The Joys of Looking

Well, my bloody computer had to be reformatted once AGAIN. Hopefully this time it will be all right. And a neighbour pulled some strings with the local telephone central to have our lines checked, finding that there was indeed a break in the line sufficient to keep the gerbils from being able to work properly. Maybe things are looking up.

Driving into Maadi this morning, however, I had time to think about vegetables and fruit. Okay, that doesn't sound very exciting, but it was pleasing. My yoga class is at 9 am twice a week, and I have to be on the road at about 8:15 am. This is the same time that many of the farmers are on the road with their pickup trucks and donkey carts carrying the day's crop to market. Somehow a donkey cart loaded with a perfect pyramid of snowy white cauliflowers is much more conducive to thoughts of cauliflower au gratin than a cellophane packet in a supermarket. So maybe I'm weird, but the utter freshness of the produce inspires me.

I passed a couple of carts parked by the side of the road with golden oranges and the redder clementines stacked next to yellow guavas and stacks of local bananas. Our winter fruit are usually yellow and orange. The best apples here right now are Iranian and Syrian yellow apples, crisp and flower-scented. Strawberries are coming into season and the sales of whipping cream are soaring. Our winter vegetables; spinach, peas, beans, at least 8 types of lettuce, sweet red and orange carrots and new potatos tempt the laziest cook to toss together at least a salad and soup.

I'm beginning to plan my soon-to-be-purchased parcel of land where I will build a small house with room for my visiting daughter and other guests and a proper kitchen that I can work in with pleasure. High on the list of things to have is a good vegetable garden, fruit trees for shade, and a poultry yard. Oh, to eat my own tomatoes!

Messing About With Horses

Hortenseposing.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

This photo was taken by Merri Melde while she was visiting me last February. I have lots of photos of Hortense being silly on a horse, but I think that Merri got the best one. Hortense is one of my neighbours, a young French woman who is utterly fearless on horseback, as is pretty obvious from the picture. The horse is Maximus, a rescued cart horse. She teaches lessons, trains horses for other owners, and competes in local competitions, both jumping and endurance. None of these competitions are very important, nor are they very serious. She has a good time, the horse has a good time, everyone enjoys themselves.

When I was a little girl I harassed my poor parents into buying model horses, broomstick horses, even into bringing two skulls home from a camping trip so that I could have a "horse" in the garden. I even fed the poor bones daily. When I was about 8, they finally gave in to the extent that I was allowed to take weekly riding lessons for a year or so. I was about 12 when we moved from a city to a small town where horses almost outnumbered humans. A couple down the road from us sheltered rescue horses and they were happy to have some demented child come to ride them and feed them treats.

At roughly the same time, I was reading rather large quantities of books about archaeology and ancient civilizations, with Egypt being right up there on my reading list. I bored any number of horsey friends silly by going on about pyramids and pharoahs as we rambled around the dirt roads and mountain trails on whatever horses could be collected. Despite all my entreaties, my parents never lost sight of their sanity and actually bought me the horse that I pleaded for. I had to come to Egypt to own a horse.

I spent twenty horseless years going to university, working and having children. Canada is a pretty expensive place to own horses, so it wasn't ever really an option. I was forty or so when my husband came home to tell me that he'd offered me as new owner for a chestnut Arab mare who had been owned by a friend of his. I didn't know whether to be delighted or horrified. I'd met the mare once and she wasn't exactly the friendliest creature on the planet, but in the end, a horse nut is a horse nut after all. I found a place for her in a stable in Alexandria and found myself a new group of friends who undertook my retraining as a rider so that I wouldn't kill myself with this green filly.

All of that was about 15 years ago. I still have the mare, Dorika, as well as two of her sons. I also have the son of a lovely white mare that I bought soon after acquiring Dory, a couple of gift geldings, one purchase who is worth his weight in gold for his patience and reliability with novice riders, and a filly who is growing up to take Dory's place as top mare someday. The horses are beginning to earn their carrots taking people for trail rides, but their real value is in maintaining my sanity.

Today I decided that I'd spent enough time doing errands and whatnot, so I called Hortense's husband, Morad, to see if he was free for a ride. He also trains and competes with local horses, so their work schedules often have holes in them that allow rides. We took two of my boys out for a trip around the local stables, stopping for tea here and there, trying out a nice looking mare, and generally fooling around for a couple of hours, but at the same time working on the training for the horses.

