A word a week: Worker

Tags

Bazar, Cairo, Cheaper than Walmart, Merchant, Pictures of Cairo, Silver jewellery, Worker

This picture comes in response to the word challenge on the blog below. I really like the idea of a random word and then pictures that tell its story in so many different ways:

http://suellewellyn2011.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/a-word-a-week-challenge-worker/<
This picture tells the story of a Cairo family of merchants (sorry, can't resist using the word 'merchant', how often does one get to these days?)
The father is having tea and fishing for potential customers. From the comfort of his plastic chair, he eyes non-local looking pedestrians and gets the charming process started.
He approached me by saying I look exactly like his daughter and could I please go in and have a look at her picture, isn't it just extraordinary?
He then entrusted me to his son, a far less adept charmer but a figure of silent determination, who took me inside the "Cheaper than Walmart" Lovely Bazar, despite my polite confession that I was actually looking for a shawerma and could I please go and get it.
Unsurprisingly, there was no picture of the daughter inside. There was a picture of the Pyramids, some t-shirts that said 'I heart Cairo' and some unexpectedly lovely pieces of silver jewellery. Lovely and very possibly cheaper than Walmart, though I’m hardly in a position to comment as the last time I was in one is either never or one blurred afternoon last century.
We parted friends, despite my insufficient potential as a customer and hence 10 minutes of valuable merchant time wasted on me.
I suspect I was forgiven because I look so like the daughter:)

Money may not grow on trees but bread sometimes does

Tags

Bread, Excess food, food, Hungry traveller, Life in the Middle East, Living with no money, Sharing

Due to a planning error, I have a lot of bread this morning.

This doesn’t happen often.

Bread is a catch 22: if I eat it I feel guilty, if I don’t I feel guilty.

I can’t throw away bread. I reach for the bin and my hand freezes. I find it hard enough to throw any sort of food (and very rarely do) but bread is the ultimate no no.

So over the years I have developed various bread disposing strategies that assuage my conscience while also allowing me to exist in a space that is not entirely covered in bread.

I leave it out for hypothetical birds to eat. I take it to work and “forget” it in the kitchen.  

I dig it a dignified grave in the freezer under the solemn pretence that one day I will make crumbs. 

What complicates the matter further is that I really enjoy going to the baker’s.

He’s a young man perpetually glued to his phone, who smiles widely when I walk in and never fails to shout excitedly (at my beaming face as well as the puzzled ear at the other end of the line): “How are you? I’m better better now that I see you!” 

He then proceeds to give me a quick approximation of the price of my steaming cargo and I walk away thinking “this time I have just the perfect amount!”

The good news is that, even if I don’t, at the long last I have found the way. 

I learned that excess food here is placed in bags and left somewhere at eye-level in the street – a tree, a wall, a fence. The hungry traveller stops and helps himself to the contents of the bag. Nice and easy. 

I know an Australian guy who has spent years in the Middle East without any discernible source of income. Hugely impressed, I once asked him how he deals with the food issue.

“Are you blind?” he replied. “There’s food on every corner!”

As indeed there is.   

What time is it? It’s picnic time!

Tags

Day trips, Family, Life in the Middle East, Picnic, Spring, travel, Weekend

Few things are more important In the Middle East than a picnic.

The picnic is the alpha and omega of social life. The number one entertainment option. The stuff of week-day dreams and Sunday memories.

People talk about a successful picnic in the same way you and I would describe a holiday to Tenerife.

A lot of care goes into packing the right supplies and identifying the correct spot. 

Transport is never straightforward. It involves long lines of cars crawling up the motorway like giant snails, crushed under the combined load of 4 adults and 7 children, three of whom stick out their upper bodies through the windows to keep the load piled on the roof from dispersing. 

In somebody’s garden, on a roof top, by the side of the road, in the centre of a junction, anywhere where a square meter can be found it will be covered in pots, pans and plastic chairs while a family establishes ownership for one delightful day. 

Groups of joyous picnickers descend upon the beach and set up camp.

The boys run around and kick balls, the girls comb each other’s long hair and the mothers carefully dispense tea and coffee for everybody. Particularly well organised picnickers will have music blasting out of the parked car, to the envy of the less musical crowds. 

