First Week Back

I finally made it to Egypt for real on Monday night. It did, however, take some time due to delays. Every flight was delayed and I had just moments before my last connection when we landed in JFK. Luckily the gate from where we were dropped off to the gate that we were leaving from wasn’t too far away. We left on time but we sat on the runway for an hour. My previous flight was delayed because JFK was having really strong winds enough to close down one of the runways. So by us lifting off an hour late, it put us behind 2 hours in Cairo for some odd reason even though we had some tail wind.

But oh well. Life goes on. And I’m keeping myself busy since the very first morning. There was a cooking class at 9:30 that was really good. It was on puff pastries, croissants, and Danishes. She made it seem so easy to make and I didn’t realize how much butter you have to use. She says you end up using as much butter as there is all the other ingredients combined; so basically half is butter and half is everything else. All of the girls there were amazed that I had just gotten in the night before and wasn’t tired. I think I wasn’t tired because I didn’t have a long layover like the 15 hour one we had in Amsterdam last time and I also slept on every flight for most of the flight.

On Wednesday Josh and I spent the day doing a lot of errands. Like getting our membership at the club, buying groceries, pots, pans, some dishes, and other miscellaneous household items. All we had in the fridge was a couple boxes of juice, feta cheese, and water. For the dry goods we had rice and I think that was about it. We had about 6 plates, 3 bowls, 4 cups, 1 casserole dish, and 1 wicked tiny pot…too tiny to cook rice or noodles in. So there wasn’t much we could do for meals until we got a bigger pot. I was able to make tin foil dinners the second night but without the tin foil. In stead we put in the casserole dish. It was pretty good. And with the left over ground beef, we made hamburgers with cheese, ketchup, tomatoes, and flat bread. It was pretty good. And last night we made beef and cheese quesadillas. They were good too. We used the leftover tin foil dinner in them for lunch today.

Thursday was the wives first Arabic class. It was more like review to me from the last time I was here. Oh and there are 6 wives here and only 1 lives a 5 minute walking distance from us. All the others live on the other side of town. We only get together when all the wives are doing something. Anyways, to get back on track, we will have those Arabic classes 3 times a week for an hour.

Unlike the States and basically everywhere else, Fridays are the Sabbath instead of Sunday. So we went to church in the morning. Saw a lot of old faces as well as new. And since I was an old face to some, I was lucky enough to say the closing prayer in Sacrament meeting. They are giving students callings for the time being as well to help get word out about activities to those in the group and to replace those who are leaving either for good or for the summer. Usually in the summer, church is for 2 hours instead of 3 because they don’t have enough people to fill all the callings every week. I don’t know if they will do that this summer since there are 50+ people here besides the normal. The Primary President, who is an old friend, said she is on the prowl and to watch my back. So I’ll probably be keeping my tradition of being in the Primary.

On Saturday we got up wicked early to meet the bus to take us to Alexandria. Since we’ve been there before, we didn’t take a lot of pictures. I think we took more pictures on the way there than when we were actually in Alex.

We started out going to King Farouk’s palaces and garden. It was a really nice calm feeling place. From what we saw, they took good care of the place. We weren’t able to go inside the palace.

The Mediterranean Sea behind us at King Farouk’s Palace.

Our next stop was the old lighthouse fortress. It hadn’t changed at all since we were there a year ago. So we didn’t take any pictures. Plus it was really hot and with all the white-ish walls, we couldn’t really open our eyes. After that, we went to see some old Roman ruins. I couldn’t find a good enough rock to bring back for my collection with the short amount of time we had there.

This is the last of the pictures from the trip.

We went to a huge library for our last stop. It was very updated and VERY clean. I wasn’t afraid to touch stuff because of dirtiness. It was amazing. They had a couple of small museums for manuscripts, Egyptology, and their late President Sadat who was assassinated in 1989 during a country parade. They had the suit he wore that day with all the bloodstains on it still as well as other personal belongings. And that concludes my first week here in Egypt.