Christmas in Cairo

Because I was so homesick in October I was nervous about how December would feel. When Mark and I lived here before it didn't feel like Christmas at all except in our apartment.  I was so surprised at how festive New Cairo is.  There are decorations everywhere and even our school was all decked out.  I read quite a few articles about where to find the best Christmas displays and was so impressed with what we saw.  We drove over to Sheik Ziad near 6th of October one night (passing by the Giza Pyramids as we did - so crazy we live somewhere that that is a normal thing to do) and loved seeing their beautiful displays.  The mall by our house had awesome outdoor decorations as well. It was a festive month and I am so grateful it went so much better than October.  The weather helped a ton as well.  We even felt chilled at times and needed to wear sweaters and jackets. 

On the drive to Sheik Zaid

We chose a burger place (Good Eatery) to eat dinner in Sheik Ziad and were so surprised when we saw they had a peppermint milkshake on the menu!  It wasn't quite like what you would get at home but we applaud them for trying and the milkshakes were the best ones we have had here.  They were thick and creamy. 

Hydeout, New Cairo.  About 30 minutes from our house there is a large housing development and this year they hosted a cute Christmas town so we went to check it out one night.  There was a carousel, food trucks, carnival games, and beautiful displays. 

I had read online that they would have roller skating available and was so excited to try it out.  Sadly it was a very miniature rink but Lydia had fun skating around

 

AIS.  Our school had amazing decorations!  It was so fun to walk around the halls.  One day I went on a quick walk around the school and counted 11 Christmas trees.  It was definitely not this festive when I worked there before.  Each year AIS hosts a food drive where students donate food to give to all the workers at school. We took Jared and Lydia to a grocery store nearby and gave them each 150 Egyptian pounds to spend on food for the food drive. They were pretty reluctant to go and ended up having a fun time choosing the food and budgeting how much they could get with their money.  I love that our school has a built in service opportunity. 

At the beginning of the month I sat down and picked 25 Christmas activities and got all the supplies ready.  They ranged from coloring pages and word scrambles to a Christmas Trivia Kahoot and Youtube playlists of neighborhood Christmas lights displays and the all time best Christmas commercials.  Our school library has a decent supply of Christmas books and the librarian let me check out as many as I wanted.  We successfully did our Names of Christ Advent every night, reading the descriptions by candlelight which made it more special. We watched the 2021 Witness's of Christ Concert the church hosted and the First Presidency Christmas Devotional.  We decided to watch one talk from the devotional a night the week leading up to Christmas which worked really well. At the beginning of the month we spent an evening in Maadi attending a local church's live nativity.  They have been hosting this nativity for 70 years, Mark and I attended it when we lived here previously.  It was a much smaller scale due to COVID but helped set the right spirit for the month. 

I love how festive our apartment was.  I brought some things with me but the teachers who lived here before us really loved Christmas so when we bought all their stuff we got some great Christmas decor which was awesome. 

Maadi Community Church Nativity 

Christmas traditions Cairo edition.

With a little extra planning we were able to do most of our Christmas traditions here.  It is well documented that most things can be done here you just have to add 2-4 more steps so that is what we did.  I was really glad we were able to do our traditions, they definitely made it feel like home. Both Jared and Lydia said Christmas in Cairo was about the same as Christmas at home, that they had a great weekend which made me feel really happy and accomplished.  There are plenty of hard things here but we are figuring it out! 

Ice cream cone trees, Christmas tree waffles, Christmas baking and Christmas caroling.

We had such a fun time caroling.  We picked three families to visit, got our cookie plates together, made our hot chocolate and ordered an Uber.  Mark asked the Uber driver if he wouldn't mind doing more than one stop which made it easier to get to all the different houses. The families we visited were really happy, they were all so surprised it was great. The last one we visited took this fun picture of us. 

