Anyway, what has happened since I last posted? Well, as the title suggests, there has been a marriage amongst us! Our very good friends, Janice and Daniel decided to tie the knot and, after much running around embassies and ministries, finally did it. If I imagine the bureaucratic grief we go through to do the most simple things here in Egypt, my hat goes off to the intrepid twosome in their ultimately successful efforts to get hitched! To celebrate their union, we held a small party in their honour at our house- ten or so guests and a very sweet bellydancer who goes by the exotic and entrancing name of Lorna!
I have to say, she was great. Although she's not Egyptian (she's Scottish actually!), she is very good at what she does and, almost uniquely among belly dancers here, actually looks like she's enjoying herself! I have to say Janice put on a good show of dancing too- especially as she's still on the road to recovery from a major car crash which seemed to have broken or bruised almost every bone in the girl's body!
Anyway, after a bit of a dance and lots of food, we cracked open the champagne and headed up onto the roof- it does get tolerably cool up there after about 9pm! We'll definitely miss that roof terrace when we leave- when it's not blazing hot (through summer) or blowing a gale (through khamseen) it is a profoundly beautiful place with some of the best views of Cairo we could have wished for.
What else? Well apart from numerous visits to Road 9 for shopping and coffee (I was quite impressed to find the new Harry Potter released in Cairo too. Soma said it was too expensive and we could wait until we go back home and buy it from Asda. I saved even more money by logging onto Wikipedia and finding out the whole plotline for free!), we figured we'd better get a bit of last minute tourism done, so headed for the pyramids yesterday. Yes, I know we've been here nearly three years- I have actually seen the things hundreds of times since every Tom Dick and Harry who heads here "on business" seems to want to go see them! However, the boys have only visited once previously and that had to be cut short when Kieran got sick all over the Pyramid of Cheops! So, at 8.30 yesterday morning, we all clambered into the car and headed to Giza. Half an hour later we were there armed with water, small boys and a camera. After a brief interlude with a tout who had mustered up the courage to try sell Soma something(I saved him getting hit at great personal risk but was shocked by the sort of local Arabic vocabulary she has picked up!) we headed round two of the Pyramids then down to the Sphinx. Kieran then pronounced himself hot- to be fair it was 36C at only 10.30am and he had been good- so off we headed to Wadi Digla club to go swimming!! Anyway, below is a pic of Soma and the boys next to Cheops (Chephren is in the background).
One final piece of news. although I'm vegetarian so am not directly affected by this, I can't help feeling a small bit of local pride at the fact that our local burger bar, just down on Road 9, is apparently the best in the world- go take a look for yourselves if you don't believe it!
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1639839,00.html
Anyway, that's all for now- hopefully we'll have more news next week. I'm off to Amsterdam to meet with some colleagues and should be slightly more certain of where we're off to next. At the very least I'll be able to buy myself a decent camera!
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