adventures in boxed beverages

This week we have done a lot! We've been to the grocery (a western supermarket, sadly, because our local grocer is on vacation until monday), ridden the Metro (the mass transit train system, partly above and partly below ground), visited Care With Love (an organization that cares for children with cancer, that trains home health care workers, and a variety of other things...one of the volunteers (Jay) is going to be working there this year) to attend a graduation ceremony for the home health training program, taken a felucca (boat) ride on the Nile, had several fabulous meals, and started Arabic class.

For this post, I first want to share with you how grocery stores work. They look just like ours, except almost all the product packaging is in Arabic. Duh. Luckily, the back side is often in English or French, so I'm doing okay with that so far. Beverages here (juice, milk, etc) mostly come in hermetically sealed boxes. I purchased a box of mango juice and a box of milk. When I went to open them in the morning so I could have breakfast, here's what happened:





I pulled the plastic tab. The milk one broke and I had to cut a hole in the top with a knife. The mango juice plastic opening came completely off, leaving me with just the hole in the box, which I am now covering with the plastic tab when it's in the fridge. Great. It was a fantastic introduction to the ingenuity and flexibility needed to live in another country!