The men grill meat and onions with an air of sacred duty. They inspect the results of their labour with care, shout assurances of success and then grin triumphantly at men with inferior grills.

The air fills with mouth-watering smells. The non picnicker advances through grill land at their peril. 

It’s that time of year. Grill or be grilled. 

Liebster stuff

Tags

Liebster, me

Dear readers, it seems that I have received an award.

This is a most unusual and flattering circumstance for which our lovely Pricess Orchid http://princessorchid.wordpress.com/ is responsible:) Thanks, Princess.

So here’s what I have to do: thank the blogger who nominated you (checked), answer 11 questions, write 11 things about myself, then pass on the love.

So http://expateyeonlatvia.wordpress.com/and http://theforgetfulgenius.wordpress.com/, how do you fancy some liebstering?

Here goes my confession:

1. What is the quality that you feel most proud of?
Clarity. Or…Hold on. Now I feel a bit muddled:)

2. If you could choose one superpower, what would it be?
To turn dull people into Oscar Wilde for the time we are stuck together

3. If the story of “Indecent Proposal” ever happens to you, what would you do?
As which one of the triangle:)?

4. What is your most embarrassing moment?
Must have been too embarrassed to remember.

5. Is there anything you can’t do anymore but you wish you could? What is it?Clubbing until the small hours. And finding it pleasant:)

6. What is the title of the last book you read?
Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih

7. What is the first adjective you would think of when anyone asks you about China?
Infinite:)

8. What is your favorite sport?
Football

9. What do you want to ask if you ever meet a great fortuneteller?
Will I believe you?

10. What is your biggest superstition?
Don’t wear your underwear inside out or the weather will change

11. What do you do when you have some “ME time”?
Read a book, read another book, have another cup of coffee.

 

 11 things about myself:

1. I always drink red wine in the winter and white wine in the summer

2. I love anything that involves high percentages of cheese, butter, pickles and/or mustard

3. A good walk is one that takes me to a nice coffee shop that has newspapers, on a crisp spring morning

4. Have never seen a James Bond film

5. I am obsessed with balconies

6. I am afraid of lifts and closed spaces (unless they are planes, which I bizarrely don’t have a problem with)

7. I can’t sing, draw or perform any remotely artistic task

8. Cheesy films put me in a rage

9. I love animals

10. In a parallel universe, I always punch condescending people in the nose

11. I want to know why other women’s make-up always looks so perfect

 

How about you, my liebster-ised readers?

 

Morning alert: an insufferable breech of etiquette is being committed behind your back

Tags

Co-workers, office etiquette, Office Space, Rant, stuff that gets on my nerves, Work

Most of us spend most of our waking hours in a shared space, that has computers, blinds, a fridge if we are lucky and a number of people engaging at any one time with one or all of the above.

And then in this seemingly quiet environment, just like in one of those set up rooms where Big Brother films the sprawled limbs of contestants sitting around getting bored, in walks the Drama.

Or not quite.

In walks the chatty guy on his way to  the fridge. Or the blinds. One thing about those office blinds is that they cause a small but steady number of people to develop a permanent obsession, which manifest itself in their continuous pulling up and down, accompanied by grunts of dissatisfaction.   

And anyway, as chatty Co-worker walks by your computer aiming to correct the angle of the blinds, he slows down to look at your screen and then stops for a better read.   

“Oh, so your mum is coming to visit!” he observes to your startled back. “When is she coming? That’s lovely. I hope my mum can come over at some point.” 

You mumble a shared hope that his mum can indeed visit, suggest the month of May perhaps and then subtly return to your computer.

This time you open a big fat work email. This will shut him up, you cunningly smile to yourself.

It is an email he himself has received, it can be read in the comfort of his own chair so there would be absolutely no point in hovering. 

But the thing is, there is.  

 “Oh, do we really have to do that? Noooo!” he thunders. “When is the deadline? Scroll down, will you, I can’t see that anywhere. Do they actually know how busy we are????”

Yes, we are extremely busy. So little time, so many opportunities to stick our nose in other people’s business. It’s just not fair.  

How do you, smart people in offices everywhere, keep that little square in front of your eyes to yourself?