check-in

It was a nice dinner last night– Moroccan food beside the Nile with three of the most pleasant people I know, all of them Egyptians. There were various things to celebrate for all the various people present, and the mood was upbeat and benevolent just as we should always be hoping for.

The other nice thing is that I had never been to this particular hotel, and going there filled in a strange blank on my map of Cairo experiences; the place isn’t that far off my usual beaten path, but for some reason I’d just never felt like turning in that particular direction. But in fact it’s a wonderful area with a previously unsuspected surplus of trees, and when you live in Egypt trees start to become a pleasant surprise when you encounter a large number of them together.

In fact, trees are on the list of objects that have played a greatly reduced role in my life since moving here. Coins would also be on the list, since this has been such a predominantly paper money country that people nearly roll their eyes when you try to pay with the not-so-common coins that are in circulation.

Pens and notebooks are another thing in shorter supply here than elsewhere. The notebooks, I can understand for the reason indicated above… trees just don’t exist here in abundance, and thus paper products are not nearly as ubiquitous as they are in the USA. (Restaurants with pancakes also give you the tiniest trace amount of maple syrup, but there probably isn’t even one maple tree in the entire country.)

Last week in Alexandria I had some sudden philosophy ideas and wanted to write them down. The search for a notebook took literally 10 minutes, and succeeded only because someone used “connections” with his cousin to dig one up for me from the bottom of some storage cabinet. Stranger still, all they could find me was a laughably cute little Mickey Mouse notebook from China that could be concealed in the palm of my hand if I so wished.

It is for this reason that the latest breakthroughs in object-oriented philosophy are merrily scrawled in a notebook that has the following words printed on the cover:

“Have a ball..

Happy Time!

MICKEY PROJECT

Mickey is rich in protein and
calcium which help build the
musclesyou need to throw
a ball or climb a tree”