Hissing Sid

Meet Hissing Sid, our latest "adopta-moggy".  Mrs Sid, for she is of the female persuasion, gets her name from the fact she her favoured form of communication is to hiss at us, even when we are treating her to a plateful of crunchie cat snacks and a plate of milk.  Grateful eh?  Still she provides a bit of female company for the other Mrs in the house......

Bricks and Mortar

With the banking system seemingly looking as stable as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, standing but being propped up, we decided we would like our worldy savings transferred from pounds & pence into bricks a mortar.  Having something 3D - that you can touch just seems a little more tangible at the moment.  So summertime I sent Mrs T off on a mission to filter all the house/cottages in Suffolk and provide a short list for when I returned.  House hunting, we have found, can be like one of those long Norse Sagas, with wonderous worlds, strange beings, both good and evil (estate agents) and incredible plot twists - heres our potted journey - names and places changed to protect the innocent:

House 1:  Nice house, next to football pitch, somebody wants it more than we do. Fail.

House 2:  Converted barn that used to house pigs.  Very nicely done, way over priced.  Owners "It was on the market for 485k last year".  Well, hello, thats why its not been sold! Fail.

House 3:  16th Century listed house in lovely village opposite Church.  "Access to upper floor bedroom is from a ladder" could optimistically mean a small 2-3 rung set of steps.  In this case it was a 8ft high vertical climb that fireman Sam would have struggled with.  No option to change as it is a listed cottage!   Agent "Yes I know about the upper floor, did you need to use the third bedroom then?" Fail.

House 4:  Old Bottle Cottage, beautiful views over lovely chalk valley with terraced garden, in village close to town.  "A lot of house (and garden and garages) for your money" sez agent, and she is right.  Needed work but had the scope to extend and for us to play around with walls and room sizes.  Somebody had spent a lot of money outfitting the stunningly large bathroom however it was styled by Captain Birdseye who went overboard  (pun intended)  on the nautical theme.  Still tastes can be personal and we can send said bathroom to davy jones locker.  "Two offers have fallen through on this for personal reasons" said agent, rubbing hands like Scrooge and looking rather shifty.  Prompted by every relative we spoke to who collectively said "You need to check where Snoasis will be built".  We did indeed check where Snoasis - europes largest indoor Ski and snow centre-parc like resort is to be built and the answer was not far away.  The images of an 85m (14 buses) 425m long ski run behind the house look pretty impressive..  this is how it will look.House was close!

Thus no 3 offer fell through due to "personal reasons" - bullet dodged. Fail.

House 5:  DIY enthusiast on speed.  Words or even pictures could not describe. Fail.

House 6:  Converted Victoria school house in very quite (2 street) village.  Needs plenty of TLC unless you are a fan of 1970s features and fittings.  Great gardens and backs onto village field with football pitch.  Offer in and accepted - now going through all the rigmaroll of solictors ("cha-ching" 150 pound per hour), surveys "cha ching", ground searches cha-ching, mortgage arrangment, cha-ching, cha-ching cha-ching.

Once we finally get it Mrs T will act like a whirling dervish desgining and planning and project managing the dragging of the property into the 21st C.

As a certain Bush would have said on efforts to get my money out of the bank - "mission accomplished"

And lastly....Anyone know what this fruit tree is in the garden - best guess is quince but grateful to be educated....

  

A visit to the Careso orphanage

Mrs T and a couple of other like minded ladies visited the orphanage today in Heliopolis. This is the one that Mrs T has been helping support with sales of her wonderful and lovingly homemade greetings cards (available at all good Bazaars in the Cairo expat social circle!). I have plans to sell a few prints of the mosques I have been visiting - see previous posts - at the next bazaar to the same ends.....

As they were visiting around lunch I took in the camera, popped out for lunch and met Fawkeya and the residents and got to snap a few images. I did not use the flash and so had a little trouble with exposure and shutter speed but I got some acceptable photos. If invited back I'll get some more. I plan to get some hard copies and give to Mrs T to take down and hand out. We plan to use the images to potentially update the website.

Left: The entrance and loom. Right: the ladies and Fawkeya.

One of the residents demonstrates the loom in action. They have been making rugs to sell and the look great. The loom helps with their motor skills, gives the residents a sense of achievement and they are rightly proud of what they produce!

The ladies and Fawkeya discuss the rugs and how much they would fetch in the bazaars.

The happy residents of Careso Orphanage enjoying social time.

Happy smiling faces......

Working on motor skills

The brightly painted walls

Finding out what the needs of the orphanage are and how the ladies can help....

Fawkeya looks proudly on as another demonstration of rug making


A visit to the sensory room, recenlty put in. Lights and colours.

A really interesting trip! Its great to see the valuable work of people like Fawkeya and it makes all the effort from all those who support the Careso Orphanage worth it.

If you get a chance buy a few cards from Mrs T, or even a print or two from me, you can be sure the profits are well appreciated and a little goes a long way.

Back online

Managed to fix the "Blog in Arabic" login issue I was having and now back in on - will write and post some photos this weekend- watch this cyberspace.....

Karanis - Cult of the Crocodile!

