Apartment hunting

Cairo, day three:

Today was spent tying loose ends and trying to find an apartment for a reasonable price. It's complicated though, mostly because there are four married couples who want to share an apartment, and the other three found an apartment without us that has three bedrooms and they want to move into it. We want to share to save on rent because, hello, this trip is already costing us an arm and a leg, so we're just trying to be flexible and taking it as it comes. It kind of feels like elementary school when no one wants you on their kickball team. We all know the feeling...

Cairo never sleeps. Egyptians are on a weird schedule since it is so hot during the day. Stores are open from like noon to midnight, rather than the typical 8-5. Of course, my body wanted to be on Cairo schedule, so now I never sleep either at night. Note the 2 am blog posts of the past two nights. Amir, unfortunately, is on a crazy schedule too, which may contribute to my crazy sleep habits of late. He didn't go to bed tonight until after midnight, probably because this morning he slept in until after ten. We tried to cut down on the daytime naps, but he was so crabby it was impossible to keep him awake. We tried to keep him awake two nights ago by going out for food, but he totally passed out in the backpack, then woke back up for three hours when we got home. Mostly, Tim just takes him down to the lobby and speaks Arabic with crazy partying Egyptians until he gets sleepy enough to bring back to the sleeping mom for some milk and sleep. It's working out, but it means that I sleep from 8 pm until midnight, then wake up, like now and don't go back to sleep until 4 am. Luckily, there are plenty of opportunities for naps during the day. Oh, jet lag.

We went grocery shopping today, and the food is one, super cheap, and two, free of artificial ingredients for the most part. We bought some really cheap cookies and the ingredients are: butter, sugar, flour, vanilla. How awesome is that? No high-fructose corn syrup, no Yellow 5 or Red 40. My assumption is because corn is not subsidized like in the states, those crappy combinations are not as cheap to make or as mass-produced. They were very tasty cookies though. We also bought goat cheese, crackers, yogurt, water, two cartons of juice... all for 50 pounds (10 dollars). Pretty awesome, eh?

What else did we do today? Bought phones. Phone plans are sweet here. I wish they were more common in the US. Two phones plus plenty of minutes to last us the summer ran about 300 pounds (60 dollars). We were just going to get one phone to share but with it being so cheap we figured we would want two since we won't be together too much during the day. I love the idea of prepaid minutes, plus the idea that you only use your minutes for calls that you personally make. Text messages use up less money than minutes in your prepaidness, so it's easy to send quick messages for cheap. Who needs unlimited anyways? Certainly not us because we aren't using them.

That's all for now, I desperately need sleep as we are having a meeting with the other couples in t-minus 6 hours. Tomorrow is our first Egyptian Wednesday. I need my rest!