Cairo Scholars

[mimicucumber]

It is weird when my two main sources of news are BBC online news - which, no matter how virtuous I feel, I cannot be fucked to read nearly as thoroughly as I would a newspaper - and Cairo Scholars.

CS is an email group for expats and Cairene students, and it's mostly ads for language exchanges, accommodation, visa info, NGO job placements, etc. But

Comments

[euphuistica]

I met a fairly interesting bio-tech chick who moved to Singapore a few months ago from the US with her husband recently. We were insta-friends as soon as she made a little face about the American Women's Association, the refuge of otherwise sane US women who move out here, leave high-powered jobs behind and suddenly find themselves on a committee, stretching mani-pedis into a day's worth of pampering and bitching about the Filipina who is raising their kids and cleaning their toilets. This is all 'yup, whatever' until you get to the point where they start assuming you, as a white woman with a working 'husband', are primarily obsessed with all this nonsense as well. It is truly a different world...

[mimicucumber]

Ugh, yeah. One thing I do like about Cairo Scholars is that alongside the diplomats' kids and American University in Cairo brats, it's often made up of humanitarian types, archaeologists, and Arabists - this doesn't make everyone perfect (a lot of lifestyle hippies and bleeding hearts in there) but there's at least a pretence of cultural awareness and earnestness. And like I say, Cairo Scholars and its desperate recreation of home life 'standards' is indispensable to me.

Except for the water filtering for plants bit. I don't think I'll ever do that.

[anonymous]

Funnily enough, I saw a new (now the second afaik) Topshop and New Look in Moscow today and thought "THANK GOD, AT LAST!"

Do you have a big divide among the expat community there? As far as I can tell, foreigners in Russia are pretty sharply divided between those of us who STUDY the place and those who work here.

(I know I have no lj any more, but i might come back with some fantastic moscow insight ;) -exsovietdisco)

[mimicucumber]

Yes - why did you disappear?! I hope you're ok and that everything's all right in your life.

Do you have a big divide among the expat community there?
I don't know enough to tell, to be honest. Also, CS is not just an expat list, it's also local rich kids. I would imagine, though, that there is yes a research/'work' divide, or - probably a better division: those with a local salary/grant money/other precarious forms of income versus those lucky, lucky sods with an international salary.

I'd be rich as Croesus if I had my pathetic London salary right now.

[anonymous]

Yes, everything's OK, but I had barely updated in about two years, and many of my entries were so old I didn't rememeber writing them, so I thought it time to make a break. I'm still reading various journals though, and I even started writing down some stuff about Moscow (I got here on Monday, and am here till April doing some research in the archives) so I might put it up, I dunno yet.

I met with some resarcher friends yesterday, and we talked about the divide between Western business people (who, a lot of the time, don't speak good Russian, and whine about Russian rudeness) and students/ academics, who generally are learning or speak Russian already and who quickly learn to be as rude as the locals.

Six years ago, I could live like a king on my student income in Russia. Now, not so much...