It’s called:
Guess what the tone of Kelly’s Blog is going to be
It’s really quite simple…before you go ahead and link up to my blog, check what the weather was like in Cairo during my waking and working hours…
Now don’t just look at the temperature…because I can tolerate the heat, but take particular notice to the wind speed, and while you’re at it, be my guest and check out the humidity too…I’m about sick of all the idiots out there who say, “Oh but it’s a dry heat…”
Dry heat my ass. Look at this photo of Giza and Cairo
Notice the community encroaching on the desert plateau. The desert and the pyramids are a sandy island surrounded by endless buildings, roads, and Cairo traffic. I assure you there are people and vegetation abundant throughout cairo and it is plenty humid…no it’s not the amazon or anything, but it’s not so simple as being “dry heat.” The sun is so intense you actually feel as though you should be moving away from a flame. When you pass by a window it feels like a furnance is filtering its hot breath straight at you….
Walking throughout the site today, I seriously would not have been surprised to see a fierce fire hissing dragon fighting off some arthurian knights no less than five feet away from me…I mean two things by this…one, it was so hot that I felt it possible that the only thing that could really account for it is a creature that exhales fire….two, it was so hot that I seriously could have hallucinated such a creature into existence.
What’s worse, is that the pollution is so terrible in Cairo, that all of the smog just traps the heat in even more. So again…dry heat my ass.
But this is all besides the point….No matter what I knew coming into this that I would be dealing with hot weather., Today it was 99 and tomorrow it is going to be 100, however even those are a bit outrageous for mid March in Egypt.
But the heat isn’t even the problem…sure it’s not very comfortable, but it’s the wind that is unbearable. Trying to walk uphill to the tent, against the blowing wind and sand had my pulse in a frenzy by the time I got to the top, and I’m someone in great shape. The wind made getting any work done nearly impossible…at one point, the wind was so strong it ripped my beautiful feature forms from my folder and they went flying across the desert plateau….everyone dropped what they were doing to help me fetch them before they scattered into obscurity….luckily, I retrieved them all…but even that did not supress the rage in my heart that I harbored for this wind. I wanted to give mother nature a good ole punch in the ovary…Actually I just wanted to punch anything. Throughout the day, Egyptian desert ants were constantly crawling over me…in my hair, up my arms, down my shirt…I would flick them off and the wind would whip them right back at me. I would pick them up between my fingers wanting to crush their little exoskeletons so badly…inverebrate pieces of shit…but I would just throw them off, despite the fact that such efforts were futile.
They shut the site down at 1:00, a half hour before lunch even starts simply because nothing could get done with the strong winds. We were all put on duty back in the Villa. I am the offical data entry person, the work of which I have yet to even begin, so that is actually going to take up the rest of my afternoons for the next few weeks. I started today though, and its fairly easy…basically just taking information from the feature logs and the bag registers and entering them into the online database….the problem with doing it today was that I was already aching with irritability from the morning. I was exhausted…Peter described me was walking in with the slouched shoulders of a defeated soldier. As I entered the bathroom to wash my hands, I saw again that I manged to have goggles of clean skin where my glasses had been, the rest of me dusty, silty, sandy. Dirt clinged the peach fuzz between my eyebrows granting me a look that would have given Frida Kahlo a run for her money. On top of this…having proclaimed much too soon my immunity to mosquitos, I managed to get around 30 bites, all between my ankles and mid calves. Itchy, sweaty, dirty, exhausted, and now I have to plug and chug numbers into a computer, over a wireless signal whistling “I think I can I think I can I think I can..” Every entry takes forever to upload…and I sit…watching the bar inch along thinking…”yep…today I hate Egypt and wish I was somwhere else.”
I did database stuff until I thought I would tear my own skin off in irritable frustration. I peaced out a half out early…I knew exactly where I needed to go. True I walked down to the Meridien, but not to jump in the pool…but to walk straight into the gym there and jump on the treadmill. 5 miles in 21 minutes (told you I’m still in good shape)…of course this is not really the same as it would have been running on real ground…but you still get a sense for the magnitude of frustration I had to get out…and all because of dealing with a day of utter discomfort.
Leaving I finally felt calm. On my way there I really thought I would snap…start screaming profanities at the hissers and the honkers…walking home I found my way back to the smile that I normally offer the locals on my walks to and fro.
Then as I unlocked the gate to my apartment, I remembered that tomorrow is Easter and got pissed all over again.
Tomorrow the weather is supposed to be worse…whispers of khamaseen hang as heavy as the heat slung from the sun. Khamaseen is arabic for fifty…fifty days that make up the sandstorm season.
Will we see it?
A sand storm?
Time will tell….
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