The Boy With Three Eggs . . .

. . . and The Saga of the Lamp!

It’s been a day of total immersion into Egyptian family life and getting practical, logistical challenges accomplished, in a very Egyptian way!

After a long night searching for sleep due to a very hard mattress, Pyramid-block pillows and duvets so thick and tucked in all around the bed in 40c heat that a sheared sheep in Siberia would have felt cosy, we hit the road with Ayman, our local driver.

Recently, he’s played a key role in caretaking our remaining possessions here, when Dd’s former colleague, with whom we’d left them six years ago, decided to leave Cairo earlier this year.

What we couldn’t bring to Spain are now part of Ayman’s home domain (including two wonderful small designer armchairs), and we were invited there for lunch and packing today, in ‘real life’ Cairo, far from even our normal haunts.

A wonderful feast was put on and all his three sons, whom we had met before, were cock-a-hoop to see us again, and receive some FC Barcelona goodies, especially the youngest, 11-year old Malek.

He was even more delighted to take me up onto their roof terrace to see their chickens and present today’s lay of three eggs to camera!

Re the rest of our possessions, the main challenge was to devise a way to pack the shoulder-tall (to me) and quite-wide standard lamp for taking home in the aircraft hold as an extra large item. I was in the ‘cut it in half and put it in a large suitcase’ camp and Ayman in the ‘keep it whole, enveloped in card board boxes’ camp, when Dd came up with the classic coaching ‘And’ solution combining the best of both worlds in a creative way!

The collage in extra tells the story!

Our day finished off with a walk down memory lane in Zamalek being greeted by many, and noting the moving on of a few.

Dinner at Hanna’s.

PS
We have explored DHL-ing over the years but it is super complicated and way too expensive to do!