Salman in Cairo

Thursday night, the beginning of the weekend here, and officially my second week at work has finally come to an end. Wow. Im tired.

Life here basically transalates into PERPETUALLY being busy and doing something and hence, perPETUALLY being exhausted. life starts at 9 am when i wake up (or aroudn that time atleast :P depends on how crazy the night before was...thank god i have flexi hours) i hit work by around 10 am where i check my mail... go around the office meeting everyone... check my mail (both personal and business) and then boom works starts hardcore... and when i mean harcore i mean that in two weeks at the office iv probably done more pure hardwork then i ever did in four years of college :P For example... today i had meetings with finance to approve the pricing structure of two different advertising products that i had proposed, then a meeting with the art department and the technical department to talk about the implementation flow that was helping design, then sat purely with the art guy to discuss the branding of the new products .... today i was supposed to have a meeting with the representatives of Arab African Bank over here but that got delayed till sunday... so instead i was working on business proposal financials (so first i had to actually learn how to WRITE financials :P hahahahahaha and so the work basically continues perpetually all day long... theres always something or the other and for some reason since the day that iv gotten here they have basically put me in charge of everything... even more then the project manager.... its HARSH... definately... but if you asked me if id rather be doing this or sitting and being a paper pusher... i would definately choose this :P I spend my days doing anything but wasting time... im learning a lot... the people i work with are absolutely amazing, incredibly helpful... and theres always someone coming down upto the office to meet me and of course the necessary "Welcome to Egypt!" hahaha

But thats where the day begins... when i come home from work... im at home for a MAXIMMUM of an hour... which is basiclly the time where we wait for the rest of my two flatmates to get home. Once everyone is home... then we leave the apartment and only God knows when well get back :P In fact, usually only God knows where were going. We start the plan to go somewhere with a vague idea of whose house were going to... and from there, we head from one place to another, house hopping and shisha place hopping and going to house partys and random get togethers until godforsaken hours of the morning. Half the time we end up at peoples places and we have no idea who they are... atleast thats how it started but now a lot of the peoples whose houses we randomly showed at are now really great friends of mine... so its a great way to meet new and amazing people.

hahaha and the people iv met... wow im gonna start posting seperate posts for all of them :P

So we get home around 4am... (after weve left the house around 5 -6) sit around the house for a while just cooling down after the night... and then crash when were exhausted enough not to notice the freak springs in the bed that poke right into your back... but then... when your exhausted enough, anything feels comfortable ;)

And then,
I wake up,
at 9am
and do it
all over again.

:)

I love this city...

Posted by Salman at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments

Oh wow... this is hard :P

There are a few differences between Ramadhan at home and ramadhan here in cairo - Though the first few im gonna mention arent even regarding cairo in particularly. Basically while we were in college - fasting consisted of staying up until 4 am eating and partying... crashing at 4 am and waking up at 4pm - to sit around a while and crib about who was gonna get us food (whcih invariably someone did) so sit and chow down at around 5. Classes? What classes :P

Here its pretty harsh... i cant wake up at 4 am to eat because it totally kills my timetable... so instead before going to sleep around 2 in the morning or so me and Kent chow down (Kent = my canadian roomate who is also fasting... but more on that later) we go to sleep... i wake up around 9 o clock to head to the office at 10... now this is where the difficult bit starts. Firstly... i walk to the office in the cairo sun.. which isnt particularly pleasant... to ride up an elevator 15 stories that crawls insanely slow while at the same time has absolutely no ventillation... by the time i reach the office im parched... then i gotta sit down for the next 6-7 hours and WORK. Now THATS something i am SO not used to... trying to concentrate over 6-7 hours without any chai or water really gets to you... especially if the work your doing is creative - lethargy doesnt really help at all. Food is not the issue... hydration and caffiene is the issue :p

As for Kent hahahaha hes a charecter. My canadian born and bread friend has never fasted a day in his life... and i guess he wants to see how far he can push himself... interestingly enough - hes placed ME as his guage - he says hell fast as long as i do.. because supposedly... im the "pro at this fasting shit" :P SO hahahaha im inclined towards the idea of keeping it up just to see if this white white WHITE (the whitest man iv ever seen actually :P) man can actually pull through this purely on strength of will. Honestly.. hes impressed me already.

BUt aarrghh.. wqquarter to five shoudl have left the office a while ago.. so im gonna head home to cook some food for my iftaar... itll prolly be a combination of left over fast food mixed with whatever fresh i can find in the kitchen... yeah yeah im a regular gourmet shef :P

Catch you guys laters....

oh oh oh on the plus side me and kent are always trying to find new places to eat.. so yesterday for iftaar we found this beautiful little lebanese place which was absolutely aweSOME... interestingly enough what we call seekh kabebs back home are called koftas here... weird na?

hmm oh.. and im practically the only individual on my FLOOR whose fasting :P

Posted by Salman at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments

Hello all

Its me FINALLY posting pictures for everyone who wanted to see what i was upto and everything thats going on... If you wanna take a look go here Simply because i cant be bothered to seperately post them here on this website :P

But yeah when i get the time i will...

