Battling the Hydra

The transition from Sri Lanka to Egypt has been smoother in some ways than previous moves, harder in others. 

Before we left the U.S., I made the mistake of trying to order a new credit card to be delivered to an address not in my profile. I incorrectly believed the magnetic strip peeling off the back of the card would be a problem in Egypt. I should have known they'd have chip readers here. They actually prefer paying by just tapping the card to the card reader, a technology retailers didn’t yet have in Sri Lanka. 

Evidently, this raises major red flags in the credit card fraud department, and the bank froze my credit card two days before we were scheduled to fly to Egypt. I called the bank, gave them my social security number, a code they texted to the number on file (my sister-in-law's cell phone), and my security word ("which might be a pet's name" Thanks. That's helpful). 

"Do you have another number we can send another code to?"

I gave them Elise's cell phone number. 

"I'm sorry. We can't send a code to that number. Do you have another number we can send another code to?"

I gave them Sam's cell phone number. 

"I'm sorry. We can't send a code to that number. Do you have a home phone number we can call?"

"No," I responded. "I don’t have a home phone." It's 2023. No one has a home phone. Oh, and I don't live in the United States. 

"Do you have a work phone where we can call your employer?" 

I told them I wasn't in the office. I was on vacation. I even tried explaining my situation, but they said they couldn't verify my identity (despite the information I'd already provided) and would have to send a letter to my address on file. Which is in Sri Lanka. Where I don’t live anymore. 

This was, obviously, stressful. But we still had an American Express credit card. I even loaded a bunch of cash onto Clementine's debit card. 

Until those cards, too, were blocked after we landed in Egypt. 

Every night for the first two weeks we were in Egypt, I was on the phone, long distance back to the States, with a credit card company or bank, trying to get the cards unblocked. I had different phone numbers and addresses for different cards and different banks. No U.S. number. Every time I had to call, I had to make sure my sister-in-law was available to WhatsApp a security code to me. 

I usually think of myself as a very organized person, but this ordeal had me second guessing myself. I felt like I was Hercules battling the mythological hydra, a multiheaded serpent who regrows two heads for each one you hack off. We've moved so many times, I couldn't remember which old telephone number belonged to which country. The longer this went on the more I felt like maybe I really was fraudulent. The banks made me feel like a criminal. 

We've been in Egypt for three weeks and still only have the things we carried with us on the plane. We knew before we arrived the Egyptian bureaucracy would keep us separated from our stuff longer than any of our previous moves. This usually isn't a big deal -- and when our things do eventually show up, we inevitably question why we have so much stuff to begin with-- but I have a strange hankering to make a pie. I can't tell you which part of my brain this desire percolated from, but we don't have a pie dish or a rolling pin, so I've had to suppress this particular impulse for now. 

The only thing emoting any personality in our house at all is a Polaroid of Clementine in tutu and tights standing on the steps of our rental house in Falls Church. We had recently moved from South India and still didn't own winter clothes. This was the winter of Snowmaggedon, and I still remember holding a shivering Clementine after ballet class as we waded through snow banks to the car. 

The kids have no toys and few books. But they do have a tennis ball. Who knew that might just be enough?

City of Ochre

We had visited Cairo before when we were living in Jordan. What struck me about the city then is the same thing that strikes me now: everything in the city is the same color. 

This isn't true in the most literal sense, and pops of color do exist, most notably in the flowers on the bougainvillea bushes and in the jacaranda, flame trees, and apple blossom trees. The later, originating in Southeast Asia, also called the pink shower tree, is a tropical plant when, in bloom, blankets the streets of our neighborhood with delicate light pink petals. 

The rest of the city is all dull ochre.

The buildings, the streets, the ground, sometimes, even, the sky is the same yellowish brown. Dust, too, diminishes the chlorophyll in the leaves in the trees, a thin layer which covers windshields, hoods, sidewalks, patio furniture, windows, sills, counters, everything. 

Cairo is more than ancient Egyptian sites but it is ancient. City blocks give way to fields of rubble, piles of concrete and rebar. Children in dusty and tattered polo shirts fly faded kites, giant satellite dishes in the background. Woman in black burqas dart into traffic, layers of black cloth flapping behind them, weaving their way between traffic and horse-drawn carts. Minarets reach toward the heavens, punctuating the sky. 

The call to prayer is familiar from our two years living in Amman. The ululating chant wraps the city warmly, it's regular rhythm comforting, establishing a sense of time and place when our atoms and cells are still recovering from the dislocating shock of another transcontinental move. 

It is hard to absorb the enormity of the city, mile after mile of monochromatic building stacked one after the other after the other, very literally dominoes. Not only because of the way in which they are placed, but each building has the same relative dimensions of a domino, the rectangular height, width, and depth are all proportionally the same as a domino. Each ochre concrete building is filled with hundreds of apartments, small balconies with bars on the windows, laundry hanging from the rail, drying, air conditioner units in windows, not running, but the fan slowly turning in the hot desert wind. There are millions of apartments in the city, each holding its own family not too unlike ours, figuring things out, lives turning, moving, revolving, beginning, and ending. Each apartment full of stories just like ours is, each story -- millions of them -- different. The city may all be the same color but nothing else about any of it is like any thing else.

Our story is set in a lovely, quiet oasis amidst the chaos of Cairo. Its hard to believe our neighborhood is able to exist at all, and you can feel that enormity of the city pressing up against its perimeter, struggling to get in. Large canopy trees -- all the varieties named above and more -- line the streets dotted with cafes, bakeries, and coffee shops. Virtually every international cuisine is represented in the restaurants within walking distance; we've gone out for Korean twice. 

We're around the corner from the school, and the kids walk there in the morning and home after school in the afternoon. In Colombo, school was a 40-minute drive from the house, so this is a welcome change.

Our house, a two-story apartment with a three marble statues of Greek, Roman, or Nubian goddesses in the lobby (the later has eyes with black irises and white pupils and seems to stare into and dissect your soul), is comfortable. There's absolutely nothing in it except our luggage, but it still feels like home. The wooden doors fit imperfectly into their frames, the stairs creak and moan disagreebly under the lightest of us, and the shower doors screech like the three blind Stygian  witches in "Clash of the Titans", and yet it seems like the perfect setting for our tale.

We moved to Egypt two weeks ago, and our story -- one of 22 million -- is only just beginning. 

A Trip to the Zoo

Before we left D.C., Peter, Clementine, and I made a special outing on the subway to the zoo.