2 months down. How many more to go???

We've been here in Cairo for 2 months now. Frankly, 2 months doesn't sound very long. But it seems like we've been here forever. In good ways and bad ways. It is always good to feel settled into a place and to have that feeling of a nice place to relax when you go home. You know that place where you just want to rest and recover from whatever bad stuff has gone on during your day. Our apartment here is now that place.

On the good news, we do have most of the possessions we shipped here. This being our "express" shipment. The shipment that is supposed to be here within 6 weeks. Fun to find out that it has been here for weeks, but due to some bad instructions we were giving on coming here, we couldn't get it until a week ago. This has made me a very unhappy camper.

(WARNING: You are about to enter a Bitch Session! If you don't want to hear me bitch, just skip this paragraph. I totally understand.) See in the Army, soldiers look out for one another and their families. Apparently not so in all of the other services (although Marines are awesome). Sure there are bad actors everywhere in every service but this is my bitch session so get over it. (I still love my Navy and Air Force friends. And hopefully you'll still love me too.) Let's just say that the experiences of the last two weeks made me question whether this military lifestyle is really such a good idea for us, which I never did even while Eric was deployed to Iraq and we had to live apart for 28 months straight. Yeah, Karen was very grouchy and moody and worked really hard to put on a smiley face for life outside this apartment. Really just wanted to punch a certain someone in the face, but that certain person was no longer in the country. AND I didn't even have my stuff to help put me in a better frame of mind. (Also, I really don't like to write when I am irritated, but I just sound like I am whining, no matter how much my mother emails me or calls me to ask when I am going to be posting again. Love you, Mom!)

So anyway, there have been a number of fantastic things that have happened since I last posted. I'll tell you about one today. This is more interesting than fantastic, but you get the idea. It was good or at least very different from the US. OK, let's just say it was a cultural experience. We experienced the Eid al Adha, a feast of several days that celebrates Abraham not sacrificing, in Islam, Ishmael and sacrificing a ram instead. What this means is that there is a bunch of sacrificing going on. On the streets. Fresh meat everywhere. I couldn't photograph it all. Imagine dimly lit hallways of buckets of meat and wandering through them to get to some back room "warehouse" full of papyrus in the Khan al Khalili. Fortunately, it is fresh so it didn't smell any more than lots of fresh meat smells.

Here's a picture of a fresh meat on the back of a truck. Yes, those are sides of some sort of meat. The red marker means that it has been inspected. We saw cars full of meat.

This camry-size vehicle had this in the trunk and even more in the back seat. Eric and I drove around after the big feast and saw and piles of skins lining the street sides. I couldn't bring myself to take a picture. It was, well, not gross but gory. The piles were 4-5 feet tall. It was an interesting sight. Also, a popular thing to do was put one's hands into the blood of the animal and then put bloody hand marks on walls and cars. After about an hour of driving around, we'd had enough and called it a day.

I'll tell you about my trip to the famous Khan al Khalili another day.