This weekend Seth and I did our Open Water Dives for our SCUBA class. We did them in the Mediterranean Sea at the Montazah Palace. Montazah was the summer residents of the Egyptian Kings when Cairo got too hot, it is still used today by the president. We’ve been here several times with friends who own private beach houses here and there are huge lovely gardens to walk about. It was pretty exciting to be scuba diving in the Mediterranean with the Kings Palace in the background.
We spent two days in the water working on our open water skills. The first dive did not go well for me (Kristal), but I kept at it and the rest of the weekend went great! From our starting class of nine we were already down to four by the time we got to the water skills. After our first open water day, Seth and I were the only ones that returned for the second day. Hopefully, the other two will try to complete the class next weekend. In addition to the skills we had to perform, Seth did five open water dives and I did four. Unfortunately, the visibility was horrible; but we have officially passed our class! We are now certified Scuba Divers! We’re so excited and can’t wait to go dive in the Red Sea or do an archeological dive here in Alex.
After three long weeks, the school is opened again! It's so good to see our students smiling faces again and hear their laughter during lunch.
They actually apprciate us now after having to learn on thier own on-line and have their parents constantly on their backs to get thier work done. Also the parents reeaally apprciate us. We were constantly getting phone calls from parents telling us how hard it was to try to teach their kids math that they didn't understand, trying to modivate their kids to do thier work, and also just plain begging us to open up the school because after weeks with their children they were really get on their nerves. Hopefully they can remember that they appreciate us for atleast a little while.
Seth and I are taking scuba diving classes. We've wanted to do this for awhile and I had contact with a Dive Center here in Alexandria though my After School Activities Coordination, so I set up some classes for us. We initially started with nine teachers interested in getting certified, but in just a few days we are down to only four of us. Since last week was our last week without students, we hurried up and got through all the classroom knowledge. Then, on Friday we spent several hours in our pool doing our confined water dives. It was a lot of fun and we are loving it. We'll do our open water dives this weekend in the Mediterranean and then we'll be done and certified.
The Under Twenty Year Old's World Cup Soccer Tournament is being held in Egypt this year. They are having games all over Egypt, even here in Alexandria. It has been quite exciting and quite the talk of the town. The USA team has been playing in Port Saiad, so that’s too far away for us to travel on a school night. But if they make it to the next round the games will be moved to Cairo, or even Alex. However, a friend of ours worked some contacts and got us invitations to come watch two of the games here. We saw Hungry beat South Africa 4-0. Then United Arab Emirates beat Honduras in a very exciting game 1-0. The UAE game was a very exciting game to watch since everyone was rooting for the Arab team and there were a lot of Emirate people there in the crowd. It was crazy. One entire section of the stadium was packed with the Egyptian army. It was a new experience for me to walk in with my three American girl friends and realize and ENTIRE section of a large stadium is no longer watching and cheering for a soccer match, but looking and yelling at YOU!
We had five days off for Eid El-Fitr, the big feast celebration after Ramadan. We found a beach house for rent on Cairo’s Craigslist. It was in Ain Sukhna, which is about an hour east of Cairo on the Red Sea. The villa was in a private resident’s beach resort. It was three levels with five bed rooms, two kitchenettes and two sitting areas with balconies. We went with four other couples from school so there was a total of eleven of us with baby Malcolm. The resort had two nice pools, a clubhouse with a restaurant and a small pizza place on the beach. Besides that there was nothing else to do and the resort it’s self was far away from anything so we never left.
The trip was very relaxing, which we needed because teaching without students for the past two weeks has been soooo hard! The hardest thing to do every day was decide if we wanted to read by the pool or read by the beach.
Lianne and I did go running on the beach in the morning. They were great relaxing runs with beautiful scenery to admire. We were on some stretches of beach that was completely uninhabited and barely ever touched by humans. On morning I found this HUGE clam shell!
We found pool rule number 6 interesting.
On the way home, we passed these boys in the back of their truck with their sheep. We drove next to them for a long time because we were having fun playing with them. They got a kick of us waving to them and taking their pictures, and we got a kick of them playing with their toy guns.
