Tuesday, November 28, 2006

A peculiar thing about Cairo/Egypt. Landlords here are obsessed with making sure they are renting out to tenants of 'good character'. Alot of landlords stipulate in the contract that unrelated men and women cannot share an apartment together, people of the opposite sex cannot stayover or even crash at your place, unless you're related and they keep a check on this through the bowebs (doormen) who report on what's going on. People get their security deposits confiscated or even evicted and so on. I've never seen anything like this in another country. Even in Bangladesh! Alot of the time the landlord is conservative or is worried about what people will say, regarding the kind of people he is leasing his apartment to. Some of the female AIESEC trainees live in a flat together, and at one point the boweb started thinking they were running a whore-house, and began interrogating every single male who tried entering the building. Some have to bribe their bowebs if they want to throw a party. lol!

I finally got my password generator from work, which means I can now work from home, or anywhere with DSL. A huge relief, because now that Luli is on a work-trip to Sweden, its not easy finding somebody to drive me to work. On Sunday I had to go in, so I took a cab which cost me 50 pounds! A normal trip here costs like 5 pounds max! Thats 50p. You dont even get one-way trips to work in London costing 5 quid!

Anyway, things are super messed up at the moment. I actually found a real nice place to live, with Nay-Nay another trainee, but the girls who are living there at the moment are holding out on making a final decision because they want someone to live there for 6months not 2. So, we wait. And wait. To top it all off, the guys I've been crashing with have been evicted from their flat. Yep. So now they are as homeless as me. Cairo is being over-run by homeless AIESEC trainees.

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