Showing posts with label shopping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shopping. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Khan Al Khalili Pictures
Sorry to be MIA again, everyone! It's midterm time and I've been writing on various subjects, as well as my other blog, and Gilded Serpent, so I haven't had much time to update here. To tide you over, here's some pictures from Khan Al Khalili a couple weeks back that I've been meaning to post:
Monday, February 15, 2010
Slice of Fashion
As the news is traveling around the world, some readers may have heard that my favorite designer Alexander McQueen died a few days ago. I was so saddened to hear of this loss to the fashion community and to the global community in general. I loved McQueen’s work because it was outside the box, unusual, challenging, and made the fashion world just that bit more interesting and special. I remember watching his Spring 2010 line on the label website, curious to see more of the weird shoes that were cropping up all over the internet and hear the original debut of Lady Gag’s “Bad Romance” single. I thought it would be interesting or maybe amusing to see more. As the show unfolded I found myself completely sucked in. The dresses, the setting, the creepy music had me from a minute in and I think I became an instant McQueen fan. Those CLOTHES–I couldn’t look away. Go find it on the internet if you can, it used to be streaming from the McQueen site which is now on hold in light of what has happened.
I bring up fashion because of Alexander McQueen, and because it has been on my mind here in Egypt as the seasons are starting to change. Cairo has an uncanny problem of seasons tending to smack right up against each other, for example it was about mid-60s last week, and the last few days have been in the 80s and people are beginning to get worried that it’s going to get hot again. Grab the kids, run for cover, get out of the way, because the distant rumbles of summer are starting to appear!
Clothes are a bit of a constant ex-pat problem here in my mind. When I was packing to come back from the US this second time I found myself kind of at a loss. I need to have clubbing clothes which should be just the right amount of sexy, school clothes which look okay next to the AUC kids’ designer outfits, but aren’t so nice that I feel bad about ruining them running around Cairo, bikinis for the Red Sea, but also thin sweaters to cover my arms, heels for going out dancing, but flats to run around in every day that I am ok with throwing away in a month because they will be trashed. Not only that but washers here have a tendency to eat clothes, or just chew them up and spit them back out bedraggled and faded, so you need tougher clothes that you are ok with fading a bit and sweating copiously in when things get hot (which they will!). Phew, talk about a wardrobe issue. Somehow I’ve managed to compromise by having not enough clothes–instead of too much I seem to have brought too little, which brings us to the next problem: shopping in Cairo.
Everyone thinks shopping in Cairo is going to be awesome, because things are supposed to be cheaper in the 3rd world. I have news for you all, cheaper prices also means cheaper make here. We’re not talking an American lower-quality thing where you can wear it and make it work without that much difficulty–I’m talking about lower quality everything, from the strength and weave of denim to the surface stitching on a blouse. Things that make a garment have a much shorter life, which means running out shopping every few weeks and feeling like your clothes are always falling apart, which means spending more money. To get good-quality clothes here means they are either imported–thus ridiculously expensive–or sold in a more affluent part of town and therefore are also ridiculously expensive.
Add to that the strangeness of Cairene women’s fashion and suddenly I’m not in a very good position if I don’t want to go around nude. I don’t really understand why everything has to be a strange color with trim in a different color that completely grates on the eye while simultaneously fitting in a matronly way and incorporating a gross usage of sewn-on plastic jewelery. Somehow the Egyptian girls pull it off–I cannot. Can a poor American girl just get a long-sleeve cotton shirt? Apparently not.
Clothes may seem like a very superficial thing to be blogging about, but this gives you a snapshot of daily Cairo life. Not everything is grandiose revelations about life, beautiful tombs, and magical moments in Egypt. Sometimes life is just trying to put together an outfit in the morning.
X-Posted to NicoleInCairo.WordPress.com
I bring up fashion because of Alexander McQueen, and because it has been on my mind here in Egypt as the seasons are starting to change. Cairo has an uncanny problem of seasons tending to smack right up against each other, for example it was about mid-60s last week, and the last few days have been in the 80s and people are beginning to get worried that it’s going to get hot again. Grab the kids, run for cover, get out of the way, because the distant rumbles of summer are starting to appear!
Clothes are a bit of a constant ex-pat problem here in my mind. When I was packing to come back from the US this second time I found myself kind of at a loss. I need to have clubbing clothes which should be just the right amount of sexy, school clothes which look okay next to the AUC kids’ designer outfits, but aren’t so nice that I feel bad about ruining them running around Cairo, bikinis for the Red Sea, but also thin sweaters to cover my arms, heels for going out dancing, but flats to run around in every day that I am ok with throwing away in a month because they will be trashed. Not only that but washers here have a tendency to eat clothes, or just chew them up and spit them back out bedraggled and faded, so you need tougher clothes that you are ok with fading a bit and sweating copiously in when things get hot (which they will!). Phew, talk about a wardrobe issue. Somehow I’ve managed to compromise by having not enough clothes–instead of too much I seem to have brought too little, which brings us to the next problem: shopping in Cairo.
