Friday, March 15, 2024

Dune Bashing

 







Videos of Peter and Sam sand boarding!  (Really, more like sand sledding)









The Whale Graveyard

This weekend we took a family trip outside of Cairo to Feyoum, about a two hour drive southwest of the city. Feyoum is a quiet desert oasis, set around a lake surrounded by rock cliffs. Besides the many pottery shops in the quaint village, the main attraction in Feyoum is Wadi Hitan, a paleontological site that boasts the largest collection of prehistoric whale bones in the world. About 40 million years ago, this part of the Sahara was covered by the Tethys inland sea and home to bassilisaurus and durodons, enormous, fanged-toothed, carnivorous whales that were more like sea serpents than whales. 

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Magic

A was recently talking to a work colleague about the different places we'd lived around the world while watching our kids compete in a swim meet. 

There's, admittedly, little magical about swim meets. I should know. I spent the better part of my youth swimming. Mostly practice but a lot of meets, too. And I can attest swim meets are much longer and much more boring than they appear to be every four years in the Olympics. There's the smell of chlorine, the beep of the timer, and lots of screaming kids. I never actively pushed my kids to follow in my footsteps. Yet, here we are. 

Don't get me wrong. I love the fact that they're swimming. I can't think of an activity that is better at washing the mind after a long day at school in front of a screen. (Except, maybe, fishing.) Swimming tires and mellows them out as it gives them focus and drive. 

While my colleague (who is also a former swimmer) and I were watching our kids swim, he told me about his time in Moscow. He lived on a housing compound with other American families assigned to work in Moscow. One winter day, after a huge blizzard, the a group of young boys built an enormous, elaborate snow fort for the little kids that lived on the compound. They even built a two-story snow slide. He said the memory was 'magical' and that he hadn't experienced any magical moments yet in Cairo. 

I don't know if it is Cairo so much as, maybe, where we are in our lives. It seems as the kids get older there is less day-to-day magic. With babies and toddlers magic is easy to come by. They gurgle and coo and even when they spit up pured avocado there is something magical about it. There is something less magical about the middle and high school routine, getting up early to make lunches, math and French homework, parent-teacher conferences, and swim practices. We run from appointment to appointment, meeting to meeting, class to class, churning through the weeks, Sunday to Thursday, making dinner, doing dishes, folding laundry, studying for tests. It is easy to forget what we are working for or working towards.

Yet, it made me feel sad. This family may be struggling with life in Cairo, and by no means is it easy. Our transition was rough, too, but I think it had more to do with leaving Sri Lanka than it did with Egypt. We could have moved to Disneyland and the transition would have still been difficult.  

But things are looking up. We're finding our groove. Slowly but surely. Magic doesn’t come easily but it is still there. If not a little harder to come by. You just have to know where to look. I have to remind myself the point of work is not work but to allow for these moments. 

Peter and Clementine traveled to Athens for their swim meet, and Sam is in Brussels now for the championship meet where he won a silver medal in the 100 IM and bronze on the 4 x 50 medley relay. And Elise ran her 30k first trail race this morning and smoked it. It's not baby drool, lego on the floor, or swingsets, but it is pretty magical all the same. 


Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Stuff

The wind blows in from the Sahara, across the Nile Valley, bringing, surprisingly, rain and cold. When it doesn’t, a heavy fog sits on the city most mornings, suffocating it, clogging the streets, obscuring buildings. The Egyptians call it fog. Others would call it air pollution. The smoke comes from the palm plantations outside of town, I am told. I've also heard Cairiens burn pretty much anything they can get their hands on to keep warm this time of year. It is cold. Much colder than I thought it would be. 

Everyone wears a scarf and a black puffer jacket. I have one, too, from Cotopaxi, and sometimes get mistaken as a member of the puffer jacket brigade. Truth be told, we could all pass as Egyptians.  Especially Sam, and passers-by often holler at us in Arabic on the street. 

Egyptians wrap the scarf around their heads and faces. Especially when on a windshield-less motorbike or waiting on the side of the road for a passenger van to pick them up, utilizing hand signals to communicate their destinations in a complex dialogue between potential passenger and driver: fingers in a 'V' to signal the Pyramids or Giza, three fingers for the third bridge over the Nile. I cant pretend to know them all and feel lucky I have a mode of transportation that doesn't require me to rely on sign language or hand signals.

