June 12, 2005

Usually Emily does the blogs, but since it's been about six months I figure I'm due.

I know that we've discussed Egyptians' fascination with our dog, but there were some interesting things that happened over the weekend.

Thursday night our doorbell rang and when I answered, I found our teenage neighbor and about ten of her friends. Apparently, they were having an end-of-the-school-year party. Anyway, I think they were playing our equivalent of "Truth or Dare." The "dare" for one of the girls was to come over and pet our dog, which she was unwilling to do. After a few minutes of the typical giddiness, they went back to their apartment. Then, the dad (Kamel) came over to ask us if we could bring our dog over to scare the girls, which we were happy to do. We spent the next twenty minutes showing off Leia's tricks and the girls were finally able to touch the dog. Only after I locked her head between my legs, though. Before we left, the eldest son asked if we could bring our dog back the next night when his friends were going to be there. Interestingly, the one that seemed the most afraid of the dog was Kamel, who happens to be a rather large, tough individual. Apparently, having a dog brought to your house in Egypt might be compared to bringing a lion over in the States.

Today, our school brought us to Mogamma, an enormous government building, to finally get our resident visas. Everyone assured us that this would be our last time to have to go. (This was our fifth or sixth visit, mind you) We were hopeful, but we had our doubts. The man from the school who is responsible for all our documents (Sameer) sat us down and handed us the papers to fill out. At this point we got very upset. The papers he gave us happened to be the very same documents we had filled out twice already! To make a long story short, we did not get our visas. We have pretty much given up on the hope of ever getting our resident visas. We can't place all the blame on Sameer, but on the inefficiency of the Egyptian beaurocratic system. I mean, there are no computers used. They still do all this by hand! Before you go to bed tonight, I want you all to thank God for being in America.

To end on a positive note, we are getting very excited to have my parents visiting us soon. We are going to hit the typical Egyptian sites and top it off with a relaxing few days in the beach resort town of Sharm El Sheikh. Then its back to America for about a month. Yeah!!!!!!!