Aussie Girl Can Hold Her Liquor – Saturday & Sunday 11 & 12 Nov 2006

Well today was such a wasted day (followed by a different sort of wasted night!).

Due to last nights waterlogged adventure I had to spend today waiting for the hot water man to come and fix the cylinder. He was suppose to come at 1pm, but over here things run on ‘Egyptian time’ so he didn’t actually get here until about 2:45pm.

I was so cranky having to wait all day for them to come. Both the owner’s son and the hot water man came to fix it. Neither of them speak English so it was a challenging encounter (used my phrasebook – pointing at the words works well!).

With that finally under control Chris and I walked down to the bakery to get some wi-fi access. On Thursday Yasser (the project sponsor) asked what we were up to this weekend. I said we didn’t have much planned so he suggested we do something Saturday night (remembering that we work Sunday to Thursday). We said sure, good idea so at 5:30pm Yasser picked us up.

We went to a restaurant in Zamalek called ‘Abu e-Sid’ - it serves traditional Egyptian food. Yasser ordered enough food to feed a small Norwegian army and we tried lots of local food. I even tried kibda - chicken liver (EEEWWWWW I guess it didn’t taste too bad, but I couldn’t get past the texture or the thought that I was eating an organ GROSS). We also had Kisch (dip), ta-miya (some kind of mashed up bean mixture rolled into balls and deep fried, like falafels and quite nice). For mains we had rabbit Mulukhiyya (a green broth thing), chicken in a walnut sauce, a fish in tomato type sauce, and a veal tagen (stew type thing, very tender). All very yummy, although I’m glad we got a variety I don’t think I could have eaten a whole plateful of any of them...except maybe the Mulukhiyya, that was nice (even with rabbit).

Anyways, we were about two-thirds of the way through dinner when another friend of Yasser’s turned up. He was an Egyptian-American. He has lived in the States most of his life and is just moving back to Egypt.

After dinner we went to The Marriot Hotel. First we looked around at the ball rooms etc – everything is SO ornate. It used to be a palace (and you can tell!). Then we went to Harry’s Pub in the Marriot.

When we sat down they were ordering drinks and of course they all got beers. Yasser asked what I wanted and I figured if I could survive the beers yesterday I should give it another go. The beer they were ordering was a Meister Max. I figured what the hell. Actually it wasn’t too bad. It’s very light in colour/flavour (if not in alcohol content – it’s an 8% alcohol beer). I was slow drinking mine, so they all had 2 to my one (but I was still doing a good job of upholding the Aussie stereotype!). Then we moved onto spirits… 3 Bacardi’s later Ayman (Yasser’s friend) decided shots were in order. Now as most of you know I don’t do shot… I don’t like them, they make me too drunk and I generally find them a bad idea. However – as they say – when in Rome…

Several tequila shots and more Bacardi later things were looking decidedly grim for my poor liver. From about midnight onwards I kept pointing out that it was a school night and that we all had to work tomorrow etc etc etc. My suggestions that we might not be fit for work if we stayed much longer were not taken seriously until about 1:30am.

By this time (4 beers and 3 tequila shots later) Chris had already spewed and I was well and truly over my limit. We got home about 2am to find more water on the kitchen floor. Not too much, nothing like yesterday – maybe 10 litres… we decided it wasn’t growing and we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from so we’d leave it till tomorrow to sort out.

After much head spinning I finally convinced my body that sleep would be the best solution to my internal ills. When my alarm went off at 7am I swear I’d only been asleep for 3 minutes…I managed to make it through the shower, got dressed and ready for work. At 8am (our normal leaving time) I yelled out to Chris to see if he was ready and he informs me that he’d texted our driver to say 8:30am instead of 8am. I called him a bastard! said I could have had another 30minutes sleep and promptly laid down on the couch.

It had been touch and go for my belly all morning so I decided to bite the bullet and made myself throw up. I felt much better and at about 9am we finally staggered down to the car. Now as you all know I can get car sick driving around the block so you can all image just how excited I was by the prospect of over half an hour in peak hour traffic to get to work. I sat in the front seat and as to be expected there were some close calls. By the time we got to work Ahmed the driver man was quite concerned for my wellbeing… I bailed out of the car and went to the edge of the grass sure it was about to be all over… after 5 minutes of feeling seedy I decided I could brave the lift. We got to the first floor and I walked straight past our office door to the bathrooms and threw up.

Even though I was throwing up nothing I still felt much better and managed to settle down at my desk and start some work. There is nothing quite like throwing up in the toilets at work because you spent the night drinking beer and doing tequila shot when you’re living in a muslin country…

Under normal circumstances I would admit to an hangover, not proudly, but prepared to take my self inflicted punishment. However, living in a country where they are not suppose to drink getting so drunk you throw up is not a good impression to make so I just said I felt a bit off… failed to mention why…

I must have been white as a ghost coz even one of the guys from work asked if I was ok! How embarrassing. I was doing some work but the progress was very slow. Lucky for me Chris was actually in worse shape than me. So much so that at one point he actually spewed in our office! Lucky for both of us I am a prepared girl and had two plastic bags (originally intended to support me through the drive to work!) so I quickly passed him a bag.

Once he’d cleaned up and returned to our office he said ‘at some point we’ll look back on this day and laugh, but not today’

Our saving grace was that we’d been out with our project sponsor, he was the one ordering tequila shots and it was about 11am and he still hadn’t showed up at work yet.

By 11:30am Chris decided that he wasn’t going to be productive today so should just go home. I was starting to recover, but knew I was still on the edge – and lets be honest there is no point being a martyr :) so at 12noon we had the driver come back and get us to take us home.

The drive home was again touch and go for me but we made it home by about 12:30pm and crawled back into bed.

Unfortunately for me at 1:30pm Ahmed (driver man) rang to make sure I was ok (I had been, coz I was asleep!). He was really sweet though, he offered to have his wife come around and look after me!! I politely declined, said I’d just sleep and I’d be fine…

Then at 2:30pm I was woken up by the door bell – it rang 10 times before I finally gave up and answered the door. Before I could answer the door though I had to retrieve my dressing gown (couldn’t go answering the door in pjs!). It was the bloody gas man – he wanted to read the meter. Once he finally communicated that to my foggy brain I let him in, then he wanted money to pay for the gas. Our gas is being paid for by the apartment owner. The gas man wasn’t coping with my explanation (and I was well and truly over trying to explain myself) so I’ve just put my hand up, said Wait! and called Ahmed and got him to explain it in Arabic. Much simpler…

With this interruption over I crawled back into bed… 20 minutes later there is another ring of the doorbell. I was a little ticked by this point… my answer at the door with basically ‘What?!?’ and its another gas man. I’m saying no, the gas man’s already been… same language barrier issues so I give up and ring Ahmed again. Turns out this guy is a gas fixer man and was I having any problems, if so he’d fix them for free. I got him to fix the auto-ignition on the plates (now only 1 is broken instead of 5!). I spent the 20 minutes he was fixing them leaning again the wall in my pj’s, hair everywhere, drinking my water and watching him try to fix the ignitions. This combined with trying to communicate in a mix of broken Arabic and English and failing to get anywhere did not make for a pleasant experience. Finally he left and I went back to bed. By now its nearly 3pm and I can’t get back to sleep… so I decided bugger it and gave up.

I got up, spent 20 minutes cleaning up the water than we found on the floor last night and were in no condition to deal with. I wonder what the gas people thought having to splash through this big puddle in the middle of the kitchen – bugger it, they interrupted my recuperative sleep, serves them right (although they probably thought crazy foreigners)

Then I spent the afternoon curled up on the couch watching the first 3 episode of Firefly and telling myself that I’ll do some work in a minute, just when this episode finishes…

Meanwhile Chris slept through all of this commotion, in fact he didn’t surface until about 6pm and was still seedy.

Anyways, that was our adventure out drinking with the client on a school night. I figure I’ve again supported the Aussie stereotype but that’s my alcohol quota done for the year! I hate to think the conversation we’ll have with Yasser when we go back to work tomorrow… Never ever ever ever again (especially not on a school night!!!!!)