The title of this post should be a B Movie! With Mrs T off gallivanting round the fine English countryside of Suffolk busy thatched–roofed-cottage-hunting I am left home alone to work on my golf handicap. Saturday however means a little gallivant for myself and Ahmed the Driver with the camera into the wilds of Cairos mean streets or in the case of this weekend, a jaunt down the Fayoum Road.

So we set off early and spent a good while trying to find 92 petrol. Finally getting some in Giza we climbed past the Big Pointy Buildings on the Giza limestone escapement and set off south.

Ahmed said he had never been this way before (this was untrue, as he took a wrong turn this way when we were trying to find Joe at one of his football tournaments, but I didn’t want to be picky). The road is quick and straight and dual carriageway, which all equates to high speed crashes. It was not long before we came across and double lorry that had glanced a microbus. Tarantinos movies have nothing on the view from a passenger seat in Egypt.

Quite fittingly half-way acorss the desert towards the Fayoum Oasis there is a massive cemetery in the middle of nowhere. City of the Dead (another B Movie)

Karanis, or Kom Ushim or, my favourite, Crocodilopolis is one of the best known sites of Roman Egypt. Never heard of it? Nor had I. Well the ruins are not that spectacular compared to the big pointy buildings in a country with more classic ruins than you can shake a stick at. Archeologists do get excited however because Karanis is the best known town on paper, or more specifically papyrus. The town was once a thriving, lower-middle class agricultural town on the banks of Lake Quron and the Romans, like most “civilizations” collected copious amounts of paperwork documenting the minutiae of every day life. As the waters of the lake receded, along with the Roman empire the town slowly died only to be rediscovered as an unremarkable pile of ruins. The discovery was made by farmers attracted by the organic rich soil, left by the ancient inhabitants. The farmers came across many well-preserved tax records/notes/letters/official memoradums and sold them on. There value was eventually appreciated and proper excavations of the town occurred in the 1920s by, no doubt well dress chaps in the style of Howard Carter.

The visitor centre restuarant - apparently not open.....

Now I know its not a “A” grade tourist site but it looked completely trashed and we had to wake the 3-4 police from their morning slumbers (10.30am) to open the gate. They were surprised to see us, not many tourists this month! The visitor centre did not look like it had seen any visitors since Churchill coming here (apparently). The building looked like something out of the “Time Machine” when the guys goes centuries into the future (in fact the ruins looked in better shape than the visitor centre). They police insisted on following us around, which did not bother me as the sun was now high and they were flagging soon in the heat and got very bored very quickly. For some reason they did not want me to take my tripod, camera was ok, and would only agree to it for 1000 egyptian pounds – all very curious

Aswan granite Egyptian columns recycled by the Romans

The Southern Temple
Large pots were strewn everywhere

The name Crocodilopolis comes from one of the two ruined temples dedicated to the crocodile gods (hence the cult of the crocodile. Mummified crocs were found in the temples. The paperwork gives an insight into the life of an everyday town, weavers, wool sellers, potters, farmers, carpenters, hairdressers. This population paid heavy taxes to the government, mostly consisting of grain (Egypt - the breadbasket of the Roman Empire). The town interestingly was also inhabited by the mercenaries of the Roman army (you got a bit of land for slaying a few Britons/Gauls as a pension).

Fayoum oasis in the background from South Temple

The old town buried for centuries

Door with a view (but no room)
A couple of examples I retrieved from the internet of the paparyses (papayri?). My favorites was some poor guy complaining a soldier guarding the town would not let him pass with this donkey hay/olive oil cart unless be gave him a bribe (lessons that the Mubarak era did not take heed off). Also in year 198, a dispute took place with a violent tax collector, while there was a robbery of a woman whose brother was in the army at an unknown date. In 214, a fire destroyed a field of crops, while in 216, there was the burglary and vandalism of a house

Several millstones around - look good as a water feature in my garden

The site reminded me of Byblos in Lebanon, the foundations of a city left to eroded away. The impressive thing in Karansis is the amount of 1^st-4^th century pottery on the floor, everywhere you step as piles of pot shards. Either these guys had some smashing parties or the pots were of poor quality.

Piles and piles of broken pots

The north Temple - dediciated to the Crocs

Leaving our little antiquities police to their beds we headed toward the lake along some great agricultural roads. These roads are fantastic as there is so much to see going on. It was obviously Market day in Fayoum and the lorries were chock-full of farmers and cows.

Farmers and Cows travel together

Cows up front, farmers in the back
No overtaking....
Although 1st class is not luxurious, 2nd class is worse
A whole flock of farmers for sale

A generator powered by donkey - or donkey powered by generator

A whole lot of Ahmed Al Armitage Shanks

We hit the lakeside, and drove down the “cornice” Every so often a fisherman or fisherwife tried in vien to flag use down to buy their wares. I took a few pictures of the fisherman, lake and birds. As it was scorching we gave up, visited one of the two hotels on the lake (its seems Churchill is like bonnie Prince Charile, everywhere claimhe visited and stay).

"Frreeesh fish" (from the Laurel and Hardy film)

Selling fish is tough when customers are travelling at 60km/hr
A few tiddlers
This was quite a pose - reminder me of Eric Idle dress as a woman in Monty Python
Fishermen getting ready to go out again...its a family affair

Photo-shy Egrets
Fishing boats
And so we headed back to the smoke. Much more to see in this area (Wadi Rayan, Hitam, Fayoum itself) so its on my list of things to do.