So the other day I was in the In Room Dining kitchen testing some recipes and a couple of funny things happened. First, I had been cooking for a few hours and needed to leave for about 45 minutes for a meeting. I was going to come back after the meeting so I took all the things off the heat, but I left things set up in the kitchen. I informed a couple of the stewards that I would be back and then I left.
Before my meeting I saw one of the sous chefs in one of the other chef's offices talking about some of the local breakfast foods that we would be ordering for the employee dining room. Fuul (beans), local breads and tameya which is falafel. He was going to leave to go fry some of the falafel, to test it out. So he left to do that and I went and had my meeting. Afterward, the fried tameya was on a plate in the chef's office so I tasted it and then went to the office that I share with my sous and the other chef de cuisine, a Vietnamese woman named Mai Phuong. She stood up and looked at me with wide eyes and started laughing.
"Very big fiyah! Yo kitchen! Black!"
"What?" I replied.
"A lot smoke! Very big! Eveewhere!"
Again from me, "What?"
Beeg fiyah! He make!" And she pointed at the sous.
He looked sheepishly up from his desk and said, "Eet was esmall...notah that beeg."
At this point I was beginning to understand...and I took off at a fast walk to the kitchen where I had been working and sure enough, there was a huge burn pattern up the entire wall!! Up into the hood vents, completely engulfing the pot shelf above the burners. Whoa. There were also signs that someone had tried to clean it up. The sous. Poor bastard. Moments later there was a team of six stewards in there to clean it up and they were laughing at him the whole time.
The sous is a local and this was a bad thing for him because he lost face in front of the other Egyptians. It will probably take him a while to live it down. He had left the fire on high beneath the pot of corn oil he had used to fry the tameya and it had hit the smoke point and ignited. Doh!
The next funny story occured while those same stewards were cleaning up the mess. They were joking and laughing and behaving as all young kitchen dudes do. I was on a table prepping as far away from the mess as I could be. They are really friendly people and kept looking over and smiling. Finally a guy with decent english skills walked over and asked, "Hey chef, you used to make da movies?"
Again my answer, "What?"
"Before you do this, you do the movie?"
"What?"
"I think I see you in the movies..."
I laughed. "Ok, what one?"
He smiled big and hit me with one I have never been hit with before. "Walker: Texas Ranger! You Chuck Norris right?"
Oh man it was all I could do to not double over on that one. Yeah, ya had to be there, but do I really look like Chuck Norris? If I do I would like to think I can at least act better than him. Ha ha.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
The Free Climbing Handyman
Originally written August 7th-
A few days ago we were having the handyman guy do some things around the house. It is interesting because here you just make a call and a guy shows up with a toolbox to repair any and all of your things around the house. That day he was putting up a towel hanger in the bathroom, a place to hang shirts to dry in the laundry room, seal a door that was allowing sand in when the wind blew, and then finally, running an internet cable from the router downstairs to one of the bedrooms upstairs.
I wasn't thinking this was going to happen the way it did. Maybe it would be run inside the house, along a wall or maybe inside the wall. But, as Esther says, 'Here they like to make holes in things.' And that is what they did. Just drilled right through the wall and ran the cable out from the floor above. Then he came downstairs and blasted a hole through the downstairs wall. Plaster and sawdust flying all over.
But then the inevitable problem became evident. How to get the cable in the little hole from the outside. The windows in that area don't open, and you can't reach around the building to do it. So what does the guy do? He climbs out our third floor window and shimmies all the way around the side of building with his feet on a tiny ledge! He makes it around but the hole isn't big enough so we have to hand the drill out the window to him. He MacGuyver's the hole and puts the cable in. Then shimmies back around and in the window again. With a grin on his face he wipes the sweat off his brow and nods once quickly. Just another day in that guys life. We were impressed...thirty feet up without a net, and probably earning about 2 dollars a day.
A funny footnote to that story was when he went to drill from the outside, the cord to the drill came unplugged so I went to plug it back in. It had no actual plug, just two exposed wires that I had to stick in the holes of the wall outlet...I held them in while he drilled with my eyes closed just waiting to feel however many volts rocketing up through my body....but it never happened. El humdalilah!!!!
A few days ago we were having the handyman guy do some things around the house. It is interesting because here you just make a call and a guy shows up with a toolbox to repair any and all of your things around the house. That day he was putting up a towel hanger in the bathroom, a place to hang shirts to dry in the laundry room, seal a door that was allowing sand in when the wind blew, and then finally, running an internet cable from the router downstairs to one of the bedrooms upstairs.