Everyone thinks shopping in Cairo is going to be awesome, because things are supposed to be cheaper in the 3rd world. I have news for you all, cheaper prices also means cheaper make here. We’re not talking an American lower-quality thing where you can wear it and make it work without that much difficulty–I’m talking about lower quality everything, from the strength and weave of denim to the surface stitching on a blouse. Things that make a garment have a much shorter life, which means running out shopping every few weeks and feeling like your clothes are always falling apart, which means spending more money. To get good-quality clothes here means they are either imported–thus ridiculously expensive–or sold in a more affluent part of town and therefore are also ridiculously expensive.
Add to that the strangeness of Cairene women’s fashion and suddenly I’m not in a very good position if I don’t want to go around nude. I don’t really understand why everything has to be a strange color with trim in a different color that completely grates on the eye while simultaneously fitting in a matronly way and incorporating a gross usage of sewn-on plastic jewelery. Somehow the Egyptian girls pull it off–I cannot. Can a poor American girl just get a long-sleeve cotton shirt? Apparently not.
Clothes may seem like a very superficial thing to be blogging about, but this gives you a snapshot of daily Cairo life. Not everything is grandiose revelations about life, beautiful tombs, and magical moments in Egypt. Sometimes life is just trying to put together an outfit in the morning.
X-Posted to NicoleInCairo.WordPress.com
Saturday, September 12, 2009
3 Months In
My, my school has been keeping me busy! I know I can be a slacker about updating, but this takes the cake, doesn't it? My camera is on the fritz, so stay tuned for photos in the next couple days.
AUC Stuff
This last week was the first week of classes, but also the week when I got to do lots of fun activities like running around trying to get my email activated, my ID card to scan properly, my pin # for the online portal reset, a class dropped, and so on. Let me just say that AUC has a lot to learn about organization. Here are two examples:
Exhibit A: I ended up not thinking my Literature and Gender class was right for me, so I wanted to drop it and replace it with a seminar on Palestinian/Israeli issues. Easy, right? Wrong! I first had to find the office to make an appointment to do so. Luckily I ran into another international student who had to do something similar, and HER friend luckily knew where we needed to go to make an appointment to go to another location to make the actual schedule change. So we trooped off to the office, made our appointments for a few days later, and I showed up at the appointed time at the computer lab to see my adviser and get my schedule switched.
The room was chaos. Literally 20 students running around the lab, looking at schedules on computers, sitting and waiting in a clearly backed up and disorganized non-line for their appointment, or just sitting reading something. I finally got to my adviser, who told me that the class I wanted to switch into was full and there was no waiting list, so I should look at the course catalog and come back tomorrow to make the schedule change as they were closing in 15 minutes. I said okay, and came back the next day.
I came in and the guy manning the door asked me if I had an appointment..."uh, well I had one for yesterday, and she said to come back today as it's the last day to add/drop." I was told to wait in the hall with a few other people, so sure, whatever. I waited an hour before I finally got to my adviser again, to tell her that I couldn't find a replacement course and I just wanted to do the drop and take 12 credits instead. What did she say? "Oh, sure no problem, I already dropped you."
Exhibit B: I couldn't log onto the student portal, which you are supposed to do using your ID # and your birthday. Mine should have therefore been 1213** but it wouldn't work at all, so I headed to the registrar's office to get it reset. The first time I went a harassed-looking lady said, "Okay you need to go see your adviser, in the CORE building." Umm...what? I sort of nodded and wandered off, figuring I would try again the next day when there was someone else working.
Sure enough there was, and she said, "Come on back, you want [so-and-so]'s office just over there." Great! I then noticed there were about ten people hanging out in the waiting area outside so-and-so's office...and one person waiting inside the office where the lady we wanted wasn't even present. Not good, but I had time before my next class to wait, so I just took a seat.
After one hour again of waiting I was informed that, "Yeah it's just your birthday, which is 1212**, right?"
More on AUC classes and student culture to come! By the by, looks like I'm joining the Dabke team and/or the Egyptian Folkloric group!
Cooking
If you start dating an Egyptian boy and tell him you don't really cook, he may begin to cry--or at least look like he's about to. Therefore out of love, curiosity, hunger, and embarrassment over my lack of ability to feed myself, I attended a cooking class a few days ago that ended up being a blast! I found about it through Cairo Scholars, where a girl was advertising the class for special Egyptian food, taught by an Egyptian lady, and we'd have Iftar after at her home. For 150LE that sounded great!
