The hunt for an Apartment (it makes Red October look like a well-signed exit on an American highway)

It is said that finding an apartment, a place to live, especially for a short period of time, is difficult in any city. I can attest to this fact, having spent two torturous weeks in search of an apartment last year in DC. But really, while the actual emailing and endless Craigslist reading and responding are painful, the apartment search itself it not terrible or dangerous or particularly dank and dreary. Even better for me, I found a place with the Kreutzbergs and was spared the agony of outfitting or in any other way dealing with apartment hunting. Assuming I had not found this ideal position, I would still have been protected from sketchy persons, cheating landlords, and other unsavory individuals by things like laws. By contrast, exhibit Egypt. I had an apartment, and then I didn’t, and so I spent two weeks searching the web and asking around about a new apartment. One person at the university told me “not to worry”, he would “take care of it”. I come back from vacation with my parents and, surprise surprise, he has taken care of nothing. Rather, I have nowhere to live and only the amazing wonderfulness of my parents saves my poor self from being homeless in Cairo as they agree to pay for my hotel room. But on the last day, we call one of the numbers on the poorly-spelled “I can find you an apartment” signs in Zamalek. He shows us about 6 apartments after promising he’ll show us “only 2” and one has a staircase darker than the mastaba I crawled into earlier this year and is one of the most unhygienic, dank places I have ever encountered. It reminded me of the crack-den in a dark American movie—badly scuffed furniture, barely-working appliances, water stains and dirty rugs, odd boards over one window, and probably a zillion insects crawling about.
Finally, he agrees to let me meet this “German Girl” who is looking for a roommate. This takes a couple days to accomplish, but when we finally go up to the apartment and an American girl with an Italian parent who went to high school in France answers the door, I am not even phased. And even better, the apartment will work! I talk with the girl and we agree that I finally have a place to live in Cairo—however, due to conflicting schedules it will take me two days to actually move in.
Before moving in, I decide it would be wise to invest in a set of sheets so that I can be sure to have a nice, clean top and bottom sheet, as well as a blanket. Now, I could go to the store in Zamalek, where I will be overcharged by the worth of my firstborn female child in the Middle East or I could be sneaky and go to one of the textiles districts. Now in a place brimming with textiles—everything from gossamer curtains and bolts of tapestry fabric to barely-there panties and nightgowns large enough use as a rain-fly on my tent, one would think there would be no problem finding sheets. After all, towels and lace netting are in abundance! Twenty minutes later on a back alley in the area I come upon a store that appears to have at least some of the ubiquitous heavily embroidered bed linens. These sheets would put a Victorian decorator to shame with the sheer magnitude of the gold, sparkly flowers covering every possible inch of fabric. By this point, an older gentleman with some English has been brought in to translate my exclamations of horror in English and my “la la las” into similar exclamations of horror in Arabic. I finally get the concept of “no flowers, no decoration at all” across and instead of leading me to a less-visible stack of plastic enclosed sheets I am led to the back, toward large bolts of cotton. Oh dear, I begin to think as he says, “Good quality cotton. What color you like?” Cautiously pointing toward bright pink, the only available shade that doesn’t remind me of rainbow sherbert ice cream, the bolt is immediately examined, I stutter out “itneen [two]” in response the an inquiry of “how many each sheet, pillow?” and call it good. The fabric is cut, taken away to be sown into sheets and pillowcases as I wait, and I am cajoled into a chair to wait 10 minutes. So I wait… and wait… and wait. The well-meaning Coptic store owners and workers don’t stare ridiculously, but are not quite sure what to make of this young American girl in there shop and attempt to ask her simple Arabic questions. Confronted with men who have small, secret cross tattoos on their wrists (a common practice) and who speak no English, I settle on the “nod and smile” method while attempting to read a book on Chinese individualism. Weird. An hour later my sheets and pillowcases, all in shocking pink, emerge from the outside street, fresh from the sewing room where they have been created. Who knew getting sheets could be this difficult? By this point, it’s 8pm and I trudge back across the 26th of July Bridge (and literally beat off a 9-year-old who thinks it’s funny to run by and smack my ass), only to receive a voicemail telling me that my new roommate is still not at the apartment and I am still without a key. So I find a coffee shop and sit. Today, I learned several lessons: it will always be harder than I thought it would be; don’t go shopping without provisions as you may be forced to stumble into a food establishment salivating and delirious after having not eaten in over 12 hours; and somehow, I don’t know how, it really always does work out in the end.