Ladies Weekend

With Seth gone to Oman this past weekend I was really looking forward to some time alone. Although this experience has been great for the two of us; living in a foreign country, working together, and living where we work has been quite a difference experience than our lives back home. There are some days that I feel like I haven’t been more than 100 yards away from my husband all day long. For the most part it’s nice, but it can get a little tiresome other times. So a weekend alone was sounding great to me.

However, my nice quite weekend to myself didn’t quite work out that way. I ended up being too social. We had Noah’s 5th birthday part on campus Friday afternoon. It was fun, but I helped Jean and Tamer a lot with the set up and kid control. Noah made out like a bandit and got so many presents. Not to mention the coolest guy in Pre-K for getting to have a party at the school play ground on a weekend!

That evening, six of us girls went out to the Greek Club and met up with our new high school secretary, Karen and a few other girls. We had a really fun “girls night” out and enjoyed a really good fish meal. The Greek Club is literally that…a club for Greeks. There is a fairly large population of Greeks in Egypt and they all know each other. We had to pay to get in since we aren’t Greek. Karen is Syrian but engaged to a Greek so she goes there just about every night. It’s kind of like a country club (without the golf); there is a restaurant/bar, lounge, recreation room, etc.

The next day, we did our normal every other week run to Carrefour (Middle Eastern Wal-Mart) and did our normal shopping and had lunch at Costa Coffee. A nice little sandwich and coffee shop that we really like, there are a few around town, we’ll call it (Middle Eastern Panera)

Then that afternoon, four of us girls went to a ladies house for her Jewelry Open-House. Maia, one of our Pre-Kindergarten teachers, whom we absolutely love, has a best friend who makes local Egyptian silver jewelry and Maie invited us to her open-house sale. I always love going to the locals apartments and seeing what they look like. From the outside, ever building here looks really old, run-down, and cheap. But you can never tell how nice it might be until you go inside and then the apartments could be amazing. The Egyptian style is lost of huge crown moldings along the ceiling and walls with lots of gold paint. They also love large furniture pieces, especially dining room sets. They enjoy entertaining and will often have many different seating areas even within one room. So even if an apartment is large, it often feels small or doesn’t have much moving room once they crowd all their large furniture and several different seating areas in. When we arrived at the ladies house, it was quite crowed with women and very little room to move or walk in-between the people and the furniture. But she had tons of jewelry out on display all over the apartment and it was all so amazing you didn’t mind not being able to more quickly because it took awhile to admire all the pieces. I found two silver rings I really liked. One almost matches perfectly with my favorite bracelet that I was wearing that day, therefore, by Women’s Law: You have to buy anything that would go perfectly with what you’re currently wearing. I also got a silver necklace with an Arabic saying that roughly translates into, “May God watch over you.” We ended up spending four hours there. We were surprised when we first arrived to see our friend Maie, who is a covered lady, with her scarf off. I had yet to be able to attend a women’s only function where the women could be unveiled. After we decided on what we wanted to purchase we sat down and had a nice long conversation with Maie and a few of her friends. At one point of time, I notice that someone got a phone call and one word was spoken to the room and all of a sudden ever women were putting their scarves back on. Maie explained that a husband had called and was coming up so they all had to cover again.

So I had a fun but very busy ladies weekend and not much time to myself. I was happy to see Seth when he returned on Sunday and had missed him. He brought me a little wooden jewelry box from Oman with a silver and onyx necklace on it. I really made out well with new jewelry this weekend!