We missed handing out the "Best Christmas Lights Award" this year but drinking hot chocolate while watching awesome light displays on our TV worked well enough. The best Christmas commercials were fun and heartwarming to watch. We tried to guess what the commercials were for and were rarely successful.  We watched Food Network's Christmas cookie challenge and I made a Christmas trivia Kahoot which Jared and Lydia loved.  It was great to have these simple activities to make the month feel special.  And we are all thrilled to be on Winter break especially Lydia! 

Christmas Eve 

Since Christmas Eve was a Friday we started the day with church.  We decided to attend the Nile River Branch which is all in Arabic and then attend our own branch after.  We figured both Sacrament meetings would have a special Christmas program and they were both really nice.  That afternoon I did a lot of food prep because we were having our friends from school, the Karsies over for Christmas Eve dinner. We went to the special grocery store that sells ham in Heliopolis last week and got a Christmas ham and it turned out great.  We ate dinner and watched the special Christmas episode of The Chosen together. It was nice to visit with them.  They are easy to get along with and we always enjoy hanging out with them.  Before bed Jared and Lydia exchanged their sibling gift and then we sent a few of Marco Polos to people at home singing them Christmas Carols. It was really fun and a great way to end the evening. Before going to bed Mark and I filled the stockings and wrote out the scavenger hunt clues for the next day. 

Christmas Day

We told Jared and Lydia to meet us in our room at 7:45 so we could watch the Nativity together as we do each year.  Lydia was up at 6:00 and Jared woke up at 7:30.  I got up around 7:00 to make orange rolls since Pillsbury Orange Rolls are not available here. I found a copycat recipe that actually turned out to be very similar to the Pillsbury rolls.  I have a different recipe for orange rolls that I make at Easter which are just like orange cinnamon rolls but these were much more similar to the Pillsbury ones which was great.  Susanna and I were exchanging some Marco Polo's and she ended up having to make orange rolls from scratch too because all the stores near her were out when she went to buy some.  We also both made egg, cheese and sausage casseroles! It was fun to chat with her and funny that we were doing the same things. 

After the nativity we came downstairs to open stockings and presents.  Once that was done we finished getting breakfast ready, ate, and then Jared and Lydia played with some of their new presents.  My favorite presents was a pair of roller skates.  I love roller skating so much and after we attended the Christmas festival with the miniature rink I was thinking about where we could skate and it occurred to me that we could totally skate at our school!  We could try the gym, the canteen or the hallways.  I got in touch with a friend from school who has lived here a long time to see if she had recommendations on where to get skates and she actually had two pairs of rollerblades her kids had outgrown and offered them to Jared and Lydia. It was such a fun surprise. Once they had skates I was pretty jealous so I convinced Mark to go to one store with me and they had roller skates!  It was a Christmas miracle.  I am so happy to have my own skates again and have an active activity to do with Jared and Lydia.  I have missed biking, kayaking and hiking so much since we got here!

Around noon Jared and Lydia asked about the scavenger hunt so we did that together.  It was so fun.  This is one of our favorite traditions and it was fun to have a new place to hide the present in and come up with clues. We did not mean to make it super challenging for Jared but he struggled with quite a few of the clues.  It was really fun. 

Finding the first clue hidden in the tree. This also took him longer than expected. It was great! 

Laser tag.  Jared has wanted a set for a long time and lucky for us a family in our ward who works with the foreign service and gets mail from the US offered to order Christmas presents for us!  We got Jared Legos and this set and he was a happy kid. We found all of Lydia's presents here but Jared really wanted Legos and they are so expensive/hard to come by here.  We hope this will entice Jared to have friends over here.  He always comments that their houses are much more fun than ours and he is not wrong but we would like to return the favor and have them over here too. 

Stuffed animals have been very important to Lydia since we got here.  She had to leave most of hers at home in our attic in Virginia and she misses them.  She was very happy to receive this one. So cute! 

