Week of Feb 14

Still not a lot of exciting things to blog about. I have been out a lot this week, and had some good times, but nothing unusual.

Hedi stopped by my flat the evening of Valentine’s Day. Hedi lives on the 6^th floor and teaches at the Canadian International School (she works with with Alyssia, the Italian who I watched the soccer game with). Her internet was out, so she used my computer for a little while to buy some airplane tickets. She is meeting her daughter, who lives in Canada, in Portugal for spring break. She managed to route her daughter and a friend through Paris with an 8 hour layover, so they will take a bus tour of Paris before boarding the plane to Portugal. Sounds like a neat trip for Hedi, and those two young ladies.

I remember Hedi coming by because it struck me as the quintessential middle-aged Valentine evening: we ended up sitting around, drinking beers, eating pistachios, listening to Joni Mitchell and commiserating about the difficulties in our romantic lives. En Shallah…

I met some college students from Austria one night this week in downtown Cairo. They are students at The University of Vienna and are here on their mid-year break, which is the entire month of February. I guess that is the coldest month of the year for them, and they figure we might as well make the month a holiday so they can go somewhere warm, like Cairo. It was over 90 degrees F in Cairo this week, and they were telling me they enjoyed the warmth a lot. They are all political science majors. They were going to the pyramids the next day and then over to the Sinai before heading back to Austria. They were great to hang out with.

Here they are, from the left, Anja, Joseph and Tino:

Justine and I also made time this week to join the Italian belly dancers for dinner downtown. We had dinner at Le Bistro, a nice little French Café in Cairo, and then we went out to one of the local hangouts, but I can’t remember the name. It is a famous dive in downtown Cairo. The place is very Spartan, and pretty much just a place to sit and drink beer, but it does have a certain low-key charm to it.

Here we are at the French Café:

If you are new to my blog, I'm the really good looking one!

And here are some pictures of us at the beer hangout:

The girls are leaving to go back to their home in Lecce, Italy, on Monday. Lecce is in the heel of Italy's boot. I'll see them at least one more time before they leave.