Just the Two of Us: Good Bye Zaharaa’, Hello Maadi!

Some bits of news in the Schilling family never quite made it to the blog. Part of the problem was that the blog was just recently created and therefore some important and slightly interesting things happened just before its creation.

Originally we decided to stay in Egypt until the end of the year. I would study Arabic at AUC and then we would return to the States. As time progressed and we got more comfortable with our new home in Egypt, we decided to extend our stay a bit longer. I was accepted to BYU in October and would start in April. So we figured why not stick around “Sand Land” a bit longer. One thing was for certain: If we do stay we need to move out of Zaharaa’ al Maadi. Maadi is a big town. It’s nothing like Cairo of course, but fairly spread out. The church building, shopping and all our friends all live in downtown Maadi. From Zaharaa’ al Maadi, which is like a suburb of Maadi, you need to take a 5 minute cab ride. That may not sound like a big deal but when you have to pay 20 L.E. roundtrip it can quickly add up. More importantly, Carolee really had nothing to do in Zaharaa’ al Maadi.

There are really no stores, no people the visit, no interesting sites to go see. Zaharaa’ al Maadi is a new town that’s built right up against the desert. On the other side of our apartment building was another apartment building. Past that was desert. Our street in front of our house wasn’t paved. Packs of wild dogs roamed the streets just outside our front door.

Our place was nice. Pink couches and walls are hard to pass up. Certainly the extremely narrow kitchen was hard to leave. But by the second day of looking for an apartment we had found our new home: Rd 87 Building 20 Apartment 47. I know Carolee realized this sooner than I did, but it wasn’t until the next morning did I realize how close our apartment was to everything. We were less than 2 minutes away from the Sharps and Heiss’. I was less than a minute away from my school bus stop. The church and Rd. 9 (the main street where all the stores are) were also less than 5 minutes walk away. No more annoying fights with cabdrivers over prices. We haven’t regretted our choice to move.