We made one stop for tea at a house near Morad's new place. The fellaheen who own the house buy and sell horses on a very small scale. There is usually a young stallion or mare tied outside the front door between training sessions with a cart or saddle. Today there were three horses there, an older mare being shod, a young stallion and a filly. I was riding my younger gelding who didn't really get the idea that he had to stand still while I was drinking a hot cup of tea and we had to walk in a few circles before he decided to cooperate. Thinking about it now, drinking hot tea on a horse is probably something that I should tell the kids not to try at home, but at the time it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

At my age, I really shouldn't be doing silly things I suppose, but I find that life is much more interesting when I do. That's one of the things that the horses give me, a chance to play. I go exploring, I play games like trying to pluck flowers from a wall, I go fruit picking with four-legged ladders during mulberry season. It's fun and the horses don't ever turn around to me and tell me that it's time I grew up. Partners in crime.

The Lonely Whale

Science News Article | Reuters.com

It isn't often that a news story catches my attention like this one did. Mind you, with the gerbils powering my net connection being a tad on the slow side these days, it isn't often that I get to download the news either. Still, this story about a single whale that's been cruising the Pacific for the past twelve years singing a song unlike any other really got me. The details are rather sketchy. Apparently using the sonar readings available through the US submarine fleet, scientists have been classifying whales and their migration patterns in the Pacific. This one whale has a voice unlike any other and also doesn't share the usual migration routes.

The implications of the story are fairly staggering when you stop to think about it. The Pacific is a rather vast area and there are obviously things there that we humans are as yet unaware of. It's quite possible that there are whales in the Pacific that we are not aware of, but then there is the statement that this is one whale rather than a group of them. The first thing that occurred to me on reading the article was the thought of how excrutiatingly lonely that creature must be. To wander an area the size of the Pacific alone is unimaginable to me. But perhaps this sort of whale is a solitary creature. Orangutans are primates, like gorillas, chimps and humans, all of whom live in groups. Orangutans, however, are solitary and do not live in groups. They simply get together at breeding times, and after that the female is raising her offspring without any input from another orangutan.

Humans live in groups. The extended family seems to be almost extinct in many parts of the world, most notably in Europe and North America, but in Egypt it is alive and well. Sometimes an extended family is supportive and other times it is stifling. Much depends on the particular family or particular family members, but the association with an extended family in this part of the world was initially one of the big draws of Egypt. I grew up in North America and had almost no family other than one aunt on my father's side. My mother's family was all in the UK and we didn't travel there much to know them well. I've seen more of them since moving to Egypt than I ever did growing up. Something about the Egyptian sunshine and the English rain.....

The predilection for living in each other's pockets that is found in Egypt has caused all sorts of problems for urban planners. They've built satellite cities around Cairo to relieve the pressure on the capital city, but people don't want to be that far from their parents and old neighbourhoods. Getting Egyptians to move is amazingly impossible. As a college student in North America, I moved so many times that when I decided to add them all up as a grad student, I was astounded at the number of addresses I'd had over the years. That would not be the case here at all. Most young people live with their parents until they marry and then they don't move more than maybe once. Someone applying for a job in North America wouldn't think twice about applying for one in another city or state or province, but in Egypt to find someone willing to move from Alexandria to Cairo or vice versa is almost unheard of. Egyptians are definitely in the extreme of crowd-loving people.

I was talking to a friend the other day and laughing about someone asking me if it was hard living alone. First, when you have ten dogs, you are not living alone no matter how you figure it. A pack of dogs is a complex society and I'm constantly dealing with arguments, disputes and discussions among them. Then my friend pointed out that although I live alone with a gang of dogs, no one could say that I'm not social. I have neighbours dropping by all the time if I'm home and otherwise I'm usually off to see a friend. Then there are the visitors. Since I moved here in February, I've had ten long-term (over a week and usually more like three) houseguests and probably another four short term. Not bad for ten months in a shoebox inhabited by a lone woman and a bunch of canines.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996764

Another story about the whale in the New Scientist quotes researchers as saying that the lonely whale probably isn't a new species. It's voice is at a higher frequency, a much higher frequency, than other whales of what they believe is its species. Maybe this is just a sort of Tiny Tim whale, for those of you old enough to remember the falsetto-voiced singer. And if it's like Tiny Tim, well, that could be reason enough to be alone.

Water, Water Everywhere And Not A Drop To Drink

Cattle Egret in a Canal, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

There's an old man who works at our airline. He's worked for our family for many years and over the years we've given him the odd bit of money to help pay for his son's medications and dialysis. His son has been on dialysis since he was about 10 years old or so and now his wife is on it as well. The reason that his family have to have dialysis is that the wells in his village are polluted with the runoff from fertilizers used in the fields. The phosphates and nitrates that accumulate will destroy a person's kidneys, as well as kill infants under 6 months of age when they bond with the iron in the blood in place of oxygen.

