As a teenager, Mary Ned Fotis would lie on the grass at her rural Midwestern home, gazing at changing patterns in the clouds, wondering if the sky looked the same in France, in Africa, in ??.  Her questions were answered years later when, along with her peripatetic Greek husband and toddler son, she was plucked from the security of their New England suburb and plunked into Cairo, a place she had earlier vowed she would never return to.  Her letters and reflections humorously follow her growing family as they face challenges (“Mommy, there was a cobra in the playground today”) and delights (yes, there IS a rabbit in the moon—in Southeast Asia, that is) of six years of expatriate life in Africa and Asia in the 1980s.  “Well, I’ve seen the pyramids—and never again as long as I live will I ever set foot in this country again!”  I announced as we boarded the plane and left the desert sands behind. Two years later, we moved to Cairo.  No wonder I was a reluctant expatriate. My first experience with Egypt had been a combination business trip/honeymoon for which I was ill-prepared.  Clad in jeans and tee-shirts, whisked from the airport from our overnight flight from South Africa, we were—to our amazement—escorted to the presidential suite of a new luxury hotel overlooking the Nile.  Due to a shortage of hotel rooms and series of miscommunications,  and unable to switch hotels until the next day, we spent our first night in these “luxurious” surroundings, quickly learning that all that glitters is not gold.  Perched on a French provincial settee, surrounded by marble tables, bizarre crystal lamps, incredibly ornate furniture and watered silk wallpaper, I gazed out of one of our many bay windows overlooking the Nile to the splendor of Cairo’s domed and minaret-dotted skyline.  We had—for the two of us—three bathrooms (the “green room,” the “brown room” and the “blue room”); it took us a while to learn which one had a functioning shower, which one to use for a toilet that flushed, and which one’s faucet didn’t drip—no wonder there were three of them, as we needed all three.  In addition, we had three balconies with chairs and tables (where were our friends so we could throw a party?) and three separate living rooms, or perhaps I should say salons, with (dusty) crystal chandeliers, (cracked) marble tables and (uncomfortable) brocade and silk-upholstered furniture.  Oh, where to sit?  Where to sit?  We soon emerged from our awestruck state as we explored our surroundings and realized that we were indeed in Egypt, and therefore:  Not one of the three built-in radios worked; there were glasses, but no water to drink; there were oriental carpets, but we had to hopscotch over the cigarette ashes; none of the three bathtubs had been cleaned, which was odd considering that water spurted from the showerhead sporadically and without provocation, and the suite’s elegantly molded and gilded doors were covered with black fingerprints.  Nonetheless, we were humbled, clad as we were, to be “presidential” for a night. The next day we removed ourselves to Cairo’s legendary Shepherd Hotel, first built in 1814, famed as an historic hotel which hosted emperors, kings and queens.  We soon discovered to our dismay that the original structure had burned down during the rebellion against King Farouk in 1952, and that the present Soviet-style structure bore the name only, not even the same location.  We were more down to earth in our spartan surroundings with early American motel furnishings with a little fringe added for the oriental touch.  The Persian carpets’ brilliant hues were obscured by strata of overlying dirt (which dynasty?), further blurred by the funereal pall cast by what appeared to be torchieres straight from a funeral parlor.  We did enjoy our several balconies overlooking Cairo’s noisy and chaotic street scene, so much better viewed from above.  Eventually we plunged in, accosted by frenetic guides awaiting their prey, much as it must have been for centuries, or should I say millennia?  After several hours of touring, we escaped the busy street scene with what we thought would be a relaxing sailboat ride on the Nile, cut short when the boat’s real owner rowed up, yelling and screaming, forced us onto another boat, threatened to extort double-payment and called the police when we refused.  Meanwhile, the boatman who literally “took us for a ride” and whom we had paid generously, fled the scene, leaving us to deal with the boat’s owner and the police, surrounded by a crowd of curious bystanders—most of Cairo, it seemed to us, except for “the guy in a long brown robe” who was surely by now well on his way to Luxor.

RESOURCE LINKS FOR EGYPT About Moving to Egypt Information about moving to Egypt. Articles on Living and Investing in Egypt A Complete section of Articles about Egypt. Embassies & Consulates for Egypt Embassy & Consulate web sites & contact numbers worldwide. Banks of Egypt Banks of Egypt - Africa Banks Section. Egypt: Government & Country Information Information in Egypt about the country, weather, Governments and much more! Business, Economy & Real Estate for Egypt Including Banks for Egypt. Jobs in Egypt Part of the EscapeArtist overseas job index. Maps of Egypt A large number of differing Egyptian maps, including city maps. Newspapers & Media for Egypt Escape Artist World Press is a growing index on this site. Egypt: Art & Culture Art and Culture in Egypt. Links, links & more links Including Search Engines for Egypt. Real Estate In Egypt Current real estate listings of Egyptian properties. Education Resources for Egypt Education and Schools in Egypt. Egypt: Travel & Tourism Travel, Tourism, Travel Guides, Vacations, Car Rentals, Resorts, Accomodations, etc. Previous articles on Egypt: Sinai Desert: Diving in Dahab There’s no place on earth like Dahab – a palm fringed bay in the midst of a vast arid landscape - an intoxicating mix of desert, Bedouin culture....and diving. The sand meets the sea in a most dramatic way and a fringing reef stretches further than the eye can see. The best bit? Many of the good dive sites can only be reached by camel!! The Sinai Egypt is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, but most visitors see very little of what this fabulous country has to offer. Everyone wants to join the hoards visiting the Pyramids, The Valley Of the Kings and Abu Simbel. Everyone dreams of a Nile Cruise, all things that you should do at least once, but what of the rest of the country? Unhappily Egypt has one of the lowest rates of return visit in the world, perhaps because it has not sufficiently promoted the rest of its many attractions. Notes From The Egyptian Desert About two hours out of Cairo on the road to Bahariya Oasis, we turn east into the desert. At first it’s what is called “black desert”. Billions of tiny pebbles and ancient shells have worked their way to the surface and cover the sand in a dark blanket. This is treacherous to drive on and our two Bedouin guides, Mohamed and Salah, prefer sand runs which are solider and more dependable. It’s a fast exciting bumpy ride until we come to the edge of the escarpment. The first level of the valley floor is about 100 meters below us; the drivers skirt the edge of the drop coming heart-stopping close to the edge at times, and driving over slopes that tilt the Toyota Land-Cruisers at scary angles toward the drop. Essential reading for anybody interested in the opportunities that telecommuting,  can offer.

