House Hunting in Cairo

Unlike my first trip to Egypt in January, 2010, I am not dealing with too much culture shock this time around. I know the city of Cairo pretty well, I can speak the local dialect, I know how much to pay for basic goods and services, and I am used to the idiosyncrasies of daily life here.

Despite all of that, my first few days here have not been a walk in the park. During my semester abroad, we arrived with housing waiting for us. This time, all of us on the program are tasked with finding apartments on our own. Over the past two and a half days, my two future housemates and I visited approximately 15 apartments looking for the perfect match. Some were too big, some were too small, some didn’t allow visitors of the opposite sex, etc…We finally settled, however, on a top-floor apartment with a rooftop view of the Nile that is located about 10 minutes walk from Tahrir Square. It’s currently under renovation, but we should be able to move there in about a week. Phew! It’s good to be able to check that one off the to-do list.

The apartment search, however, did have some upsides. Going from building to building asking the doormen whether there were any available apartments gave us the opportunity to brush up on our Egyptian dialect. We also learned several new words, such as mafroosh (furnished) – it turns out that nearly all apartments for rent come with a complete set of furniture, beds, and household appliances. When you take into account the fact that our apartment is completely furnished with three big bedrooms, a nice kitchen, and a large sitting room, paying $200 a month for rent and utilities seems like nothing!

We also had a chance to do some bargaining with the Egyptian landlords that we met. Haggling over prices is, of course, a facet of daily life here, but it was very interesting to take note of the other topics that came up as we discussed the possibility of living in various apartments. One of the most prominent of those topics was the issue of having visitors of the opposite sex into the apartment. Perhaps unfairly (or perhaps not), young Americans have a reputation here as licentious and disrespectful of cultural norms when it comes to their interactions with each other or with Egyptians.

Whether we actually engage in more “culturally inappropriate” behavior than your average young Egyptian is up for debate (the subject for another blog post). Nevertheless every landlord we spoke to was extremely apprehensive when we asked him or her a question about having friends over. We were careful to phrase the question in as neutral a way as possible, emphasizing that we wanted to have friends over for dinner or to study. About half the landlords that we asked, however, flatly refused. For us, that question was a “make or break” one. We wanted to be able to host friends at our house, and more importantly we didn’t want to have a landlord who was implicitly suspicious of our motives or character.

Luckily, our landlady-to-be was fine with our have friends of both sexes over to our apartment (provided that we not make too much noise). That was fine with us. Having found an apartment, we are now enjoying a relaxing Friday. Noon prayers just ended, and as I was finishing this post a cacophony of sound broke out on the street. As we are currently staying near Tahrir Square, I initially thought that it might be some sort of protest. After Friday prayers, of course, was the prime time for protests during the Egyptian uprising. As I looked down from our balcony, however, I realized that all that noise was actually from a group of food vendors hoping to take advantage of the hundreds of people pouring out of the mosque, drivers honking to get the vendors out of their way, and the multitude of other random noises that characterize daily life on Cairo’s streets. Ah Egypt, it’s good to be back!