I wasn't thinking this was going to happen the way it did. Maybe it would be run inside the house, along a wall or maybe inside the wall. But, as Esther says, 'Here they like to make holes in things.' And that is what they did. Just drilled right through the wall and ran the cable out from the floor above. Then he came downstairs and blasted a hole through the downstairs wall. Plaster and sawdust flying all over.
But then the inevitable problem became evident. How to get the cable in the little hole from the outside. The windows in that area don't open, and you can't reach around the building to do it. So what does the guy do? He climbs out our third floor window and shimmies all the way around the side of building with his feet on a tiny ledge! He makes it around but the hole isn't big enough so we have to hand the drill out the window to him. He MacGuyver's the hole and puts the cable in. Then shimmies back around and in the window again. With a grin on his face he wipes the sweat off his brow and nods once quickly. Just another day in that guys life. We were impressed...thirty feet up without a net, and probably earning about 2 dollars a day.
A funny footnote to that story was when he went to drill from the outside, the cord to the drill came unplugged so I went to plug it back in. It had no actual plug, just two exposed wires that I had to stick in the holes of the wall outlet...I held them in while he drilled with my eyes closed just waiting to feel however many volts rocketing up through my body....but it never happened. El humdalilah!!!!
Segway from India to Egypt....
Originally written August 1st-
I never really got to it on blogging about Nepal. When I got there I was overwhelmed with the depth of the culture and the variety of the nature there. I was on the way to do a trek in the Himalayas and then I was going to sit down and write about it all. But when I got back from the trekking I was so overstimulated by all that I saw that I couldn't even begin to write about it. I got blocked, and then I wrote nothing. That is unfortunate because Nepal is, without a doubt, the coolest place I have ever visited. A combination of the people, the nature, the Buddhism and the energy there completely won me over. Despite nights spent in hotel rooms full of ants and roaches...with daily power outages and incredible levels of pollution, the place was, hands down, the most amazing I have visited.
Maybe at some point I will get to describing more of how it was. But for now I want to get to how things are going in Egypt. To do that, I have to finish the end of the India/Nepal story. It will be kept brief.
I went back to India from Kathmandu and flew down to Bombay. It was raining really hard when I got there, the heart of the monsoon. Mumbai was interesting enough, but I don't think I need to go back there. While I was in Colaba, Hillary Clinton made a diplomatic visit and stayed at the Taj Hotel, which was just a few doors down from my much more humble hotel. We visited a lot of the same places. India Gate and the Jain Temple in Malabar Hill. I also went to Dhobi Ghat, the Laxmi Temple, Haji Ali Mosque and a few other religious places. When the rain came it was incredible. Enough to fill buckets in mere minutes. On the way back from seeing the Ali Mosque I was on the jetty that connects it to the mainland when the rain came in from the Arabian Sea. You could see the black clouds coming, but they caught us by surprise moving so quickly. The next thing I knew I was moving at full speed in a large crowd of muslims and in seconds we were all soaked to the bone. Never seen rain like that.
When I left Mumbai, like Hillary, I went to Delhi. Back to the Pahar Ganj ghetto. I was there for a few days. I went to see the Taj Mahal in Agra and took some cooking classes. I like Delhi. It is completely nuts, but in a good way.
So then I took the old overnight flight back to Abu Dhabi, and then Cairo. I got picked up by Ryan and Catherine and her driver Mohamet. Everyone seems to be named Mohamet. There are to be 5 in my kitchen alone. I have had this week to get ready for work. Buy new clothes, shoes and a stereo. From here on I will use this blog as a place to write short updates on things that stand out as strange or funny or somehow interesting. This culture is very different from that of the west and many times I see things that seem fun to share. My impressions so far are that this culture is very misunderstood by the West. I hope that my picking out of the more strange happenings doesn't serve to enhance that misunderstanding. People here are people. It is a good culture with many positives. Nothing like the demonized version the West percieves.
