There are cockroaches here!

I didn’t include these photos in our last blog entry but these were taken on the bus ride to Giza. We’ve been told that a building that is unfinished doesn’t owe taxes. So a LOT of the buildings here are unfinished. 

One of the thousands of unfinished buildings we've seen.
Notice the second floor window & balcony. Someone is living there.

Donkeys! The white vans in the background are cabs.

 My Dad wondered what they drive around here. We've seen car dealerships just like home but we’ve also seen some interesting vehicles that we would never see at home.

Another unfinished building on the left.
Check out the little black car!

This truck has cows in the back. COWS!

 Mike went to school this week. The school seems to be in ciaos as many schools are the week before school starts. Becca and I checked it out on Tuesday. The school sent a special bus just for teacher families to come and have a look around. It’s pretty cool and hot there. No photos were taken because it was just too crazy with workers everywhere – painting and moving stuff. The lobby is beautiful and air conditioned. To get to the main classroom areas, you take a staircase beyond the reception area where there is no roof! The middle of the school has no roof! (That's where the "hot" comes in.) Last year it rained for 20 minutes on 5 different days. A roof is not required. On the way to the high school section we passed an outdoor gym and courtyard, a pool and a big soccer field. The high school does have a roof. They have two squash courts! I haven’t seen that in a school before. The classrooms are very basic and all have air conditioners. If they don’t have a smart board, they have an LCD TV on the wall that can hook up to the teacher’s computer. The library and cafeteria area are both very nice. The cafeteria has a coffee shop, a Popa Johns Pizza and a booth that sells some healthier selections like salads and chicken wraps, soups and sandwiches. It looks like Becca will be able to find lots to eat for less than 18LE or $3 Canadian a day. Mike’s room is #17 on the first floor. He has a couple classes with 20 kids, and one with only 6 but numbers are still being finalized and I’m sure will be adjusted a few times in the next couple of weeks. 

Egypt has DELIVERY! You can get anything you want delivered to your door like groceries, food, beer & wine by making a phone call or ordering on-line. I tried to order water from the grocery store, but they were out of water so that didn’t work but we did successfully order chicken wings and quesadillas. They even remembered to put only chicken and cheese on Becca's!   

The Good: Mike fulfilling one of his Egypt goals – to smoke a SHEESHA pipe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookah

Our friend Giuseppe ordered a sheesha at the ACE Club.

The Bad: Text messages from Becca at 3:30am “Mom” “Mom” “Mom?” “Mommy” “I went pee and now theres a lizard on my ceiling and I cant go back to sleep cuz its there” “Mooooom” “PLEASE” – finally she just comes in our room and wakes me up because my cell phone was not beside me and I couldn’t hear it. 

We watched it crawl along the wall for 10 minutes. I wasn’t going to touch it and neither was Becca. It moved so fast! So Mike came to the rescue. He tried to trap it in a Tupperware container but ended up killing it by accident.

This is not the cockroach from Mike's chair - it's the cockroach from our dining room floor!
 Fortunately this one was already dead. I still made Becca scream when I picked it up.
We think it flew (or crawled?) in when I was cleaning the windows. 

The Ugly: Text message from Mike “just went to sit at my desk and there was a giant cockroach on my chair”. Me “O M G was it alive?”. Mike “oh yes”