Posted by Salman at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Comments

After first having my traineeship cancelled, then by some miricle of God and a little bit of personal intervention having my traineeship reinstated - only to have my visa not arrive and not arrive again and flying to islamabad just to see what was going on just to find out that my travel agent had been screwing around and THEN having my visa arrive at the last possible day so that i could fly out three days later without even getting the chance to meet half of my friends....

Im Finally in Cairo.

WoW.

Where to even start - where everything starts i guess... at the beginning. THe flight was pretty uneventful - was hassled a bit by the pakistani immigration guys for the simple fact that this was the first time i was flying. They asked me to sit and wait and after waiting for almost half an hour when i confronted the same guy again he took a look at it and let me through - not a word not nothing. First flight from karachi to Dubai, sat next to a pakistani guy whos parents had settled in the UK so we had a nice talk about this and that. Landing at dubai airport was uneventful but walking into the airport itself was wow. THe place is less an airport and more of a shopping wall... with massive 12 foot screens lining the walls almost 30 feet high. within an hour i was on a flight from Dubai to Cairo, sitting next to a dubai resident who was going to cairo for business and didnt really have anything nice to say about the place.

Then came cairo.

Hahahaha my first reaction of the airport was like WOW this place is even worse then islamabads airport before its renovation (and anyone who knows islamabads airport knows that its still pretty bad :P) Got in line to get my visa approved and my entry stamp put on. I had been told by an uncle that i would probably get hassled at the airport simply because of the fact that i was pakistani - interestingly enough that never happened... i was asked simply if i had anything to declare... one of my bags was given a check over and then they let me out. When i walked out rolling a luggage cart that refused to work looking for someone - anyone wearing an aeisec t-shirt I knew that someone named Alia was supposed to pick me up but i had no idea who she was or what she looked like. Took a round got out and was suddenly asked by by a very pretty girl if i was Salman and lo and behold.. that was alia.

We grabbed my things, and drove out of the airport. First impression of cairo city? Very VERY nice. A lot like karachi with nicer cars, nicer buildings, AMAZING roads (so far) and absolutely MASSIVE. Driving driving drivingg driving drove over a bridge that absolutely never seemed to end. It had to be atleast 4-5 km long! From the airport we took about an hours drive down to Cairo University. There i met a lot of the students who were a part of AIESEC Cairo University. I was there about 45 minutes - after which we packed my things into a car, and went for "falouka" which is basically a sailboat along the Nile (all of this is straight from the airport :P) We met right outside the Four Seasons (impressive hotel) and next thing you know im sitting and thinking WOW... im ACTUALLY sailing on the NIle river - a year ago i never thought THAT would happen :P I met my roomate Kent from Canada - who had spent some time in India before coming here so we had a great time while he practiced some of his Hindi and we spoke of partition :P Around 12 o clock we got home to find out that the guy who was at the flat (and with the only key) was out partying and didnt expect to be back for a while... so we FINALLY somehow (there was a lot of conversation in arabic that just sounded like someone reciting the Quran to me :P) but finally we got the landlady to open the place. Got home sat around for a while and then crashed at around 2 am. That was my first day in Cairo.
The second morning i woke up early cause Miguel - my second flat mate froom mexico (who came home eventually at like 4 am) works at the same place as i do... so he was supposed to take me to work the first day and i had no idea when he would leave. Eventually he woke up bleary eyed from the night before but eventually we got to work... and wow... what an experience THAT was.

We started at the 12th floor... and Miguel took me around and introduced me to just about everyone in the office who had arrived by around 1030 (we have pretty flexible hours here i was later to found out)... so ahesta ahesta i made my way up the floors meeting everyone along the way until i reached the the 15nth floor where i have my office. Walking into the office was an experience... wooden floored with a large open space, full of incredibly hyper people who literally jumped up off their chairs to meet me with big smiles. One entire wall is made of glass - and because we have a little park right in front of the office - we get to see literally all of Cairo sprawled out in front of us every day. Here i met Karim - my incredibly energetic boss whose gave me a 45 minute CRASH COURSE in everything thats been going on...which was a total mindful - talked to me about different ideas and proposals that i had and because of something i said basically in right there and then told me that i would be giving a presentation to all the heads of departments in the middle of next month. Wow.