We learned to cook a few different dishes, including: Shorbet Lisan ‘Asfour (Orzo soup in homemade chicken broth), Khoshaf bel Laban (Milk with dried fruit & nuts), Ma7shi Felfel we Kosa (Stuffed Peppers & Zucchini), Reyash Dani (Egyptian style lamb chops), Makarona Bechamel bel La7ma el Mafrooma (Oven-baked pasta with Bechamel and Ground Beef), 2amar el Din (Apricot drink), Karkaday (Hibisucus drink).
Everything was delicious, but what I found really fascinating was the style of Egyptian cooking and how people acquire their ingredients here/prepare them for cooking. This is still a country where you CAN get things fresh from the animals or fresh from the farm so to speak, and so it seems like many cooks that live here prefer not to shop the grocery stores like we foreign girls have been doing, but hit up the suuq for your veggies and milk and the butcher directly for the freshest stuff. Tipping the guy who sells you bags of fresh milk or the one who cuts your beef for you ensures that you get the best products too, especially once you develop a regular-customer sort of relationship.
Also of note is that there can be extra steps that us Westerners aren't used to dealing with when you prepare ingredients. For example, when you buy milk here (not at the grocery store) it literally is from the cow, so you have to boil it and remove the heavy cream yourself. This means that you get high quality milk, but in addition once you scrape off the cream and refrigerate it you get the most delicious heavy cream ever to use in your Makarona Bechamel! By the way, that is a baked pasta dish to die for--actually literally because we all stared in awe at how much cream and fats went into it. It was out of this world tasty though!
As a result of this class I theoretically could make these dishes, but at the moment I'm content with just keeping a bottle of 3mr El Din in the fridge because it's delicious and easy! During Ramadan you'll see in stores these packages with pictures of apricots on them wrapped in orange plastic wrap. When you open them up there's something like a big apricot fruit leather inside that you rip into little pieces and soak in water overnight before blending (if you have a blender--we don't have a working one!) and adding sugar to taste. Egyptians and Westerners do tend to disagree on how much sugar to add though, so you can also just have people add their own!
Shopping
In Maadi the road the metro runs parallel to, and has stops on, is called "Road 9." Long story--basically the streets in Maadi DO have numbers...but they make no logical sense. Recently the girls have decided that Shari3 Tissa is pretty much the place to go hang out and shop around, and I have to agree. It's got all these cute little Khan Al Khalili-esque stores hiding beneath upscale cafes, that probably are a little more expensive than the Khan itself, but without the crazy hawking, crowds, and general insanity! I picked up some gorgeous scarves (15LE each) and a swath of the kind of tent fabric that I am craaazy about!
I also picked up a tray of awesome Egyptian desserts from a store next to an equally awesome silver store, with windows packed with boards of trinkets and pendants. So, we basically have been eating little mini-backlava style things of different varieties for the last day. Some come with pistachios, some in squares, or rolls and all are ridiculously decadent!
Ramadan
Ok, since people have been asking it IS indeed Ramadan! I would love to write loads about it, but I am doing an article for The Gilded Serpent on Ramadan in Cairo and don't want to repeat myself, so stay tuned! I'm getting some nice photos, and trust me it is a very festive, fun time of year unless you're hungry or need something between 5:30 and 8pm!
AUC Stuff
This last week was the first week of classes, but also the week when I got to do lots of fun activities like running around trying to get my email activated, my ID card to scan properly, my pin # for the online portal reset, a class dropped, and so on. Let me just say that AUC has a lot to learn about organization. Here are two examples:
Exhibit A: I ended up not thinking my Literature and Gender class was right for me, so I wanted to drop it and replace it with a seminar on Palestinian/Israeli issues. Easy, right? Wrong! I first had to find the office to make an appointment to do so. Luckily I ran into another international student who had to do something similar, and HER friend luckily knew where we needed to go to make an appointment to go to another location to make the actual schedule change. So we trooped off to the office, made our appointments for a few days later, and I showed up at the appointed time at the computer lab to see my adviser and get my schedule switched.
The room was chaos. Literally 20 students running around the lab, looking at schedules on computers, sitting and waiting in a clearly backed up and disorganized non-line for their appointment, or just sitting reading something. I finally got to my adviser, who told me that the class I wanted to switch into was full and there was no waiting list, so I should look at the course catalog and come back tomorrow to make the schedule change as they were closing in 15 minutes. I said okay, and came back the next day.
I came in and the guy manning the door asked me if I had an appointment..."uh, well I had one for yesterday, and she said to come back today as it's the last day to add/drop." I was told to wait in the hall with a few other people, so sure, whatever. I waited an hour before I finally got to my adviser again, to tell her that I couldn't find a replacement course and I just wanted to do the drop and take 12 credits instead. What did she say? "Oh, sure no problem, I already dropped you."