We were finally getting settled in our New England suburb, I had at last made some friends in the neighborhood, and our son was just a year old.  Life was good.  How could we possibly be uprooted to go back THERE—and with a baby!?!  Well, thank God we did.  Those two years in Cairo stretched to three and then four, and more.  When we did eventually depart, it was with great sorrow on my part, as I grew to love that crazy and exasperating place.  The only consolation was that we were leaving for another adventure, an assignment in Thailand, which couldn’t have been more different—where yells were replaced by whispers, brusqueness by refinement, sand by water, and camels and donkeys by elephants and water buffalo. 

I was a reluctant expatriate no more. And from the Egypt years…

Mummies and Mud
With mummy wrappings protruding from our pockets and shirts, we sifted through the crumbling mud bricks first molded perhaps 4,000-5,000 years ago.  The original straw remains in these ancient building blocks, many now a fine powder forming wonderful landslides for Jared and his friend on the lower half of this Hawara pyramid near the fringes of the Fayoum oasis several hours south of Cairo.  The upper level remains very nearly perfect, and we observed how each mud brick, perhaps sixteen inches long, rested on those beneath.  The immutability of stone is omnipresent here in Egypt, but we were surprised at the longevity of this unfired mud brick.

We wandered through the extensive burial ground and ancient labyrinth at the base of the pyramid, where pieces of hand-woven linen peeked through the powdery soil, some still covering bones.  One teenaged boy in our party uncovered TWO mummies!  The rest of us stumbled among multifarious bones and cloth mummy wrappings.  (An embassy employee wife later told me of uncovering an entire mummy head in her garden shed, perhaps left by a previous tenant.  In fact, so many mummies have been unearthed from the Egyptian soil that “mummy” became a generic commodity in England in the 1800s.)

In the beginning, I carefully sneaked a tiny one-inch square piece of the ancient cloth into my pocket.  One hour later, this “pharaonic fabric” had become so common that I was rejecting anything under eight inches long.  And then my interest turned to pottery shards—chunks of ancient amphora, water or storage jars buried with the dead to provide ample sustenance for their eternal journey.   We gradually discarded our November jackets, sweaters and hats, and stood—quite hot!—in short sleeves, basking under the same sun and lovely cloudy skies that canopied those early workers who—brick by brick—built this pyramid.  I looked to my right—and saw my son in a tiny burial pit, digging away with a leg bone. 

With that, we departed for Fayoum, desert oasis a hundred and twenty kilometers south of Cairo, known for its straw baskets, as well as the world-famous 2,000-year old Fayoum Portraits, individual representative funerary masks painted during the Roman period on small boards to be placed over mummies’ faces.  To see the Fayoum Portraits, however, one must travel to museums in the US, England, France, Germany, Russia and Greece, as well as Cairo.

As usual, I was in search of typical Egyptian arts and crafts for the Christmas bazaar to be held in one week—enough to call for a two-car convoy on a beautiful Friday.  After wild and frantic bargaining, we appeared to accomplish our goal for the bazaar, but a friend still wanted a very large square basket, and none remained.  Thus we loaded one basket-lady, a pretty freckled young woman with a one-month-old infant, into one of the cars and set off for her home five miles away where she assured us were hundreds more baskets—and there were!

We stopped at a typical hut village by the water pump, which seemed to be the “town hall” as well.  Girls in orange, fuchsia and purple dresses with earthenware pots and copper pans on their heads carried water for their households.  Old women (old?  perhaps thirty and up) in black sat chewing and spitting sugar cane.  As we wound through the maze of alleyways past lovely old wooden doors and iron grillwork—on mud houses with dirt floors—we threaded our way in and out of groups of children, and then the entire passage was blocked by a camel, bearing four times its volume in sugarcane. 

We ducked into a doorway with ducks and hens—and finally reached the basket-lady’s house, where we all bought more than we needed at more than we should have paid.  The beauty of some of the people, the friendliness of nearly all, the poverty yet resilience of the human spirit amid the beauty of the palm trees, decorative brickwork, and colorful garb contrasted with the squalor—runny noses, fly-infested eyes, deformities.  We were all appreciative for our brief glimpse into village life and somehow more quiet and thoughtful—and thankful—as we drove away.

Dubai: A Jewel In The Middle East: A Modern City On The Persian Gulf - - Set against the backdrop of sand and sea is a remarkable city. Dubai, once little more than a sleepy backwater town, has sprung magically out of this desert wilderness in the last thirty or so years to become a modern, cosmopolitan city whose inhabitants have arrived from the four corners of the globe to embrace a liberalism not enjoyed anywhere else in the Middle East.  This odd hybrid of Baghdad, Bombay and Phoenix is the new Mecca for a host of nationalities: Arabs, Indians, Filipinos, Iranians, Russians, Europeans and Americans.