Mud falls from the sky and is called rain
I kid you not. Cairo is a dry, dusty city whose average rainfall is only about 25mm per year (that’s just under 1 inch, in case you’re wondering). So when rain does fall, it is a big event. People run outside. People forget how to drive. It gets insane. And when it rained here, a few days ago, Jack and I were out for a walk. When we got back, and I removed my jacket, it was COVERED in muddy splotches!!! It looked like I’d been splashed by a bus in a really bad puddle. In the morning, the cars were DIRTIER than they had been before the rain. Too strange.
Eggs are room temperature
Yes, it is true. The eggs in the groceries are kept on the shelves. This wouldn’t seem like a big deal, except if one is trying to whip the whites. Room temp whites do not whip the way that nicely chilled whites whip. This is very important when making a raw egg nog for a holiday tree lighting party. We had to toss a bunch of egg white glop that wouldn’t cooperate to become nog. What a shame.
Cookies = Christmas
Each Christmas since I-don’t-know-when I’ve baked a huge number of cookies for the holiday season. They usually go for gifts to those indispensible people in Jack’s and my lives, like the lady in the mail room, the guys in the parking garage, the secretary without whom life would stop, the nice lady who cleans the house. The rest are saved for the Solstice party. In Cairo, this has been just about the ONLY thing to remind me that the holiday season is approaching. The cookies have been changed, as I can’t get all the same ingredients here. I’ve been improvising and playing. It is fun, and it’s beginning to feel (and, according to Jack, SMELL) like Christmas – even if it doesn’t look like it.