Cairo Quikpost

Good morning! Haha ... I would probably have woken up at around this time if I were in Singapore, but now that I'm in Cairo, I've not gone to bed yet, thanks to this 1-hour wireless Internet card that I bought so that I can send some document back to office. But weirdly, this is one of those rare moments when I think my job isn't so bad actually (despite 12-hour fieldwork days here in Cairo!). I'll tell you why.

1) The city is beautiful. Even the hotel we are staying in is very nice. It is by no means the best in the city, but it's got a gorgeous compound.

2) The people are beautiful. They really are very charming! The women are pretty and many of the guys are very good-looking. Even our hotel waiters are cute (though they could be from elsewhere in the region).

3) We have a maniac driver taking us to our second fieldwork everyday (we do two a day). It's scary but exhilarating at the same time. I sort of relish it, especially with the window open and my face gets a good beating from the sandy wind.

4) People have breakfast at 1 pm, lunch at 5 pm and dinner at 10 pm. Imagine the horror on our local contact's face when we wanted to go for lunch at 12 noon. Haha. So today, we had lunch at 4 pm, to live like the Cairenes do. We had this popular east-west fusion of Egyptian fare called the koshary.

5) Government workers go to the office at 10 am, have breakfast, chit chat, type some documents and go home at 2.30 pm. Imagine the swell of envy in us when we heard that!

6) Everyone we meet seems so happy; laughter is quick. But our local contact says, that's laughing in the face of adversity. Everyone has their own problems that they keep inside while they put on a brave front with smile and laughter as shields. We should all take a leaf out of their book. The day will be better if we keep an optimistic outlook, like having sheesha in an open-air cafe nestled in the sprawling low-cost housing area for Cairo's poor. I'm quite affected by this respondent from the lower class that we had today. A bright kid, just poor. I hope his plight will not be like that of those charming kids in Karachi who get stuck in the rut they've been born into for life.

Will post pictures another day.