Starting our lives in Maadi, Egypt

We arrived in Cairo at 5:30 am on Monday, September 1. We were taken to an Apache guest flat where we will stay until our furniture arrives in late October. Our first very important task is to find a house. I am not going to lie; the guest flat is grim and dusty but we have Internet so I am not going to complain. I will clean the daylights out of it when I have some time. Today I am going to see houses with a lovely French woman named Helene.
 
Yesterday after a short nap Dave and I got a driver and visited two places: the Community Services Association (CSA) and the closest local food market, Kimo. The CSA is a community center for expats with fitness classes, coffee bar, gift shop, library, and offers lots of classes and tours and events. It will be my home away from home and is close enough for me to walk to from the flat. We then shopped at Kimo and got some frozen spinach because we haven't had proper green vegetables for more than a week. It will be a challenge to continue eating leafy green vegetables in Cairo because of the bugs and parasites. Dave went to work around 2 and I decided to walk back to the store for cleaning supplies. It was a short walk although I was afraid of getting lost. The streets are chaotic with few street signs; I will have to use landmarks to get around.
 
In the next few days I will get a SIM card for my iphone and unlock it. I am so happy to have switched to an iphone before I left Houston because I've been able to take lots of photos of our week-long vacation in Switzerland and Italy. I will post some of those photos later. I used wi-fi in the hotels and could communicate and send photos the whole week. Thank goodness for the Internet; 22 years ago when we moved to London I could only communicate by letter and rare long distance phone calls.
 
Here are some photos of our flat and my route to the market.

Dave in front of our apartment building. Our address is 50 Road 84, New Maadi, Egypt



This is our road, 84. Streets commonly have numbers instead of names. The road is dusty and filled with potholes and other diversions. You have to pay attention to nearly every step you take.




Kimo market. It is one of the smaller markets but a 10 minute walk from the flat. The people are very nice. The market is small and very compact with every nook and cranny filled with food and basic household supplies.