Spring in Cairo

I have no idea what most of these flowers are, but I have been enjoying them blooming the past few weeks.  They make grey and dusty Cairo seem much more friendly.  These flowers are inside and just outside of our building:

These are trees blooming around Maadi.  The first tree smells really nice— a good antidote to traffic exhaust fumes!

A close-up of the tree above.  The flowers are bigger than my hands!

These last two are poinsettia bushes(!) and bougainvillea growing up into a tree.

Learning Arabic II

My Arabic lessons have continued steadily since they began in September.  I am making some progress, but it is slow.  I was proudest of one of my recent homework assignments, which was to write out the story of Little Red Riding Hood.  This was excellent writing, vocabulary, and grammar practice, and a whole lot of fun.

The assignment I had to turn in today was a set of sentences using the complicated numbering system in Arabic: number one has a masculine and a feminine form, number two gets shortened, changed to masculine or feminine, and attached to the end of the noun it modifies, numbers three through ten have shortened forms that follow a plural noun, and numbers 11-100 use their long forms after a singular noun. 

As I exited the staircase on my way to class I encountered my good friends and informal Arabic teachers— Ibrahim the janitor, Hashem the security guard, and Ahmad the maintenance worker.  Ibrahim and Hashem are my most persistent instructors, and it was Ibrahim that came up with a creative way to help me remember the days of the week.  He assigned a day to the men that regularly work here.  He himself is Goma (Friday) and Hashem is Khamis (Thursday).  Ahmad has become Ilsubt (Saturday).  The rest of the days are randomly assigned to whoever is standing around at the time.  Even though I have moved beyond these vocabulary words, Ibrahim finds this a hilarious joke that he repeats nearly every time he sees me. 

So this morning when I ran into these men and they saw me with a notebook they got all excited.  When they found out I was going to an Arabic class, I offered to show them my homework and they seemed thrilled.  Hashem is the most literate of the three and he took charge.  After reading the first sentence he asked me for a pencil.  He and Ahmad carefully went through each sentence, correcting the spelling (the grammar, surprisingly, didn't need correction).  When they reached sentence number six and found no errors I was congratulated enthusiastically.  By the time they finished all the sentences I was late for class, but I had (almost) perfect homework.  It didn't occur to me until later that Ibrahim had quietly disappeared when the homework came out.  In spite of his enthusiastic teaching, I have been suspecting that he is functionally illiterate.  A large portion of Egyptians are, and that contributes to many of their economic and social problems.

Needless to say, I had some explaining to do when I handed in my homework.  Fortunately, my teacher is very laid back and was entertained by the story.  It turns out that Ahmad and Hashem were assuming that I was writing in Modern Standard Arabic so several of their corrections weren't quite right for my assignment in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic.  Nevertheless, I sincerely appreciated the time these men take to encourage me and help me out.  Language lessons are not at all part of their jobs, but they, like many Egyptians I have met, seem to make it their personal mission to help all foreigners learn their language.  As Arabic is as hard for English speakers as Mandarin Chinese, we can certainly use all the help we can get!

Not for the Faint of Heart

Between food poisoning and traveling it had been a couple of weeks since I had done a really thorough house cleaning.  This afternoon I started to rectify the situation.  When we dust, not only do we have to dust the normal things, we also have to dust several of the doorways.  In three of our rooms the air is being continuously sucked out of the house— the two rooms that house our HVAC units, and one of the bathrooms.  The doors to those rooms stay closed most of the time, so dust and dirt collect in the doorway.  This is what it looks like after a couple of weeks:

Fortunately, it wipes away fairly easily:

But I'm left with super gross dust bunnies:

Since the doorways were particularly bad, I decided to check our air filters.   The washable filter came out first and it was almost completely black:

A good vacuuming mostly took care of the problem:

The HEPA filter, however, was in much worse shape.  We are waiting for a new one to come in the mail, so I tried to vacuum out this one to nurse it along.  Here it is with one corner vacuumed:

Even though the cleaning was only somewhat successful, the air in the room is noticeably better now.

Cairo consistently lands on Top 10 lists for air pollution, but it has never been at the top of the list.  I cannot even imagine what this chore would be like in Beijing!