the apartment search

We've been apartment hunting recently, which is both exciting and overwhelming. And, as was seen last night, can lead to severe differences of opinion. After work yesterday Alex and I met up with our broker, Sherine, at an address in Mohandisseen that seemed "very familiar" to Alex. It turned out to be the same building he lived in before moving to Zamalek. For a bit of background, there are a few neighborhoods in Cairo that are very foreigner-friendly and have western-style apartments and inflated rents. Zamalek, which is a tree-filled island, is one of them, my old hood Garden City is another, and Maadi, the suburb to the south where I used to teach, is the third. We've decided to broaden our search to the neighborhoods across the river from Zamalek, Mohandisseen and Dokki. Technically in Giza and not Cairo, they were built for the newly wealthy when the country opened up to foreign trade in the 60s and 70s. Like all of Cairo, they're noisy and crowded, but are still known for having classy restaurants and stores.

The apartment we looked at was seriously a relic of that happier time. It was enormous, with old, but elegant, western-style furniture (one of our requirements). A big tiled balcony overlooked a quiet park. It had three bedrooms, three bathrooms (not including the maid's bathroom at the end of narrow, scary little room), three living rooms... two refrigerators and a deep freezer. I was in love. I was also willing to overlook the constant sounds of traffic audible from the bedrooms' side of the apartment. Alex wasn't, and for once seemed immune to my pleading. He said he had suffered from the noise for the year that he lived on the floor above, and that his number one requirement in an apartment is quiet. I have to concede that if anyone would put up with a year of sleep deprivation without complaint, it'd be Alex. So we went back to Zamalek to look at two small, poorly-decorated apartments. I was hoping that their unsuitability would strengthen my case, but it didn't, really. Nor did my offers of white noise machines and earplugs.

Searching for apartments makes me remember when I had just moved to Cairo and was looking for a place with Tori and Ryan, nearly two years ago. We were staying at a seedy, bedbug-infested hostel deep in Downtown, with a very hazy idea of where and how to look. The traditional way to find an apartment in Cairo is to walk around the streets you're interested in and ask the bowabs if there are any free apartments in their building. They might decide to help you search, or refer to the neighborhood simsar, who knows what's available and how much rent the owners want. So we memorized the relevant phrases in our egyptian phrasebook and set out to get an apartment, the egyptian way. I think we went to Dokki, since it was on the metro and I knew a girl who lived there and liked it. We wandered around, bought roasted sweet potatoes from a street vendor, and talked to a couple bowabs who told us to come back the following day. Which we didn't.

The manager of our hostel was either sympathetic to our cause or sensed a business opportunity, and connected us to a simsar in Garden City. Sayeed had a dingy little office with a revolving door of strange men who'd come in to drink tea and smoke cigarettes with him. Sayeed was a bit of a scoundrel but he was quick to laugh, especially at others. He spoke enough english to get by and relied on his assistant Amr for the rest. Amr was about a year younger than us and a university student who never seemed to get any closer to graduating, probably because he was always doing Sayeed's bidding. He complained that he was a slave and that Sayeed didn't respect him. He didn't, either - I heard that their business relationship has recently come to an end, when Sayeed insulted Amr's mother and refused to take it back or apologize. Amr loves his mother, and once told me that he didn't want to marry because he preferred to live with her forever. I teased him about that most months when I went to drop off the rent and have a cup of tea, but he never wavered. Anyway, they set us up with an apartment that we loved, and that Tori still lives in. Amr occasionally sends me facebook messages griping about how I left without saying goodbye, and I assume Sayeed's found a new assistant. But this time around, we're going through a professional broker.