I'm becoming increasingly convinced we will all emerge from the time with some kind of low-level, simmering PTSD. We respond to breaking reports differently here than we might have in the States or even Sri Lanka. The first thing Elise asked me when she came downstairs the other morning was, "Did you read the news?" Always an ominous way to start the day. A drone attack in Jordan killed three U.S. servicemen. Most people don't have to worry how that might affect their day or alter their morning commute. It will be nice to once again be able to relegate such headlines to background noise. To not always have to wonder if today's headline will be the one that finally breaks the camel's back and force us to move just as we were getting settled.

It took us longer to get settled here than it has after previous moves. We left a lot in Sri Lanka, but not having our stuff for six months didn't help much either. Our shipments from Sri Lanka (including the air shipment in previous moves arrived two weeks after we landed) didn't arrive until right before Christmas.  We unpacked and set up the Christmas tree at the same time. At the end of the day, we dont really need any of these material possessions. My employer makes sure we have pots and pans, dishes and silverware, sheets and towels. But none of it is ours. What I learned this move is that even if you don't need that stuff, it's almost impossible to call a new place home without it. There is a feeling of belonging that comes being surrounded by your stuff, objects that are familiar, that serve specific purposes, or specifically do not serve any purpose whatsoever except that they belong to you. 

I don’t know what it was for me that helped me feel settled.  I don't know if I could identify one item. I move with my guitar (used to be my dad's) even though I don't have time to play anymore. It sits on the floor in my closet but at least I know where it is now and know it is not sitting in a shipping container somewhere being targeted by Houthis. I move with a record player and half my collection of vinyl which has now become Sam and I's collection of vinyl. It's heavy. Everything we own has an opportunity cost in weight since we only get to move so many pounds of worldly goods around the world. The vinyl seems a good use of that weight. The 300 lb. rusting treadmill may be less of a good use of weight. Elise and I may both be disappointed it made the journey to Egypt. 

Having our stuff has made a big difference. We are starting to settle in. We are starting to think of Cairo as home. I hope we are able to stay. 

Sunday, January 14, 2024

Sweet Fourteen


An make-up birthday cake because Peter's birthday fell during our trip to Vienna. We bought the cake at a local bakery. It looked soooo good in the window, but tasted terrible. Sorry, Peter. 

Saturday, January 6, 2024

Ice Skating and Curling (and Glühwein)

Over the next several days, we experienced a perfect balance of culture, good food, fun, and the great outdoors. We had a traditional Austrian dinner of weiner schnitzel and apple strudel, accompanied by violen and an accordian. 

We explored churches -- including St. Charles Cathedral -- and museums, taking in Gustav Klimt's Beethovenfrieze at the Secession and modern art at the Albertina museum. We went in search of traditional Sri Lanka food one night, and the kids dug in to plates piled high with string hoppers. We explored the wooded hills just outside Vienna and, in search of the last Christmas market, the Schonbrun gardens. Unfortunately, the market was closed due to high winds, but we ducked into a small cafe for a ridiculously decadent dessert of pancakes fried in brown sugar and topped with cranberries. 

Last but not least, another round of ice skating and curling capped our last two days. Swimmers on skates is very much like watching fish out of water. 


New Years in Vienna

We greeted the new year in Vienna, visiting friends from Sri Lanka. The day after we arrived was Peter's birthday. The "kids" tackled the city in search of their own adventures, ice skating under a giant oak wrapped in twinkling white lights and haunting record stores in search of vinyl, while the adults hit the Christmas market and enjoyed steaming mugs of glühwein beneath the gaze of the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa in the square between the museum of natural history and the museum of art. Peter's patience was rewarded with a birthday dinner of his favorite dish, ramen. He agreed to take a rain check on the birthday cake. 

Downtown Vienna shut down on New Year's Eve and opened its cobblestone streets and hidden alleyways to the city's revelers. There was -- of course -- more glühwein, as well as another Viennese first, roasted chestnuts, and bratwurst slathered in melty cheeze and fried onions. 

We returned to our friend's home in time for the Seahawks game and to ring in 2024 with fireworks from the (very cold and windy) rooftop. Sam -- with friends new and old -- huddled under blankets with his brother and sister and watched the skyline erupt with color and light.  Fireworks sparkled above the rooftops for as far as the eye could see. If the year is anything like the first 15 minutes, it's going to be a good year.