1008 miles east...

or 1622km for the rest of the world.

We've been meaning to announce this on the blog for some time now...but just haven't had the time to get around to it, but we slack off on the blog a lot!

But next year, we will be living in a new country, 1008 miles east of Cairo.

Things didn't quite work out the way we wanted them to with my school this year. We absolutely love Cairo and Egypt and while it may not be the easiest life here, we are very sad to be leaving. But things just didn't work out for us to stay, so it's time for our overseas adventure to move east.

I was hired at what seems to be a wonderful school where I will be given a lot of opportunities to grow professionally, which I didn't get here. We also will be able to accomplish more of our financial goals there...and our travel goals, which is a huge perk. It may not have the same excitement, culture and charm of Cairo, but it's the right move for us at this time.

During my spring break, I took a trip over to our new home to check things out, spend some time at the school, but the main purpose was to move over many of our belongings ahead of time so we didn't have to trek them back to the states over the summer just to bring them all the way back this way again come August. I took the trip on my own while Mike stayed behind.

Here was my flight path....

Kuwait is, obviously, a lot different from Cairo. It was very organized and very westernized. Before I went, a friend told us that Kuwait is like the 51st state. Going there, I found that statement proved very true. It felt like I had just traveled to America....just with a lot more Arabs walking around. While I was there I stayed with my new principal and she showed me around. We went to different grocery stores and malls. I also spent two days going to the school and meeting people and watching how things work. The school is huge and has an enormous amount of resources and everyone was really nice. The staff were all happy and laughing and had life in them. A very different environment from where I am working now. That was the best thing to see. They seemed to deal with a lot of the silly BS that I deal with, but not to the point where they have become totally beaten down about it.

Kuwait will be a very different experience for us, but we are excited for what lies ahead.

Here are some pictures from my trip.

View from my principal's flat

Zoom-in of the skyline

Clean, organized paved streets

Stop lights and cars in lanes

Arabian Gulf

Very western stores

Soooo many western products

View from inside The Avenues, one of the big malls ---see the men in white, those are Kuwaiti men :)

The classrooms are HUGE!

You can just see from this picture how many resources are available

Kuwait coastline at sunrise

Construction work in Egypt

I was in the construction field for about 10 years before coming to Cairo. All I have to say is "WOW!" The things they do here are crazy, no regulations are in place obviously by what I have seen. Don't get me wrong I and plenty of others I worked with bent the rules here and there but not as bad as it is here. I would NEVER and mean EVER do construction here in Egypt. I have framed plenty of houses in my years in construction or service something that might have been on a roof. But I always was safe about it, we were required by one company that if we even placed a single foot on a roof we had to be tied off. Here not so much. The pictures below show you what I am talking about.

 The first two picture are of an Egyptian man climbing the antenna tower where most of the mobile dishes are for cell phones and a couple dishes for TV. However he climbed this antenna with no kind of safety equipment whatsoever. He was also alone, so if he fell who knows how long he would be on that roof before some one found him. We live on the 9th and he was above the height of our floor, the top of the antenna is probably 5 stories from the roof. The second two photos are of two men servicing a AC unit. This was right in front of my building too. The first picture shows how high off the street he is. He is eight floors up from the ground. The man with him is only standing there I thought he was at least holding onto the other guys belt loop but after I put the photo on my computer i realized he was just holding the wall up. Again no harness, no safety whatsoever.

These are some of the examples I have taken pictures of since I have been here. But the list of things goes on forever. Their scaffolding here is just timber tied by rope. No nuts and bolts or anything like what we used back home in the States. I have seen men climbing ropes to the roof or floor of building they are working on because there is no elevator installed yet. Even though there are stairs going to where they need to be they choose the most direct path. They work in flip flops here doing major construction, I am not sure they even know what steel toed boots are here. Manual labor is a must if you want to do construction here. I have watched on many occasions men unloading well over 500 bricks from a truck by hand, this taking a full 8 hour day to get done.

The one thing that I will say however, is that I have a new appreciation for the resources I have back home to do construction. Back home you very rarely had to hand drive a nail, cut a piece of wood by hand unless it was finish work or even hand tighten a screw. Here there is no power tools except for tile saws which are not wet tiles saws. So they make cuts with a dry tile saw and again no safety they don't even wear eye protection. Watching these men build something is exhausting to even watch. Day in, day out hand driving framing, cutting wood by hand, everything is tightened by hand. It makes me have new respect for the people that did construction before all the glory of power tools in the States. I think many of us in the construction field would only work half a day if you took our power saw, compressors and cordless drills away from us.

The only other thing that baffles me is how much rebar the use in their concrete work. They use probably quadruple the amount that we do back home. That being said it is understandable seeing that all their building here are made out of concrete and brick. They first start off with their base slab and then go from there. The do floor by floor of concrete pillars and the floor. After they complete those steps they go back and fill in the openings that make the wall with brick. The use no wood for framing here except on the top floor units. They use wood to frame out the windows but then remove it after the brick has set. As they do the brick the run their conduit for electric, phone/cable and also water. After all those steps they then add a stucco to the exterior and interior walls. They use different custom concrete finishing tools to make crown molding on the inside and outside details of the buildings. That's where the biggest thing I noticed that is different, their finish work is flawless, perfectly level tile floors, perfectly textured walls and straight that can be expected. Seeing I don't think I have ever seen a level being used.

Even though I would love to learn from a seasoned "finish carpenter" here I could never get passed the fact that everyday I would go to work, I would literally wonder if I would make it home without a broken bone, a laceration or even worse. In all what I have seen they really could use someone to come here and teach some onsite safety training to get rid of the many onsite injuries here. Would I ever do construction work in Egypt?? No! They couldn't pay enough for me to even except a supervisor position where I don't even do any hands on labor. I wouldn't want to live with the burden of someone being severely injured or dieing. The culture of work safety here is nonexistent!

Spring Break - Gouna, Egypt

My Spring Break from school didn't start until April 25th! Probably the latest Spring Break in history.

We planned a 6 day, 5 night trip to Gouna. Gouna is a small resort town in Egypt set along on the Red Sea home to 17 hotels. It was the perfect place for us to escape to and be able to really let off some stress and get refreshed enough to finish off the school year.

We stayed at the Steigenberger Golf Resort.

We woke up and had a cup of coffee on our little room patio, with this view.








We spent our days laying out enjoying the sun and sea.

And our evenings taking a tuc tuc into town and eating a nice dinner and then hanging out with shisha and good conversation....and some Monopoly Deal!

In the back of the tuc tuc

On my birthday we took a boat out to Mahmya  Island (pronounced  mok-may-uh) to spend the day. There was a nice sandy beach there and we had our own little beach cabana of sorts. And for dinner we went to a delicious Italian restaurant owned and run by an Italian couple. It was absolutely delicious, but we are terrible at taking pictures of food....we get too excited when it comes and just dig in! Then remember the picture after we finish. Oops.

Our beach area, complete with bean bags

And the hotel sent me a surprise birthday cake when we returned from the island! .......with a trick candle!!!!!! At least they have a sense of humor!

 

It really did prove to be a very relaxing refreshed break away from the Cairo chaos.

Ahhhhhhhhh