Chirp chirp

Well, hubby is now safe and sound in Kuwait, though I wish he was safe and sound here instead.
He left the house at 6:10 this morning.
I tried not to cry but didn't quite make it.
Insha'Allah this trip will be fast and he will be home sooner than ten days!

He was up early (actually he didn't sleep last night) getting ready, and so I was awake, and you can always hear the birds outside the window, even before the sun comes. I took a video so you could hear some of the birds, though I think you can only hear two in the video I uploaded. There was, in addition, a whole tree FULL of little birds chirping, but they were a bit further from the window and I don't think you can hear them in this. I'll try to get them soon.
Anyways, here's a link to the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR6zQAPXvSQ


mom made some stuffed eggplant yesterday, bur not maashi like would be regular stuffed eggplant. These eggplants had been pickled first, and then she stuffed them with a mixture of crushed garlic, cardamom (or was it cumin?) and red pepper. Way too hot for me to try with the red pepper, and honestly they didn't look that tasty, but I'm sure they tasted good.



She also made koshary the other day. It was my first time to try the dish, despite the fact that it's one of the most popular dishes here in Egypt.
It's lentils in a sauce, which is then put over/mixed with pasta and there are three different sauces you can use for the top of it.
One sauce is vinegar based, one is tomato based and the third is hot pepper.
It tasted pretty good, definitely something I would think would be good, and warming and heavy on a cold winter night.
Unfortunately, my stomach doesn't like lentils as much as my mouth does, so I probably won't eat the dish often, though I suppose I'll need to learn to cook it for hubby.


I also have a picture of the mogamma building where we renewed my visa. It really is a ginormous building. The first floor is just for visa stuff, and the rest of the floors have different ministries on them, as far as I know, and I could be wrong.
lol


The local bakery that the family buys their munchies from turns out to have some very good items that resemble in a small way, a chocolate croissant. They are called bitay (at least that's the way it is pronounced, not sure how to spell it, I think it's a French word). You can get them with no filling, with cheese filling, or how I got them with chocolate. There maybe also be additional fillings I'm unaware of, such as date.
Anyways, they are very good and nice for breakfast. The bread part is buttery and a bit flaky, just not exactly like a croissant. And the shape is more like a rectangle.
Maybe I'll take a picture at breakfast tomorrow morning.

Alright, I did promise some vocabulary words that I had learned, so here we go.
I will try to spell the Egyptian words as you would pronounce them, as it will be slightly different as to how you would normally write the word.

no = leh (though the h is kind of hard and comes to a stop)

yes = Iwuh (with the I being hard)

cheese = gibna (different cheeses would be um, like gibna cheddar, etc)

please/if possible = mumkin (like pumpkin, lol)

what's happening/what's up? = fee haga (like hag with an "uh" on the end)

finished = muhfeesh

not yet = lissa (this one gets confusing as I'm always thinking I'm hearing my name)

bread - Ish (hard I with immediate sh after)

tomorrow = bokra (like okra with a b on the front)

done/finished = khalas (the first a is almost like an uh and the last part is kind of like saying lost, without the t on the end)

That's it for Arabic, or Egyptian Arabic, for now. I'll maybe post some more words later, though I don't know a ton more than that.