Our Apartment in Maadi

May 11, 2006

Anyone who has spent time in Cairo grows familiar with the names of the separate neighborhoods. Zamalek and Maadi and Garden City and Dokki and Muhandiseen.. and a number of other less prominent ones.. start to fly off the tongue. To connoisseurs of Cairo, each word conjures up an atmosphere.. some more purely Egyptian.. others strikingly western. Maadi is the most far flung of these neighborhoods that one regularly encounters.. and that is where we have acquired the apartment in which we will live for three months.

The nice thing about this fellowship (with ARCE) is that I have no obligation to spend a certain amount of each day sitting in someone's library or taking classes. I must of course finish my project and have something to show for myself at the end of my time here.. but I can do this work largely on my own, and I expect that our apartment will be my primary work space. Since this was the case, it did not make sense to skimp on living accomodations.. and we wound up with chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and, more importantly, good air conditioners.

Emily's dad has advised us that when we look for a house we have to visit the house at different times during the day.. because one never knows where sources of noise or other annoyances will come from. Well, we visited our apartment in the late afternoon, and we knew there was a school out there. But those little Egyptian kids are loud! And in the morning there is a steady stream of cars coming to drop off their childen.

That is the view of our street in Maadi at about 8am, looking down from our fifth story apartment. Luckily, the school year should be winding down at the end of May, and there ought to be a drop in the noise level.

But the inside of our apartment is most important to us.. with its marble floors and couches. No desk.. but the dining table will double as such. No bookcases.. but the television stand provides some space for books (you can see them reflected in the picture below).

We do not actually have access to the above glasses.. which are listed as "antiques" on our lease.. but they are there in a cabinet for us to look at. The usual Egyptian taste in everything from jewelry to formal dinner plates runs a solid two steps ahead of American taste in terms of gaudiness.. But I find this part of the pleasure of being here.. and certainly my favorite part about my apartment in Zamalek a few years back was the run-down baroque feeling it gave.