Exciting Weekend

This past weekend we had Thursday off of school and enjoyed a three day weekend. Remember that our normal weekends are Friday and Saturday s here. Seth and I had talked about going to Cairo for the weekend but never got around to planning it. Plus our new little kitty is too young to leave alone that long just yet. We planned on doing a lot of stuff around Alexandria that we haven’t done yet, museums and such, but ended up having a semi-lazy weekend.

I’ll tell you about some other people more exciting weekend first and then ours…

Our friends and fellow teachers, Clay and Susanna, did got down to Cairo for a relaxing weekend and to visit a friend that lives there. Susanna is 8 months pregnant and due to have her baby April 2nd. They went to the large popular outdoor market area called the Khan el-Khalili market. They had just bought a small inlayed table and were trying to hail a taxi when a guy rushed a Clay with a knife screaming. He cut Clay on the check and Clays reaction was to push him away with the table and was able to knock him down and pin him down with the table. Susanna and their friend were screaming and so the police and everyone else that was around came running to help them. There was soon a mob of taxi drivers, market owners, shoppers and police on top of the guy and helping Clay and Susanna. The police arrested him and Clay got a couple stitches in his face. They were interviewed by the local TV and soon it was all over the news and newspapers. It was quite the international scandal. We read reports that the guy had just been released from a mental hospital a few months ago after being detained for eight years after trying something similar. He is going to be tried for attempted man slaughter. The humorous part about this story is that in all the reports they say that Clay is in his fifties which really pissed him of since he is only thirty. The other funny part of this story is that our I.T. guy at school told us that our school website got over 800 hits the day after this story hit the news. You’ll also see in the reports (if you didn’t hear already) that earlier this week there was a bomb in the exact same place that killed one and injured several other French tourists. Just think about what a conversation starter that table will be for them, “Oh what a lovely table!”, “Yes, that table saved my life one day!”
Kansas City Star Newspaper Link
Egypt Today Link
Another Story

The other exciting event this weekend, was that several of our students went to AKan concert and the stage fell. Several of our students got hurt with one needing several stitches.

Now I’m sure I have you all very concerned but do try to realize that these are the only incidents that have happened the entire time we’ve been here and it’s a very slim probability that it just happened to happen to people we knew. Before you start to go all crazy and worry about us, watch your local news and think about how many shootings, stabbings, robberies etc. are happening right in your own city and you feel plenty safe there.

Now Seth’s and mine weekend is going to sound very boring in comparison but we are glad we stayed in Alex now. On Thursday we did go out shopping with some friends and had a nice lunch out at T.G.I.Friday’s… mmmmm yummy greasy American food! Then that afternoon Seth and I went to the Alexandria Bibliotheca and took the tour and then just walked around on our own for a bit. You defiantly don’t want to get a cab near a tourist spot if you don't look like a local. The cabbie tried to charge us twice as much as the amount should have been for that distance. We told him we live here and know what the amount should be and got out of his cab. We walked about three blocks away from the Bibliotheca before trying to get a cab again. Here is a link to a page that has better pictures of the library.

That night we went out with a co-worker, Wessam who teaches Arabic, and his wife. They are a young couple and very newly married. Seth has gone out with Wessam several times for guys night to smoke Sheesha and we had briefly met his wife at a couple school functions. They took us to a very nice local cuisine restaurant that was newly opened. This was defiantly not a tourist restaurant and Seth and I felt like we might have been the first non-Egyptians to eat there. There was no English section of the menu so Wessam had to order for us. Hospitality to guest is a huge part of Egyptian culture. They want and will do anything to make sure you are happy, including making sure you have had plenty to eat. Egyptians will constantly offer you way more food then you need or could eat and if you refuse they take it very personally. You should have seen our table and the amount of food Wessam had ordered for us. There wasn’t an inch of bare space on the table and the food was piled so high. Seth and I were already quite full from our large late lunch at T.G.I Fridays so another huge meal was not in our agenda. If we stopped eating for just a second, they would say, “What’s wrong? You’re not eating! You don’t like the food? I’ll order something else you like. Why are you not eating?” and they would put more food on my plate. There was seriously a point of time where I thought to myself, “Ok, Kristal, just keep eating and you can go through-up later.” I was that full and I didn’t want to offend them. And of course they wouldn’t let us pay for our meal either. After dinner we went to an outdoor mall area called Green Plaza and walked around and had an after dinner coffee and the boys enjoyed Sheesha. Which, they of course insisted on paying for also. We had very nice conversations all night and I was asking them about good authentic Egyptian gifts that would be good to bring home to family and friends. We ended up walking around the shops some more and they ended up buying both of us a gift. It is very common in Egyptian culture that if you say you like something, they will get/give it to you. I was warned early on to be careful about complementing my Egyptian friend’s jewelry (etc.) because they would literally take it off and give it to you because you said you liked it and they always want to make people happy. So we had a very lovely evening and enjoyed true Egyptian hospitality.

The other two days of the weekend we had plans to go see areas of Alex that we hadn’t been to yet. However, we had such bad rain storms that we didn’t feel like going out. It was a good time to curl up with the kitten and a good book in bed. Last night there was a big lightning strike which had to be very close, it was the brightest flash and the loudest longest thunder crash I had ever heard. It shook the whole building and even rattled windows and doors open. Our little Sokkwi, who was not before, but now is terribly afraid of thunder storms. The lightning knocked out all of the internet service in Alexandria. It has happened before where the entire city hasn’t gotten internet back up for days. I was starting to worry that our parents would see on CNN about an American teacher getting stabbed and not be able to reach us. But obviously we got the internet back up today.