We found out that our school is going to remain closed until October 4th now. The government has requested that all schools remain closed until this time. We are continuing to provide on-line classes to our students.
I’m a Hasher! My friend, Lianne and I have joined the Hash House Harriers (HHH). It is an expat club in over 180 countries all over the world. They are world renowned for being “a drinking club with a running problem”. The original club started in Malaysia in 1938 and they have grown and spread since then.
The one in Alex has just started and there are less than ten members currently. We meet at the Portuguese Club (the local expat club) every Friday afternoon and then take a van out to the trail. The Hare lays a trail the day before with balled up scraps of paper. Here in Alex the trail is sometimes here in town and sometimes out in the farm lands. The Hare will often leave false trails, short cuts, dead ends, and splits. These features are designed to keep the “pack” together regardless of fitness level or running speed, as the Hounds in the front are forced to slow down to find the trail, allowing for the others to catch up. There are also check points where everyone has to stop and re-group (and sometimes chug a beer). Like I said earlier, it’s a non-competitive social running group that has a long tradition of drinking…drinking before, during and definitely after a run.
The Hash House Harriers have many long standing traditions and every club usually has a few of their own. Failures to follow traditions or rules are punishable by down-downs during the circle at the end of the run and since there are so many silly rules and traditions to remember it is almost certain that you will be given a down-down by the Grand Master. Down-down means chugging a warm beer until the group finishes singing a song. The more heinous the offence, the longer the song will be.
One of the most famous Hash traditions is Hash names. Everyone gets a name, which are usually pretty vulgar and obscene. Failure to use someone’s Hash name will result in a down-down during circle. I haven’t received my Hash name yet, you usually have to attend several Hash Races before you are awarded a name.
I’ll write more about my first Hash Race in another blog. If you want to check out the Alexandria Hash website (still a work in progress), click on the hyperlink.
We had such a nice time with our visiting author Tom Palmer. We got to spend a lot of time with him and really enjoyed talking with him and getting to know him. This is a picture or Tom Palmer autographing some books for us and our niece Makayla.
We have closed school until Sept. 26th! The staff still has to work and we are actually working more now trying to create on-line classes to keep contact teaching hours with our students.
The timing of all this is really such a shame since we have the author Tom Palmer visiting us this week and all the time, effort, and budget we put into bringing him here. When we realized that they were going to close the school yesterday we tried to have Mr. Palmer do as much with as many of the grade levels as possible.
The whole school is very excited for this week and has been looking forward to it for a long time.We have a very special visitor coming, author Tom Palmer.
Last year, one of our 7th graders, Omar, won a book from the library when we did the 180 Days Around the World challenge.The book was Foul Play by Tom Palmer.Omar loved this book so much that he saw the authors website listed on the back of the book.He wrote Tom Palmer and e-mail telling him how much he loved the book and asked him if he was going to have any other books coming out soon.To Omar’s great joy, Tom Palmer wrote him back and they corresponded a few times which then evolved into his English teacher and Jane and I in the library corresponding with him too.We are all very proud of Omar for initiating this contact.
We invited Tom Palmer to come visit the school and we have been planning several months now for this exciting visit.
Tom Palmer is from the UK and writes children’s books about soccer (football).He describes himself and a student that was never very good, especially at writing and hated to read; then when he was seventeen he came across a book about soccer that he enjoyed so much that it spurred his new love for reading.He decided then that he wanted to be a writer and write about soccer.
He has two series about soccer; one called Football Academy (reading level grades 3-6) and another called Football Detective (reading level grade 5-8).His latest book, Dead Ball, part of the Football Detective series just came out last week!
I have been reading all of his books in preparation for his visit and have been loving them.I can’t wait to meet Mr. Palmer face to face.
To find out more about Tom Palmer and his books please visit his website at www.tompalmer.co.ukOur students were so excited last week when they saw that Tom Palmer had posted on his schedule about his upcoming visit on his website and on his blog.(click on the hyperlinks to see)
Yesterday we officially became the only school open in Alexandria. The government schools don't have classes during Ramadan and most of the other International schools have shut down due to H1N1 flu. Yesterday the British school had a case of the flu and closed classes, leaving us as the only school open in all of Alexandria.