After the scavenger hunt we decorated some more cookies and then took them over to the security guards at school.  Normally we take treats to the fire station/ER but we weren't quite how that would work here so when a friend suggested taking treats to the guards I knew it was a great option for us. Jared was pretty grumpy to help decorate them and then as usual with service had a great time delivering them to people.  They seemed very surprised and happy to receive them.  After we dropped those off we went to the gym to roller skate/blade and play basketball.  Mark has been trying to get us to the school more to use the facilities and it has been hard to be motivated to go.  It will be a goal for the New Year to use the school facilities more and I know these skates will help.  They are heating the pool as well so we need to go swim too. 

We finished the day with leftovers from last night and then watched a Christmas movie.  It was a really lovely weekend.  It was really a blessing to have such a fun month and to not just feel really homesick.  We briefly toyed with the idea of going home for Christmas once our Eastern Europe trip got cancelled but it was just easier to stay here and in the end it worked out really nicely.  We were glad to be together to celebrate such a special time of year. 

Living In Egypt 1

Sites visited: 

Dahshur Pyramids
Al-Rafa'i and Sultan Hassan Mosque

Bayt Ali Labib (Ottoman Home)
Mosque of Ibn Tulun

Al Azhar Park
Bab Zuweila 

Cairo Opera House

Khan Al Khalili
Downtown Zamalek

The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization 

Ain Sokhna (on the Red Sea)
El Gouna (on the Red Sea

Lydia 5.5/10

Lydia does not like our school, AIS but she does like Egypt.  She has many reasons (and we heard about them nightly for the first month of school) to feel this way and they are truly all valid points.  Some reasons include: the curriculum is too easy, her classmates are too loud and interrupt the teacher too much, and there are too many students in her class. The one part of school she does enjoy is AFL, Arabic for Foreign Learners with Miss Yasmine.  She has met some nice kids but prefers her own company more than her classmates. While she does not like school she does like living in Egypt and has even begun talking about what country we will move to after Egypt which is a pretty big deal for her since up until this month the only place she would ever consider going after Egypt is back to Virginia.  She recently discovered Disney Descendants and loves listening to the soundtracks in her room (her favorite place in Egypt) while reading or coloring/drawing.  She enjoys playing in our garden now that the weather has cooled off and playing with the other kids in our building. 

Jared: 8.5/10

Jared transitioned into Middle School/AIS really well.  Like Lydia he had a lot of adjustments to the kids in his classes but is doing very well in school and has made some really nice friends.  His best friend is Kareem and they are really fun together.  They both love Minecraft and can talk about it for hours.  He regularly talks to two of his best friends from Virginia and I am very happy to see those friendships continue, he has been really blessed with good friends throughout his life. He loves Koshari, one of Egypt's well known dishes and was thrilled he could finally get a long awaited for suit.  He is signed up to run a 5K with me at the pyramids which will be a nice thing to do together.  He is one of two young men at church and while the other young man is very nice I don't see them connecting really well.  They do not live by each other and the other young man is 15 so it's a big age gap.  Jared did attend the youth Halloween party and it was the first time he really enjoyed hanging out with the youth from church.  It was nice to see him happy to be with them. 

April 7/10

There are days when I feel very content in Egypt and days where I can't imagine living here a day longer than the minimum 2 years.  One of the biggest factors for me is the weather.  Most people love the mild winters and abundant sunshine here but I desperately miss having variety.  Egypt just feels/looks the same all year, it's very boring.  I knew this would be the case moving here but it has been really hard.  My job has had more good days than bad lately which has been really nice.  This job will never be my passion or career of choice but it is the best fit for me here in Egypt.  We are very happy we chose to live across the street from our school but it has made connecting with branch members really hard. We simply live too far away from everyone to spend much time together.  That being said, I have really enjoyed our meetings at church and always feel like I learn or hear something new which has been refreshing. 
I really miss having our own car but when I think about trying to find parking here I can appreciate using Uber's more. I would love to have a rental or access to a car for one weekday and each weekend but we have yet to find a way to make that happen.  Having to take one Uber and then get another one to go back every time I want to leave my house is hard.  It's a loss of independence and is beginning to feel expensive. I don't like how I feel like I can only do one outing at a time because once I buy something I then have to carry it with me.  There have been occasions where we have left items at a store and then picked them up on our way out but it just feels like there are always added steps and that is one of my main observations about Egypt.  Everything just takes more steps and more time.  

