And now, Horrifying Baby Hour

I'm about 3 weeks behind on updating anything, but the task of catching up is so daunting that I'm just going to continue avoiding it for now, and instead muse about how terrifying shopping for children's clothing must be for parents in Cairo. Some recent happenings such as goats on taxis or coming back from the Red Sea in a minibus full of Cairo ballerinas (who were all from Eastern Europe), have gone disappointingly unphotographed for various reasons. Inane, inanimate oddities, however, are easier to catch on film.

Preface: Individual kids tend to just annoy me. They offer nothing but constant movement and noise-making (kinda like Cairo), with none of the redeeming offerings of fun people, cheap tasty foods, and structured insanity. When they stop moving and quiet down, though, kids start to scare me. Encase them in plastic, and it's nightmare-fodder. On one of my wanders around the shopping districts downtown (down Talaat Harb for anyone around), I stumbled upon Hell.

Stores upon stores, windows alongside windows, of well-dressed, lifeless, ever-staring mannequins of children. Freakin hundreds of them.

This first window actually wasn't too bad - just obedient little girls cheerfully watching their serpent overlord arrive from somewhere to the right of the photo.

This scene bothered me because of the vague "grab your junk, grab your junk" motion that some of the kids are practicing. Little albino girl disapproves and quietly plots something on her own.

I WILL RISE AGAIN


Here we witness the classic "pillar of children" so common in the nightmares of wicked people. My favorite babies are the ones with their heads cocked/kicked/twisted at odd angles.


Yuppie-children with their little ties and vests, thinking of murder.

No caption.

I saw a live goat on the luggage rack on top of a taxi today

and it was awesome.

The Shower Saga, Part 1

Before moving into my new flat, I did what I thought was a pretty complete inspection of the unit, including making sure that accessories such as a shower curtain were included, and utilities such as the shower worked. Still relatively new to Cairo at that point, however, I made some rather poor assumptions and extrapolations that, alas, did not allow me to accurately predict how well the included amenities and utilities would actually work.

Incorrect Assumption #1: The existence of a shower curtain rod above the shower and a shower curtain in a closet means that there will be a workable shower curtain for the apartment.

L-shaped curtain rod around shower area? Check. Shower curtain? Check. Curtain rings to attach curtain to rod? Check, even though there are half as many rings as holes in the curtain where rings are to be installed. Install rings in every other curtain hole, hang on rod. Looking up at the curtain rod, curtain appears to adequate cover entire width of shower - Check.

But wait....something is not quite right. Look down at length of shower curtain.

FAIL.

I don't know where the heck they got this shower curtain, how/if the previous tenants used it, or whether someone tall got bored and raised the curtain rod. When turning on the shower, the angle of the shower head actually caused approximately 99% of the water (maybe more) to gracefully arc out of the shower area and splash all over the floor, instantly turning the bathroom into a slippery death trap. One of my lingering fears in life is somehow ending up naked and dead in a situation not of my choosing. Even worse, being found mangled with boxers partially put on, with one leg in and the other foot tangled in the boxers. Then there's not even a question of what happened, and no opportunity for anyone to propose less-lame causes of death.

I played with rubber bands, twist-ties, and random plastic hooks from the 2.50 LE store for a few days, trying to lower/extend the curtain, with limited success. Hence the need for a new non-pygmy-world shower curtain, and the odyssey that I whined about in the previous post. After finding the new shower curtain, I rushed back to my apartment, giddy to install my awesome new bathroom accessory.

It was still too short.

There was just less clearance between the curtain and the stream of water as it continued to splash onto the floor. I now imagined an extremely tall person installing the curtain rod just a few inches higher than the usual height of a curtain, cackling maniacally to himself (or herself) before feasting on kittens and teddy bears. I'd grown tired of trying to be stable and agile on my feet after groggily showering in the morning, a time reserved for stumbling around dry bathrooms floors.

But, with TWO short shower curtains, there was definitely a way to make one curtain of acceptable length. I tried taping the first tiny curtain to the second less-tiny curtain, creating an overlapping fantasy of smothering vinyl that clung to me while showering, which was exactly as comfortable as it sounds. That permutation self-destructed before I could get too annoyed with it, as the tape was quickly deactivated by water and steam. I finally settled on cutting a piece off of the first curtain and gluing it to the second curtain, hoping that the super glue and the reduced weight of a smaller curtain-piece would make the curtain-merge more permanent. Pictured below is the birth of my current franken-curtain.


Looks like I've ruined a perfectly good curtain......no, TWO perfectly good curtains. Plus half of my fingers are bonded together with astoundingly-effective super glue, and the weird blue acetone I got at the pharmacy is nothing to alleviate the embarrassing syndactyly that I'm trying hide from my coworkers.

And to top it all off, the past two uber-long posts have been about freaking shower curtains.