You know you are actually living in a third world country when

This post concerns a variety of domestic and life situations involving: dirt floors, water, electricity, inside cats that should be outside, busrides, phones, lukewarm milk, donkeys, garbage collection, and random broken bones...
My floors needed to be fixed in my apartment and they spent 5 days repairing them. This means I spent 2 days with a sandbox in my living room, because they insulate with sand here, and then three days of being kicked out of my apartment until anywhere from 6pm-10pm. Because we left our windows open to let in fresh air after they treated the floors, a cat jumped into our apartment. Not just a cat, the cat; the cat of nightmares; it was a magical cat, all gray and black and huge and ugly and hiding in impossible spaces and creeping behind shadows and jumping out when I attempted to walk to the bathroom at 5:30am before a field trip. Another cat just had babies in front of the apartment next to ours. When I say "just had babies", I mean they are a few inches long... creepy kitties.
Our electricity sometimes flickers, and yesterday, our water went out and proceeded to stay out for about 19 hours--8 girls, 2 invalids, 5th floor, no water, no problem. We survived, but have decided to invest in a hand of Fatima and an eye of Horus (double dipping can't hurt, right?)to ward off the evil jinn in our apartment.
Sometimes our phone stops working, our garbage is collected from the fire escape by people who haul it away in a donkey cart, and milk (with an initial sketchy pasturization process) is not refrigerated here.
When I was on a fieldtrip, the clutch on the bus randomly broke and the busdriver jimmied it back into working order before we were able to go back three hours Cairo.
In summary? First, Egypt really is a third world country. Second of all, I love this place so much!!! Where else do I get to go camping inside my own apartment and chase cats outside the house and down the fire escape by using a squeegie mop??? It's utterly fantastic and I am enjoying life in my ghetto-fabulous apartment, with my one broken-footed roommate (she fell into a pothole) and my other broken-shouldered roommate (she fell off of a horse).