cairo day 9

so yesterday I got up and met up with Karoline early, around 11h... We went over to the apartment and dropped off some of our things. Went shopping for our apartment. I think we put up some notices on cairo scholars and co. in order to find a roommate. We had about three people interested that same day.

Around 5:30 I went back to my hostel to meet up with Costa to go meet some friend's of Prof. Baer. This also happens to be Costa's boss at the NGO he's working at.
These were extremely nice people. They also happened to be the first people I had my first beer in Egypt with. This is perhaps even more special because it was Ramadan.
Anyway, Costa and I headed out of there around 10:30 so that I could get to the signing of my apartment on time. This was totally irrelevant as the Landlady showed up an hour late and our broker showed up at midnight.
the apartment didn't go through for the following reasons:
1. She's religious. She was told it was just going to be Karoline and I but when she saw that Karoline had found a third guy to live with us, she didn't like it.
2. This, I think, caused her to want us to pay 300 pounds per month for a cleaning lady. This was not optional and she would have had to come at least 3 times a week. I think this was in order to spy on us.
3. she wanted us to sign her contract, all in Arabic, not the one our broker had presented to us the day before.
4. She didn't want us to be registered with the police as local residents.

The germans (the two other flatmates, Karoline and Andreas) were in a hurry to sign and really wanted to sign. I'm happy I didn't. Even though this probably would have been really fine and was super close to our school, it seemed shady.

At two in the morning we start driving around with our broker. I don't know why we couldn't have just waited til the next day. He finds us an apartment for quite a bit more but also nice. No bullshit with the landlord, we sign, I slept in my first apartment last night. I also went to be at 5h30 because I had to email a certain someone to tell them about this, and probably to think it over too.

Oh, and also, today was also the day that Sofie called me (for the first 'time') to tell me that she bought her plane tickets to come see me. now 15 days and counting. So basically, even before I got this call, but much more so after, Karoline had to put up with me repeating every 4 or 6 minutes "my girlfriend's coming, my girlfriend's coming, my girlfriend's coming". This could also be replaced by a big smile on my face and would be understood as the same thing.