Desert diorama

Henry's assignment to create a "desert diorama," completed using sand from the Shooting Club playground, leaves and twigs from our street, a camel traced from the cover of a Lonely Planet guidebook we bought but won't use (hate tourism, can't even bring myself to bring the kids to see the Pyramids), and best of all a shoebox from a new pair of Adidas sneakers that Ken bought for Henry while I was off giving a book talk. That's when they made the diorama, too. Isn't it awesome? So elementary school.
 
 
It's the first thing they've done, other than learning nationalist songs by heart, that has anything to do with Egypt at all.

Back at the Shooting Club

Nov 19 (the Saturday after the big Nov 18 demonstration, and the beginning of the events in Tahrir, but before they started and anyway we were across town; at 5pm that day I was giving a lecture on Hamlet at Cairo University) and then this morning: back at the Shooting Club. Henry has picked up enough Arabic that he is now pretty comfortable playing with kids for a while, though he panics if we go too far away and he can't see us. These kids were a little rougher, more sha3bi than the usual crowd at the club.
 
 
 
 
What million-man march? Synchronized swimming! Crepes with Nutella!
 
 

Esti as activist

Weather got colder, pre-election leaflets started multiplying. The sticker says: The revolutionaries aren't thugs/ Why do they try us in military courts?
 
 
 

Palmera 3: Checkout time

 
 
 

Palmera II: The time-honored project of burying your sister's feet in the sand

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Red Sea vacation, Nov 8-12

While y'all were braving snowstorms and stuff, and Ken was at a conference in Ohio, we went to the Palmera resort at Ayn Sokhna, on the Red Sea but not the Sinai side, hence just 2 hours from Cairo. The kids made new friends, got tanned, picked up some Arabic... and generally behaved themselves.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Reposting Halloween pix that didnt work in the earlier post - sorry

Here they are! I think I've fixed the photo glitches from last night's
postings now, but please email me if some are still missing.
My Halloween fantasy for next year - can someone please remind me to do
this? - is to send them as C3PO and R2D2.

Al-Fann Midan, Sat night

This was the first-Saturday-of-the-month free public arts festival. More about the event on my public blog.
But -- Now do you believe me that my daughter inspires random photo-ops?

This is Lobna, an actress who gave a really nice performance in a downtown play I saw recently. The funny thing was she came up and asked to take her picture with us.

Henry, instead of running the other way from these things, gets jealous and climbs into the picture as well.

Everyone say cheese!

In general Henry loves being out at these things, talking to people, hearing the music, acquiring souvenirs, getting treated like a big guy (and yet carried around).

This one below has got to be the strangest of the photo-op requests we've received so far. But, whatever.  Esti was glad to oblige. (Hey Facebook friends: what would happen if I put this as my profile pic?  Just kidding!!)

Then all the women and children got in on the fun. (Their menfolks, working-class-looking guys, nice enough, not ostentatiously bearded, dutifully snapped away although they did not seem altogether as thrilled as we were. The munaqaba lady was the happiest of all.) So, who besides the Hizb al-Nour says pious ladies shouldn't be photographed?  (On this neo-fundamentalist party's parliamentary election poster last week, the female candidate's photo -- bottom row, second from left -- was replaced by a flower!)

Sorry our new friend (no, we didn't exchange numbers, they just wanted the photos) got partly cut off here. It was dark out, and I found it hard to keep her in the picture.