Oh, what a night!

Things it included:

- A delicious burger!  Dad hung out with one of his colleagues today, a guitar-playing person (classical, not electric) who also lives on Zamalek; said buddy recommended a new(ish?  possibly just to us?) restaurant called Blackstone, which features yummy American food at not terribly outlandish prices.  As Dad was feeling too lazy to cook and said restaurant is literally right down the street, we went – and lo and behold, it was excellent!  A tad pricey for Egypt, which means that it’s a bit less expensive than what you’d pay for a similar meal in, say, the middle of nowhere, IL.  And it was astonishingly delicious – very fresh, very tasty.  The menu bragged about how everything was made on the premises, including all the baked goods, the salad dressing, etc.  All I can say is, my burger was better than many an American one…

- Mango ice cream!  Many of you have heard me rant and rave about Mandarine Koueider.  If you haven’t:  they’re probably my favorite pastry shop in the world, they make wonderful Egyptian baklava, along with great cakes, various other baked treats (including loukoumades, apparently – who knew?), and some of the best ice cream EVER.  It’s all homemade, on the premises, no preservatives or fake flavoring, and dang, you can tell.  The coffee ice cream wakes you up.  The banana flavor tastes more like a banana than the actual fruit.  The chocolate makes you think that you’ve died and gone to heaven.  And the mango…ah, the mango.  I love mango at any time, in any circumstance, and well-made mango ice cream is easily one of my favorite things in the entire world.  This was my first time at MK since I arrived here and it pretty much made my week…I need to remember to go back more often!  Life goal:  taste all the ice-cream flavors.

- Last but certainly not least:  I GOT A PHONE!!  I’d been putting it off and putting it off, because I love my iPhone and I didn’t want to try to phone-shop in translation and I had no idea what kind of phone I wanted (because clearly I can’t shell out for an iPhone)…but orientation starts this weekend and I’m going to need a phone number for all the forms then, so I finally buckled down and did it.  It’s not quite the cheapest phone you can get (the bottom-of-the-line ones were all Nokias and I looooathe Nokia phones…long story), but it’s close – an old-school Samsung touchscreen.  I’m glad it’s touchscreen, though it’s not the best quality (a little slow to respond, shall we say – not that I can talk, with my slowly-dying three-and-a-half-year-old iPhone).  Funny, though – I went in, looked at the phones with my parents, finally picked this one out – the cheapest of the not-Nokia smartphones – and pointed it out to the salesperson.  The guy smiled, nodded, and disappeared off into the back room, where he stayed for a very long time before eventually emerging triumphantly with – wait for it – the PINK version of the snazzy black-and-grey phone I’d chosen.  He grinned and asked if the color was ok…what was I going to say?  It’s not the prettiest thing ever, but it’s not that bad and it’s not like I really care at the end of the day.  So I laughed and nodded and he got it set up.  Interesting features:  an FM radio, a built-in alarm to give you prayer times, and an app to show you which way to face in order to pray.  Pretty snazzy!

Amusingly and annoyingly, it’s super common to get wrong numbers here – and since I don’t speak Arabic, it’s hard to get the point across.  Literally half an hour after I got my phone, someone started calling it basically non-stop…I actually turned my phone off in hopes of them figuring it out and canning it!  I also set up my voicemail, so maybe they’ll hear it and get the point?  Meanwhile, I think I’m going to start rotating languages as I answer wrong-number calls, and see what gets the best response (other than Arabic, I mean).

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