Exhibit B: I couldn't log onto the student portal, which you are supposed to do using your ID # and your birthday. Mine should have therefore been 1213** but it wouldn't work at all, so I headed to the registrar's office to get it reset. The first time I went a harassed-looking lady said, "Okay you need to go see your adviser, in the CORE building." Umm...what? I sort of nodded and wandered off, figuring I would try again the next day when there was someone else working.
Sure enough there was, and she said, "Come on back, you want [so-and-so]'s office just over there." Great! I then noticed there were about ten people hanging out in the waiting area outside so-and-so's office...and one person waiting inside the office where the lady we wanted wasn't even present. Not good, but I had time before my next class to wait, so I just took a seat.
After one hour again of waiting I was informed that, "Yeah it's just your birthday, which is 1212**, right?"
More on AUC classes and student culture to come! By the by, looks like I'm joining the Dabke team and/or the Egyptian Folkloric group!
Cooking
If you start dating an Egyptian boy and tell him you don't really cook, he may begin to cry--or at least look like he's about to. Therefore out of love, curiosity, hunger, and embarrassment over my lack of ability to feed myself, I attended a cooking class a few days ago that ended up being a blast! I found about it through Cairo Scholars, where a girl was advertising the class for special Egyptian food, taught by an Egyptian lady, and we'd have Iftar after at her home. For 150LE that sounded great!
We learned to cook a few different dishes, including: Shorbet Lisan ‘Asfour (Orzo soup in homemade chicken broth), Khoshaf bel Laban (Milk with dried fruit & nuts), Ma7shi Felfel we Kosa (Stuffed Peppers & Zucchini), Reyash Dani (Egyptian style lamb chops), Makarona Bechamel bel La7ma el Mafrooma (Oven-baked pasta with Bechamel and Ground Beef), 2amar el Din (Apricot drink), Karkaday (Hibisucus drink).
Everything was delicious, but what I found really fascinating was the style of Egyptian cooking and how people acquire their ingredients here/prepare them for cooking. This is still a country where you CAN get things fresh from the animals or fresh from the farm so to speak, and so it seems like many cooks that live here prefer not to shop the grocery stores like we foreign girls have been doing, but hit up the suuq for your veggies and milk and the butcher directly for the freshest stuff. Tipping the guy who sells you bags of fresh milk or the one who cuts your beef for you ensures that you get the best products too, especially once you develop a regular-customer sort of relationship.
Also of note is that there can be extra steps that us Westerners aren't used to dealing with when you prepare ingredients. For example, when you buy milk here (not at the grocery store) it literally is from the cow, so you have to boil it and remove the heavy cream yourself. This means that you get high quality milk, but in addition once you scrape off the cream and refrigerate it you get the most delicious heavy cream ever to use in your Makarona Bechamel! By the way, that is a baked pasta dish to die for--actually literally because we all stared in awe at how much cream and fats went into it. It was out of this world tasty though!
As a result of this class I theoretically could make these dishes, but at the moment I'm content with just keeping a bottle of 3mr El Din in the fridge because it's delicious and easy! During Ramadan you'll see in stores these packages with pictures of apricots on them wrapped in orange plastic wrap. When you open them up there's something like a big apricot fruit leather inside that you rip into little pieces and soak in water overnight before blending (if you have a blender--we don't have a working one!) and adding sugar to taste. Egyptians and Westerners do tend to disagree on how much sugar to add though, so you can also just have people add their own!
Shopping
In Maadi the road the metro runs parallel to, and has stops on, is called "Road 9." Long story--basically the streets in Maadi DO have numbers...but they make no logical sense. Recently the girls have decided that Shari3 Tissa is pretty much the place to go hang out and shop around, and I have to agree. It's got all these cute little Khan Al Khalili-esque stores hiding beneath upscale cafes, that probably are a little more expensive than the Khan itself, but without the crazy hawking, crowds, and general insanity! I picked up some gorgeous scarves (15LE each) and a swath of the kind of tent fabric that I am craaazy about!
I also picked up a tray of awesome Egyptian desserts from a store next to an equally awesome silver store, with windows packed with boards of trinkets and pendants. So, we basically have been eating little mini-backlava style things of different varieties for the last day. Some come with pistachios, some in squares, or rolls and all are ridiculously decadent!
Ramadan
Ok, since people have been asking it IS indeed Ramadan! I would love to write loads about it, but I am doing an article for The Gilded Serpent on Ramadan in Cairo and don't want to repeat myself, so stay tuned! I'm getting some nice photos, and trust me it is a very festive, fun time of year unless you're hungry or need something between 5:30 and 8pm!
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