Here is the first anecdote. Ryan's wife Esther and I went to the Carrefour one day. It is like a SuperWalmart, but the brand is French. On the way there we were driving across the Mars-like terrain and saw a little boy on the side of the road trying to hitch a ride. He looked to be about 5 or 6 years old. The cabbie asked us if we could pick him up and we said yes. It was at least 100 degrees and the boy was little. But when he got in he was like a little man. His face and the way he responded to the things the driver said made him seem much older. It turned out that he also wanted to go to Carrefour. The driver let him out a little way away and I thought that we would not see him again. But we did. It turns out he was there to play in the store! He was drinking soda, picking up toys and at one point he had a box of whopper candy that he dropped and they went in all directions. But he picked them up and ate them all. Of course he was never going to pay for any of these things. It wasn't so much what he was doing there that was interesting. It was the backstory that gave us the questions. Why would a little boy of that age be out by himself? Was he going to Carrefour because his mother had sent him? Or did he sneak out? Did he go on this journey often? Was it just to have fun? I will never know.
I never really got to it on blogging about Nepal. When I got there I was overwhelmed with the depth of the culture and the variety of the nature there. I was on the way to do a trek in the Himalayas and then I was going to sit down and write about it all. But when I got back from the trekking I was so overstimulated by all that I saw that I couldn't even begin to write about it. I got blocked, and then I wrote nothing. That is unfortunate because Nepal is, without a doubt, the coolest place I have ever visited. A combination of the people, the nature, the Buddhism and the energy there completely won me over. Despite nights spent in hotel rooms full of ants and roaches...with daily power outages and incredible levels of pollution, the place was, hands down, the most amazing I have visited.
Maybe at some point I will get to describing more of how it was. But for now I want to get to how things are going in Egypt. To do that, I have to finish the end of the India/Nepal story. It will be kept brief.
I went back to India from Kathmandu and flew down to Bombay. It was raining really hard when I got there, the heart of the monsoon. Mumbai was interesting enough, but I don't think I need to go back there. While I was in Colaba, Hillary Clinton made a diplomatic visit and stayed at the Taj Hotel, which was just a few doors down from my much more humble hotel. We visited a lot of the same places. India Gate and the Jain Temple in Malabar Hill. I also went to Dhobi Ghat, the Laxmi Temple, Haji Ali Mosque and a few other religious places. When the rain came it was incredible. Enough to fill buckets in mere minutes. On the way back from seeing the Ali Mosque I was on the jetty that connects it to the mainland when the rain came in from the Arabian Sea. You could see the black clouds coming, but they caught us by surprise moving so quickly. The next thing I knew I was moving at full speed in a large crowd of muslims and in seconds we were all soaked to the bone. Never seen rain like that.
When I left Mumbai, like Hillary, I went to Delhi. Back to the Pahar Ganj ghetto. I was there for a few days. I went to see the Taj Mahal in Agra and took some cooking classes. I like Delhi. It is completely nuts, but in a good way.
So then I took the old overnight flight back to Abu Dhabi, and then Cairo. I got picked up by Ryan and Catherine and her driver Mohamet. Everyone seems to be named Mohamet. There are to be 5 in my kitchen alone. I have had this week to get ready for work. Buy new clothes, shoes and a stereo. From here on I will use this blog as a place to write short updates on things that stand out as strange or funny or somehow interesting. This culture is very different from that of the west and many times I see things that seem fun to share. My impressions so far are that this culture is very misunderstood by the West. I hope that my picking out of the more strange happenings doesn't serve to enhance that misunderstanding. People here are people. It is a good culture with many positives. Nothing like the demonized version the West percieves.
Here is the first anecdote. Ryan's wife Esther and I went to the Carrefour one day. It is like a SuperWalmart, but the brand is French. On the way there we were driving across the Mars-like terrain and saw a little boy on the side of the road trying to hitch a ride. He looked to be about 5 or 6 years old. The cabbie asked us if we could pick him up and we said yes. It was at least 100 degrees and the boy was little. But when he got in he was like a little man. His face and the way he responded to the things the driver said made him seem much older. It turned out that he also wanted to go to Carrefour. The driver let him out a little way away and I thought that we would not see him again. But we did. It turns out he was there to play in the store! He was drinking soda, picking up toys and at one point he had a box of whopper candy that he dropped and they went in all directions. But he picked them up and ate them all. Of course he was never going to pay for any of these things. It wasn't so much what he was doing there that was interesting. It was the backstory that gave us the questions. Why would a little boy of that age be out by himself? Was he going to Carrefour because his mother had sent him? Or did he sneak out? Did he go on this journey often? Was it just to have fun? I will never know.
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