Pretty nasty isn't it? Our canals are picturesque if you see them at the right time of day when the light reflects off the surface instead of penetrating to show the rubbish that's accumulated under the water. Riding at dusk, they are streams of quicksilver etched with the ebony images of the trees and passing villagers. Their beauty is breathtaking. If you fall into them you need a serious dose of an anti-parasitic or you risk getting bilharzia (schistosomiasis), and if you drink from them, well, forget it.

It is the nature of the world to incorporate extreme beauty with extreme danger, I think. I just wish that it was the nature of governments worldwide to care more about the welfare of the poorer people who have their lives cut short by a lack of decent water. There are "fresh water" wells dug all over the countryside, but if the wells are not deep enough, they are polluted by the runoff from the fields. Poor people have a hard time scraping up the LE 2000 that it cost me to dig a well that would provide me with non-poisonous water. Where I have a good well, I've installed a tap outside the garden wall so that my neighbours can use the water. But they still wash clothes in the irrigation water.

Rome wasn't built in a day and the Egyptian countryside won't be cleaned up in one either.

War On Gerbils And Other Musings

My left hand is more or less healed now (meaning that there is an impressive looking gash in it but I can leave the bandage off now when I'm not riding) and I can type properly again, but do you think that the gerbils would let me have enough bandwidth to use Flickr so I could post a picture? Not today, lady...nor yesterday and so on. Pics will have to wait for at trip to a friend's house. This is why I have a laptop. For some bizarre reason the bandwidth on our phone lines is now about 19 thou bps, a miserable level but what can I do? I'm lobbying with Vodafone to get a Mac compatible PC card to access the net wirelessly, but so far it's a no go.

Winter is underway here as I mentioned before, having dropped in on us like a busload of in-laws, that is without warning and in full glory. One day we were in t-shirts and the next we were hauling out sweaters. I invested in an oil radiator for the living room to take the edge off the chill at night and found myself in a stream of cars at our shopping center (on the other side of the Nile and closer to higher income civilisation) with large square packages of similar objects all struggling to get home to take the ice out of the dwelling places. Okay, those of you with REAL cold issues may laugh, but the way that buildings are constructed in Egypt concentrates on the dispersal of heat rather than the retention of it. That means that they tend not to collect the summer heat but to bounce it off or radiate it, and during our admittedly short and not very cold winter, our houses turn into refrigerators. They heat up a bit during the day but the chill of the night takes it away. When we were living in Canada, we would come to Egypt in the winter and the children would only wear their winter coats in the house when we were visiting their grandparents. Needless to say, this drove the grandparents right around the bend, but they had trouble believing that it was actually spring outside for these transplanted penguins.

The horses love the chill and have a great time roaring around the desert when we go out there. I have a riding client who comes with her daughter twice a week, a diplomatic spouse who was trained as an archaeologist, and we were out in the desert yesterday for about 3 hours. I wanted to show them how the illegal strip mining is actually removing a major plateau just west of us so we took a straight course out of the country club. I was shocked to see how much more of the plateau had been carted away by the gravel trucks. Thousands of cubic meters of desert are simply gone. I have no idea how to try to do something about this since it is being done under the unwatchful eyes of the governorate of Giza and the Egyptian Army.

After the plateau, we headed back down into a wadi where we ride all the time. I wanted to show them a hill where there was an old hole from some "informal" excavations and large limestone blocks that were left behind from ancient Egyptian work. We had a wonderful gallop across the wadi and up the hill where, again, I was brought up short in utter shock. The old small hole was now about six times larger and the piles of sand from the effort were new. Below the hill there had been some small holes and chips of limestone, but as we approached it was easy to see that there had been some clandestine work in that location as well. An old screen for sifting had been left on the sand and the sand itself had obviously been disturbed by digging although it had been put back into place.

Interestingly, the department of antiquities feels that horsemen are not their allies in the fight against antiquity pilfering. At Giza they've constructed a huge wall between the desert and the habited area of Nazlit Semman and there is talk of doing a similar contstruction here in Abu Sir. Walls accomplish nothing, however, when trucks can move in from any other area of the desert to transport shovels and men. In fact, having horsemen in the desert is a deterrent of sorts since we notice problems and activity and can report it. On the other hand, much of this work is done at night and there is no feasible way to patrol the entire desert at night. The fact is, less than 20% of the sites in Egypt have been explored by the archaeologists and Egypt simply doesn't have the budget to either explore it all or to spread people all over the desert to safeguard it. The poorly paid employees of the Antiquities Department actually contribute to the problem since it is so easy to bribe someone who makes so little to "guard" something if they can't make their extra income simply by showing off the site.

