Plumbing Problems

I just had a fun and interesting experience with the bowwab that also lets me talk a bit about the housing setup here. The bowwab, or guard/doorman, is a dude (well in our apartment there are 2) who is provided free housing by the landlord of a building or house in exchange for spending most of his time at the entrance of the building. I guess an official part of the job is to guard the building, but our bowwabs are like 70 year old men so I dunno about that. Their main role is basically to be the person who you go to when you need someone to fix something in your apartment, or you need to buy something hard to find --- you ask them, and they'll do it for you or find someone else who can. Basically a chokidar in India. They are also the "eyes" of the landlord. We are lucky to live in a building with a very liberal landlord who leaves us to live independently, but I have heard of some people who have landlords that get the bowwabs to check in on the tenants and make sure they don't violate any of the landlord's rules, which in some cases can be very strict (no noise, no visitors/guests of the opposite sex, no alcohol, etc.).

Anyways, we've been having a leak in the downstairs bathroom that has been spilling through the wall onto the floor of my flatmate Sandra's bedroom. A plumber was supposed to come today, but he never showed up. Apparently, the water started to leak down through the ceiling of the apartment below us, and when I was at class today the tenant downstairs came and complained. Just half an hour ago, the bowwab came up to our room (I was taking a nap) and started scolding Sandra in Arabic. She doesn't really understand Arabic well, and Rob (our resident Arabic specialist) was out, so she called me to come down and talk to him. My spoken Arabic is not very good but after him getting angry at me for a bit and also completely forgetting the word "fix", I think I was able to tell him that we called a plumber and to come back later and talk to Rob...I also definitely won't ever forget "fix" again, sallah. (Spoken Arabic is very different from country to country and also is really different from the written Arabic we learn at school. So the stuff I've been studying at Harvard has helped me read newspapers, but barely helps me at all when I need to talk to regular people).

Ok, have been planning to post some thoughts on my trip to Alexandria over the last weekend, but haven't been able to load the pictures right. Hopefully I'll get to put it up soon.

Peace from the Middle East...