Today we officially have our first case of H1N1 flu. We are still open and continuing classes but monitoring the situation closely and taking lots of health/safety per-cations for our students and staff.
Does anyone else see the irony that the American school is the only school working on Labor Day?
Whew, time gets away from me when we are staying busy and I don’t realize how much time has gone by between posts.
Since we’ve been home, we’ve enjoyed time catching up with our friends and how their summer vacations went, meeting the new staff and making friends, visiting some of our favorite spots around town, and then of course the obligatory back to school in-services and meetings.
Ramadan started Saturday August 22nd. (You can go back to last year’s posting that explained Ramadan) The night before Egypt went on Daylight Savings Time early to accommodate for people fasting. So we are currently only seven hours ahead of you now.
School started on August 25th. It was a rough first day back for us, early that morning we received the news that Seth’s Grandma has passed away. We were both heartbroken but were grateful for the time we got to spend with her this summer. This past week we’ve realized the worst part about living overseas and being so far from the family we love and long to be near, especially during sad times. Our Schutz family has been very supportive though.
I held try-outs for Girls’ Varsity Volleyball this week. We will be traveling to Doha in October for our tournament. There was a lot of drama with the girls during try-outs but I think it all has been resolved and I believe we’ll have a good team and a fun season.
Well it was a wonderful summer being back home in the states. We got to enjoy lots of time with almost all of our family and a few friends. We filled up our bellies with lots of good American food and our suitcases with lots of new clothes and Crystal Lite. But now it’s time to head back to our other home in Egypt and get ready for another school year.
We left Kansas City on August 13th at 11:00 am and headed to Washington D.C. We followed Kristal’s dad who had left at 7:00 that same morning to catch his connecting flight in Washington D.C. for his business trip to China. He’ll be there for three weeks. The following day Kristal’s mom flew to New York to help her brother move from Texas to Horse Heads, NY. I know what you all are thinking, us Brady’s are hard to keep track of and we never stay in one state long much less on the same continent together.
From Washington D.C. we flew to Frankfurt, Germany and then to Cairo, Egypt and met the school van to drive us to Alexandria. It took a total of 32 hours from door step to door step.
Poor Sokkwi was in his cat carrier for that whole time. But once again he surprised me with how good of a traveler he is for a cat. I think it’s pretty awesome when we can be seven hours into a nine hour flight until the people around us ask, “Is there a cat under there?” and even, when he does meow he usually is happy and quite if we slip our hand into his carrier and pet him for awhile. We’ve been truly blessed on all our travels so far and always manage to sit next to people who like cats and are always interested in Sokkwi. The flight attendants are always happy to give us an extra cup of water for him and we’ll give him a couple handfuls of food to munch on in his carrier throughout his trip. On our layovers, I will find a family restroom that is a single room so that I lock the door and let him and out stretch for awhile. We’ve worked out a great system with a Ziploc bag of kitty litter and small Rubber Maid container that he can use the litter box.
We meet our good friends Joseph and Lianne in Frankfurt and were very excited to see them and catch up. The more we talked with them the more excited we were to get home and see the rest of our “Schutz Family” and meet the new staff for the year.
Somehow we lucked out and got bumped to First Class for our flight from Germany to Egypt. Neither of us had ever flown first class before and I don’t know if we can ever go back to economy again. It was such a luxury to be able to stretch out and be totally comfortable and pampered during such a long trip. But of course, it had to be the worst that Sokkwi had ever been while traveling and wouldn’t stop meowing unless I had him in my lap and begged him to be quite because I didn’t want to get kicked out of first class. I think the problem was that they were serving fish and he really wanted some.
I thought I might take some time to get reaccelerated to the driving and noise in Egypt, but surprisingly it felt like we hadn’t been gone long at all and we both truly got that warm fuzzy feeling of “coming home.”
We had chosen to move into a new apartment this year. It’s bigger with two bedrooms and a much nicer kitchen. We spent the first two days unpacking while Sokkwi ran from one end to the next non-stop to stretch his legs. I’ll post pictures of our new apartment soon.