For someone who loves this country, watching the theft of antiquities and of the desert itself is killing. The desert is being stolen with the agreement of the government itself so to whom can one complain. Local rumour is that the biggest gravel customer is the government of Israel for the construction of their infamous wall. That may, in fact, just be rumour, but if true, it is really criminal. Sometimes I do get frustrated here.

The Dangers of Being A Carrot

Giza Plateau, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Last Saturday my regular riding clients came by for a countryside tour. I have a mother and daughter who go out with me a couple of times a week, sometimes with a friend for the daughter. They are delightful people, I love going riding, and what could be better than being paid to ride with people you like? But after our ride as we were feeding the horses some chopped carrots, one of my geldings mistook my hand for a carrot in his zest for grabbing all that he could, and I got a nasty chomp on the left hand in the fleshy web between my thumb and forefinger.

Luckily my client did a lot of hiking and she had some steri-strips at home. These bandages are used in place of stitches when you have an accident in a remote area and can't get to someone to stitch you up. Handy items. I used some to close the wound but it's pretty ragged and in a spot that moves almost constantly so I opted to skip the stitches.

For the first two days, my left hand was pretty much immobilised, but it's healing nicely and I'm back to being able to type. Pretty much a shaggy dog story as an excuse for why I haven't posted.

Winter has arrived here and the nights are cold enough to drag out the old quilts from the drawers under the beds. I even invested in an oil radiator that is currentlly taking the chill off the air in the living room. That helps, as otherwise I'm wearing more clothes in the house than outside of it. The good part about winter is the clearness of the air and the way that the stars are so close at night.

The horses love the chill air and are full of energy, not that I need them energetic until my hand is healed. The parrots are eating voraciously and I've upped the octane of their bird bread by adding unsalted peanuts to the mix. They are living outside and wearing down coats, to be sure, but they and the dogs are much hungrier in the winter because of the chill, I think.

I took the photo of the tourists at the Giza Plateau the other day when I was there with a guest. The authorities try to push all the trinket sellers and the horse and camel men to a spot that they call the "scenic overlook". As you can see from the photo, the spot isn't very scenic but the view is pretty good. It almost looks like the Great Pyramid on the right is larger than the middle one, which isn't the case at all. It's quite extraordinary how the pyramids change sizes depending on your viewing spot. Just like a lot of other things.

It's Raining, It's Pouring

Storm coming, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Well, not exactly. But winter suddenly arrived with a boom of thunder the other day, much to my relief. We'd been going along with temperatures in the 30's (Celsius) for so long that we were beginning to wonder if summer was going to stay forever. The warmth was extending the hazy fall days with the warm air trying to rise from the valley floor but being held down by cooler air blowing in from the sea to our north. Now the skies are clear and the visibility in the desert is our usual winter breathtaking clarity.

So I have my favourite mare on rehab walks in the evening, the weather is cool enough to take riders out for day long rambles in the desert and countryside and I don't have to worry about the dogs dying of dehydration, not that they would with the conveniently placed pails of water around the garden.

The parrots have made their winter adaptation by demanding a higher octane bird bread and more of it than fruit. They usually get a mix of broccoli, sweet potato, beets and whole eggs mixed with tahini, soaked black-eyed peas, pasta, soaked sorghum, corn meal and peanuts slow-baked for a couple of hours. In the winter I up the soaked grains in the fresh food and add more peanuts in the bread to keep them warm and happy since they live outdoors and it does get chilly at night.

The locusts never made much of an entrance in our area though they did land in a friend's garden on the Red Sea and denude a couple of trees. I'm not sure where they are heading as I've had computer problems that resulted in my reformatting my hard drive this morning, so I haven't been able to connect to my gerbil-powered server for a while. I did see quite a few of them while riding in the desert last weekend and they are impressive. Bugs the size of sparrows are not my cup of tea at all and the thought of being engulfed in millions of them just makes my skin crawl. When you consider that they can take a field to the sand in a few hours, these things are a force to be reckoned with.

I'm hoping that my reformat has done the trick and I will be able to post more often. As it is, I'm dragging my laptop to a friend's place in search of broadband... A techie's life is never easy.