out over the parking lot, so basically there's a kind of roof there. The truck must have driven under the roof fully loaded, then unloaded by the building and got stuck under the ceiling. What these men were looking for was weight! Slightly embarrased but agreeing that it would be a pretty creative way of kidnapping, the three of us got into the truck where the other men were already waiting. Sure enough, as I climbed in I could feel it sink down under my weight. To get over the shock of this result of the first time I 'weighed' myself since I arrived in Italy (where the food is good and there's plenty of it), I went and comforted myself in a three course gorgeous meal with a lot of cheese and meat and red wine...