Straight away iv been put onto work on the largest project going on in the company at the moment - and not only that theyve basically given me more control then even the project manager so im designing the pricing scheme for a combination of new advertising products that were coming out with - as well as getting my hands into just about every aspect of the project from page design, page flow charts as well as getting into the branding of each of our advertising products. Its really really hectic and i always have a LOT of work on my hands there are days that i stay in the office until 8pm just because theres so much to get done and the deadline is basically - NOW.

Its crazy hectic - lots of work - but atleast its quality work. Im learning a lot, my work environment and my coworkers are amazingly friendly and helpful and whenever i need anything there are multiple people ready to lend a helpful hand. Though yeah if i had a paper pushing job i would be more relaxed have more time on my hands to do things and basically not come home from work exhausted out of my mind :P but this is quality work, REAL work where the decisions that i get to make actually make a difference in the grander scheme of things. That allows not only for my work to be fulfilling to a certain extent but it also means that i learn a lot of different things from various different people.



CAIRO
Cairo? Well... everyone who said that Cairo is a lot like Karachi was perfectly right. The traffic interestingly enough better - but traffic jams here are worse because in Karachi you have the advantage that if people get stuck, they always find a way around and so traffic is constantly moving... here when it gets jammed it gets REALLY jammed :P The style of the shops, the fact that you have to bargain for just about everything and the fact that when they see a foreigner they automatically try to rip them off is the same as well :P one of the advantages i have though is that for SOME reason every single person i meet automatically assumes that im Either egyptian or at the least arab. Which is why when Kent goes out shopping he ALWAYS gets ripped off, and when i go out shopping people take a good 5 minutes to understand the fact that i dont speak arabic! (Even though im constantly repeating la arabi la arabi i.e. no arabic over and over again :P I have to specifically point to myself and say PAKISTAN before i get an... ahhhhhh... pakistAAAniii and then we proceed to bargain and haggle with numbers and hand signals :P


LIFE AFTER WORK
Every day after the office is something or the other... at the least you go over to a friends place or people come over and you just hang out. The rest of the trainees here are great and are constantly looking for something fun to do. At the most ill get out somewhere to do something special, either getting out for sheesha (they have an AWESOME variety of flavors here, the other day i had CANTALOUPE flavoured sheesha which was absolutely awesome!) I havent been to very many touristy places yet... im basically thinking that i have six months to look at tourists sites... though i did go to this one special place which is basically a really high spot on the outskirts of the city where you can ssee ALL of cairo spread out below you. It was beautiful and for the umpteenth time i cursed myself for not carrying my camera along with me. (Our plans are mostly along the lines... lets get out for a bite to eat and then they just develop and modify into something larger then that :PJust yesterday what started out as a few friends heading back to our place just to hang out and chill turned into something like 15-16 people showing up... half of whome i was meeting for the first time incluDING a new trainee who had literally JUST gotten off the plane from Turkey. The poor fellow stayed for so long he eventually fell asleep on one of the couches :P The event turned into a dancing gaala with my trying to teach miguel how to dance like a pakistani (i.e. move his SHOULDERS and not his hips :P) followed by him trying to teach all of us latin dancing (MOVE YOUR HIPS not your SHOULDERS!!! hahahahahaha) which was an absolute failure :P I swear mexicans have more joints in their hips then we do :P We then got a performance from Harrision (an absolute crackpot of a trainee from Nigeria who has just gotten a fulltime job here) who showed us a traditional Nigrerian dance! The best thing about ALL of this... SOMEBODY decided to grab my camera and videotape the entire event!!! Talk about absolutely hilarious viewing :P


FOOD
Hmmm the food itself was DEFINATELY a surprise. My best explanation for it is that almost ALL of the food here has been very similar to desi food... and while definately full of FLAVOUR... cOMPLEtely lacks spices. I end up pouring chilli sauce over just about everything just to get a bit of spiciness in the food and this is ME... the guy who never put spicy sauce on ANYTHINg cause our food was spicy enough. There is a whole collection of food that we have no equivalent of in Pakistan and im having a great time basically closing my eyes and picking something just to see what it tastes like. The rest of the trainees get a major kick out of the fact that i can READ arabic (even though i cant understand a word of it :P) and so i can generally navigate around a menu (NONE of which are printed in ANY english).
hmmm Well its midnight here, and though so far there hasnt been a night that iv slept before 4 am... tomorrow is the first day of Ramadan and im inshallah going to be fasting. I dont know if ill be able to continue considering the fact that my stomach is still settling down to the water here... but tomorrow i definately plan on fasting. So i better crash now if i plan on getting ANY sleep whatsoever.

Keep checking in here for more updates.... ill write whenever i can.

And yes, pictures pictures pictures... ill upload them whenever i get the chance too... things have just been crazy hectic here so far - especially work. So soon ;)

I hope everyone, anywhere in the world is reading this is smiling and happy and having a blast. Vicky get off your butt and start having a good time :P your not gonna get to go through this experience again :)

Posted by Salman at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments