Mother's Day March 21

March 21st is Mother's Day in Egypt. There was a party planned for Nardeen's grandmother, Mounira, for the evening. But generally for Bonnie and I it was a day of relaxing. I worked on this project of course through the day along with labeling pictures so we wouldn't forget where we had been or what we had done. Bonnie went to the market with Susan but unfortunately she didn't take the camera with her.

We all got up late this morning. We were really exhausted from the trip to Sharm and needed some downtime to recover. So needless to say breakfast was late but very enjoyable. Ezzat went to the shop along with Susan and Nardeen had some studying to do. So Bonnie and I were left on our own. Bonnie decided to go to the shop after awhile and I stayed at the flat and worked on the pictures and blog. Once I completed my tasks or should say got tired of working on them I too wandered over to the shop. The shop is a congregating place for the extended family of the Eshak's. One of Nardeen's uncles has a shop right across the street that sells tools and paint. His shop is kind of like a hardware store. This results in members of the families always dropping in at one place or the other. As soon as the word got out that we were at the shop many people dropped by to greet and talk with us. Of course there was always the challenge of language. We speak no Arabic and most of Nardeen's relatives spoke little or no English. We still got along just fine and communicated just fine. The only problem was that it usually took longer than one would expect to get your point across. We talked about the same things we do in this country, relatives, religion, and politics. All were interesting discussions.

Early in he evening we took Susan out to purchase her Mother's Day present. Nardeen and Ezzat got her flowers and a new cell phone. It's really a good thing they took Susan with them to purchase the cell phone because they would have bought her a pink one and she didn't was that color she wanted a silver one. Of course for the rest of the time we were with them I think Nardeen used her mother's cell phone most of the time and I don't think Susan made even one call one it. When her phone rang she knew it was Nardeen or her husband because they were the only ones that had the number.

We closed up the shop at about 10 PM that evening. 10 PM is early to close in Egypt. Often the shops are open until 1 AM or later but then it was Mother's Day and we had a party to go to. When we arrived at Nardeen's grandmother's house we were ushered into the middle of the sitting room so the other present could surround us and talk with us. Even though it was Mother's Day we were treated like guests of honor. There were also two birthdays to celebrate that night. Of course along with all the chatting and fellowship there was food. There was a lot of food. There were certainly many people there but there was enough food to feed many more.

The biggest difficulty we had that day was keeping all of the names straight. I'm not at all sure we did very well that night but we do have pictures of all of these wonderful people and captions so we know who they are. By the time we return to Egypt we will have them straight but of course the whole family wasn't here so there will be more to learn. We both look forward to the experience.