This has really proved to be true with cooking.  Figuring out grocery stores and what I can make here has become my new pastime.  It's been fun to succeed at recreating recipes here and seeing how I can adapt local ingredients to make stuff similar to what we ate at home. I thought I made a lot of of food from scratch at home but now I feel like I make it all from scratch.  I have especially enjoyed figuring out different breads to make.  

One thing that will be very hard to ever give up is the potential to save money.  We are saving a significant amount of money each month, something we could never accomplish at home. The idea of losing that is hard to swallow no matter how much I miss seasons. 

Mark 7/10

Overall Mark has a similar view to me.  Some moments you feel like you are winning Egypt and other days it is beats you soundly.  He wishes we were closer to church members and could interact more but agrees we chose the right place to live for quality of life. Our apartment is not perfect but it works well for us. 
For school Mark feels like there are going to be challenges in any school you work in.  The challenges in Egypt, such as learned helplessness, students being very needy, excessive talking students are overly social here are different but he would face challenges at home too. 

Due to Covid, travel opportunities have been frustrating which has been very hard for Mark.  The ability to travel new places was a huge draw for coming here. We had an awesome Christmas trip planned to Austria, Budapest, Croatia and Slovenia which will most likely not happen. Hopefully soon. 

For us, life is way more convenient, efficient and just easier in the United States, but we have come a long way the last 4 months and are doing well.

Mosque in our neighborhood that we frequently pass when on runs

Our school started heating up the pool which has been nice. It reminds us of swimming at Sue's house, the water is between 85-90 degrees. 

Tailored suits from downtown Cairo. Outside the Villa where we attend church. 

Trying to capture some Fall spirit

Checking out some sites

Homemade rolls and baguettes

Small acts of independence

Alone in an Uber for the first time. 

As of last Saturday we have lived in Cairo for 86 days. Before this past Saturday here in Egypt I had never: taken an Uber by myself, gone grocery shopping alone or paid for anything outside of AIS.  At home (USA) these are such everyday occurrences but everything is so much more complicated here.  It was a nice moment when I completed all of the above, it felt so good! 

Since Mark was occupied with the visitors all day it was up to me to figure out transportation and get some errands completed.  While I don't like the idea of driving/parking here (more parking than driving) having to take multiple Ubers and give directions to places I have never been got old very fast.  Jared was invited over to his friend Kareem's house and so that was our first stop.  He lives inside a compound so getting the address to show up on the Uber app was not working.  Kareem's mom has given me some directions and once we made it there I was so relieved.  I got Jared settled and then requested another Uber and the same guy came back to get me.  It was pretty funny.  Getting to the grocery store from there was not bad and shopping went fine.  I was there early enough that it wasn't too crowded and had been to the store a few times with Mark. My biggest worry for shopping was being able to pay.  My debit card was not working and so I had Mark's and I was so nervous it would not work as well.  The next worry was meeting the Uber at the pick up point.  I am pretty good with maps in areas I am familiar with but Egypt is a very different story.  Meeting up with Uber's is always stressful.  What would have taken less than 1.5 hours at home took 3 hours here.  Lydia handled being at the apartment all that time very well. She and I had some nice time together without the boys and then I had to do it all over again to pick up Jared.  There is a lot of construction happening by the compound and it took a long time (again) to find a gate we could go through.  Once we got in I could not get an Uber to pick us up!  It took at least least 3 tries and some translating from Kareem but we did it.  It made me miss my highlander so much. 

I would love for us to have a car for Friday and Saturdays.  Then we could drive ourself to church Friday and run errands Saturday. I was so happy once we made it back and I did not have to take any more Ubers, it was a lot for one day.  Everything truly takes so much longer here and a lot of this time would be cut down if we had a car for those 2 days.  It's something to consider as our quality/ease of life would really improve.  I was so thankful I managed to get all these stops in and loved that feeling of accomplishment. 

