No Place Like Home

There is a reason to be a hermit, and it isn't just that I love the friends who visit.

People often ask me why I don't leave my farm much. I've decided to recount my day today to let know everyone know and then pin it to my timeline line or something.

I know that it is hard for people in Madinaty or New Cairo to believe this but living on a farm is NOT boring. It is summer. The sharan, or sheep flies, are hatching and beginning to drive the horses and dogs crazy. They are fat little porkers of flies who mostly hop from place to place landing on their heavy little feet. I've never been bitten by one, nor have I seen anyone bitten by one, but they do drive many of our four-leggeds crazy so we have been planning to do some spraying of our sand paddocks to kill a few multi-legged creatures with one blow, so to speak. The area in question does not have any flowering plants and is all covered in sand, so the job, which is aimed at the ground is fairly straight forward, although you can't spray with the animals in place, so of course I woke up at 5:30 am to plot out the movements of animals from one paddock to another to avoid any four-legged damage. Having shared my wisdom at 7 am with one of the gardeners I began to get ready to head out to Festival City Mall in New Cairo or Festival City or wherever the hell it is.

Today was my monthly grocery shopping day when Mariam and I venture out to Carrefour (mainly because I have learned their layout over the years and all of the big stores basically average out to the same price overall), but today we went to Festival City because it had a Birkenstock store and I decided that I needed some comfortable shoes that might look a bit respectable...at least aging hippy respectable. I thought that I remembered how to get there from my last trip to IKEA before the great inflation, but I discovered that I messed up on my parking for Carrefour, planning to be close to the door out but actually placing the car almost as far as possible away. But this only became evident about 3 hours later.

We found our way to Birkenstock (did I mention that shopping is my least favourite activity before root canals?) and I looked around. The traditional closed shoe that could be polished and everything was just about 9 thou LE. Once the clerk put away the defibrilator I looked around again and found that there were in fact shoes less likely to cause coronary damage...there was a line in molded plastic for about half the price. It has the comfortable sole shaping of the more upscale Birkinstocks and it doesn't have pieces to fall off if you bang it on a picnic table like the donkey cart knock-offs do. So my crowning achievement was the purchase of a pair of black plastic shoes for $100. My mother would turn over in her grave if we handn't buried her in her favourite trout stream in the mountains above Ojai. Having worn my best donkey cart knock-offs to go shopping I did that eternally young classic trick of simply tossing the knock-offs into a Birkenstock box and I left looking a smidge classier.

Mariam and I celebrated with an insanely expensive latte at TBS before venturing into the maw of Carrefour. I have been shopping at various branches of Carrefour for years now and have my shopping list stenciled into my skull at this point. For a year now we have been deleting some of the more frivolous items on the list bit by bit in a struggle to get the final bill down to something under three times the bill in 2020. All this means is I am putting fewer and fewer things into my cart, only to have the cashier's total come out to roughly the same amount each time. Meanwhile we are learning what things are really important in our diets. It's pretty amazing what is not.

Usually I have gone to the Carrefour on the Ring Road in Zahraa el Maadi. It's been there forever and even our illustrious mini pres hasn't managed to totally mangle the way to and from the farm as long as we stay on the Ring Road. Theoretically, Festival City should be the same, right? Sort of. The magic sign fairy has been at work there removing any signs that might direct one in, out, or anywhere else. Once we got out of the mall pushing our two carts of goodies along some very nice new pedestrian lanes painted into the car lanes right next the usual suggestion of a walkway, we were assaulted by a number of smallish women in much nicer cars than mine, some of them wearing niqab, who were shaking their fingers at us to tell us not to be walking in the road even though it was labeled for pedestrians. I muttered a number of quiet things to them as we completed the Oregon Trail to find my bloody car. But I didn't see any of the cars imploding behind me. On our way out of the carpark we followed another car for a while, but passed it when it sort of collapsed at a corner weeping as it gazed at 4 different Exit signs, but I spotted a flash of sunlight ahead and forged on past to find an actual exit.

I was counting on my memory to find the way to the Ring Road. Remind me NOT to do that again. It's going to be Google Maps all the way even if the silly woman says, "Turn right. Make a slight left. Continue east." over and over again. My memory got me onto some axis or other (I'm fairly certain that it wasn't particularly evil, but it wasn't very helpful either.) which dumped me onto the Ring Road headed to Heliopolis and parts east of Zagazig. Brilliantly I got off the Ring Road only to find myself on another axis, (this one was definitely evil) headed for some other unknown destination. But this time I used logic rather than memory and looked for a U-turn to head us to the other side of the Ring Road going to wherever the hell my farm was. Safely on the right side of a road that would hopefully lead us home we made another U-turn, this time using Ms. Google, who said that there was a right hand turn just up ahead ... except there wasn't that we could see. We stopped at a place where a parallel road cut away on the right just in case that was Ms. Google's road and asked one of the 6 police cars, sitting there watching the traffic to make sure that everyone was sufficiently confused, how to find the road to Maadi. And there on the right hand side of our current path was a tiny little whisper of asphalt wiggling to the right just before the bridge. Triumph! But just past this wiggle was a point at which the road split with absolutely no indication of which way to take. Right hand turns seemed unlucky so we took the left fork and found ourselves on the Ring Road headed back to the safety of animals and bugs.

Our route east had a rather apocalyptic look to it with piles of sand for building even more monumental useless buildings than already lined the right hand side of the road. The summer wind was rattling through the empty spaces for windows and I commented to Mariam that at the rate we were all going we would all be out of food and/or money by the end of the year and the only tenants for the buildings would be rather large rodents. Our cheerful thoughts about the possible residents of the massive apartments on either side of the Ring Road kept us entertained until we reached the Nile and the safety of Giza.

After so much fun as that, why on earth would I leave the safety of the farm?