Jared had an awesome time at Kareem's!  His house is beautiful and has everything you could want.  Jared and Kareem rode bikes (he had extras around), swam (just a little it was too cold to stay in, the high was 79 Saturday!!)) in the pool, soaked in the jacuzzi, played Minecraft and with Nerf guns and ate homemade pizza.  His house is nice and open and has a really nice yard, a trampoline and ping pong table. We will just leave it that they are in a very different tax bracket than us. But they seem like very nice people and I am so glad Jared and Kareem are becoming friends.  Jared was there for over 5 hours and both of them wanted him to stay longer. I didn't intend for him to stay that long but with how long the Ubers took and getting everything sorted it just happened and they were so happy.  Kareem's parents were out of town on a holiday together but his grandma and live in nanny were home with the boys. It was nice to get to visit with his Grandma. I am admittedly so curious about the lives of local Egyptians and want to know what the home lives of the students from school are like.  

Visitors from SLC

This past week our branch had visitors from Salt Lake City. Elder Randy Funk and his wife came over with Sharon Eubank, and Brother and Sister Bingham.  They visited with branch members, held trainings and then did some sightseeing.  

Here in Cairo we have an English speaking branch (Foreign service officers and their families, teachers like us, one or two here for work/just wanted to relocate and some USAID people) and an Arabic speaking branch which has a few Egyptian members but is mostly Sudanese.  The Nile River branch (Arabic) just passed the one year mark of its formal organization.  With Mark's calling he spent a lot of time with these visitors.  The district Relief Society president lives here in Cairo so she and the humanitarian missionaries organized the itinerary and took care of transportation and food.  This was a huge blessing as I would have had no idea how to handle that.  After church Friday our family attended dinner with the visitors at the Perry's house (Branch president and District Relief Society President).  It was a unique opportunity to spend individual time with them in such a small setting.  They are such good people who want so much to serve others and lift people up.  I felt rather out of place at dinner Friday because most of the conversation was focused on members of the Nile River Branch and I have not met many of them but it was very good for Jamie Perry to have a chance to talk to them about these situations.  

Mark spent the next day with them sightseeing.  They went to pyramids and rode camels and ate dinner at a fun restaurant with a great view of the Giza Pyramids.  Sunday I actually covered his classes for him at school while he attended some important meetings with them.   Mark met with the Ambassador from America and then with the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs.  They were very happy the meeting with the MFA happened as in the past it has been scheduled but then the person canceled last minute.  Mark said it went really well and instead of having 30 minutes they talked for almost an hour.  Then Mark escorted them to the airport and met up with the Bednar's who were coming from Jordan.  That was a fun bonus!  Sister Bednar commented that it was nice to meet him and Mark smiled and said "We've met before, at BYU Idaho."  So they talked about when we were there and how much Mark and I loved our time there.  

Mark at The Mena House 

Elder Bednar commented that just as there were pioneers in 1847 those of us here were pioneers in the area. He also said "great things were happening here (specifically the temple in Dubai) and we were just getting started here."  It was a really cool encounter.  

All of these visitors were traveling on to Sudan from here together.   They left Cairo yesterday and then today we heard the news of the Coup in Sudan!  They were actually traveling there because the church was supposed to be formally recognized. I do not think that actually happened because when we heard about the visitors this afternoon they were all safe at the hotel and the coup happened this morning.  We hope things will settle there quickly and they will be able to leave soon. 

Happy Birthday Jared!

We tried our best to carry on with our birthday traditions from Virginia and it went pretty well. We managed to find a nice party store and get some decorations and helium balloons for Jared.  Sadly, the balloons lost their helium by the next morning but we tried.  Jared went back and forth about whether or not he wanted to try to do something with new friends or just celebrate with family.  Up until about a week before his birthday he was planning on just family but then he started talking about two boys from school more and ended up choosing to have them over.  We had Kareem and Yassin come home with us from school and they payed board games, played at the school, ate dinner and then they roasted marshmallows over our fire pit. That was Jared's other request, to have a campfire.  It may have been 90 degrees that day but by evening it was in the mid 80's.  This was most likely the warmest birthday Jared has ever has. Yassin had never roasted a marshmallow before so that was kind of fun.  They are nice boys. I can see Jared hanging out with Kareem more than Yassin but its just really nice to see him be at a point where he wanted to have people from school over. 

Jared, Yassin, and Kareem

For his birthday Jared wanted crepes for breakfast, steak for dinner and brownies for his treat. This was the first time since 2015, (Kindergarten) that he did not want ham, potato, and broccoli soup and meat rolls for his birthday dinner.  I am not sure if he wasn't sure if we could make that meal or if he really wanted to try something different this year. It was a little sad to not be making it but he was happy with the meal he ended up with, steak, funeral potatoes and homemade rolls.  His birthday was actually kind of a hard day for me.  I missed Virginia and our friends/life there more than other days but I think we pulled off a fun birthday for Jared. 

Jared opened his presents before school. We actually planned ahead and bought a Lego set with us from home and saved it for his birthday.  He was very happy to have the set to build.  Yassin got him a set as well and Kareem for him the Java version of Minecraft.  He was thrilled with that.  The present that has gotten the most use is the table top ping pong net we got him.  It has been a hit.  Both Jared and Lydia have enjoyed playing ping pong together and with Mark and I.  It's nice to have a different family activity to do together. 

We have been really proud of Jared and how well he has handled this move.  He has transitioned to middle school nicely and is doing a good job staying on top of school work and figuring out a complicated new schedule.  We recently got some growth test scores back for him, Jared scored in the 95th percentile for reading and 80th for math.  He was actually the top student in reading for 6th grade which makes sense since essentially all his classmate have English as a 2nd language but as Mark and I looked into it it was still a very good individual score.  He was the 2nd highest student in 6th grade for the math tests. Again, having English as your first language is a major boost but he is a smart kid who can do very well in school. He misses Virginia and our life there but also seems to be pretty happy here.  He still regularly talks to Parker and Tyler his two best friends from home which I think is good for him.  He is one of two young men in our branch which is a big change from home where there were 9-10 deacons but he is rolling with it.  It is odd when I think of what his youth experience was like in Virginia compared to here.  The other YM is 14 and he will be moving this Summer.  He also lives in Maadi and so they just don't interact much.  For youth activity that week they got together for a baking activity.  They made a birthday cake for Jared which was very thoughtful. Youth activities are hard as most frequently they are held Tuesday night in Maadi which is a rough drive for Jared.  We were so spoiled living 4 minutes away from our church building in Charlottesville. 

He is still prone to holding grudges and needing to have the last word in situations/having things done his way which we would love to see him outgrow.  When he doesn't like something he just walks away which can be good in some situations but frustrating as well.  For example, when he and Lydia are playing together and he doesn't like something she suggests or does he just shuts her out and goes to his room.  He loves Legos, reading, Minecraft and fishing something that is much harder to do here in Egypt.  He is very responsible and trustworthy. He is definitely growing up more, and I see it happening even quicker here in Egypt where he does not have the same options for activities as he did at home (like exploring the woods, fishing and biking).

Birthday Interview

What is your favorite color? Blue
What is your favorite toy? Legos
What is your favorite movie? Lord of The Rings
What do you do well? Read
What do you like to do with Dad? Play basketball
What makes you happy? Reading
What is your favorite scripture story? Captain Moroni
What is your favorite song? The Spirit of God
What is your favorite animal? Orca
What is your favorite book? Lord of the Rings, Hunger Games
Who is your best friend? Tyler, Parker, Kareem
What is your favorite thing to do outside? Going into the woods
What is your favorite drink? Miranda
What is your favorite holiday? Christmas
What do you like to do with Mom? Play Ping Pong
What is your favorite thing to eat for breakfast? Crepes
What do you want for dinner on your birthday? Ham, Potato Broccoli soup or steak
What do you want to be when you grow up? Not sure