Why aren’t Germans funny?

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”  C. S. Lewis

I was having a little chat this morning… a cyber chat that is, with a fellow blogger.  We met online over two years ago. It was when I was still in Sydney, before I moved to Cairo.  I asked her lots of questions about what it was like to live in Egypt.  I read all her blog posts, I made comments on all her blog posts.  I suspect she thought I was stalking her, and in my own way, I was.

It didn’t start to get weird until I arrived in Cairo, and she very kindly offered to meet me for coffee… at a place where there were lots of people, and many exits.  I liked her right away.  She kept her pepper spray in her pocket and sat close to the door in case she needed to make a quick get away.

At the end of our coffee, she said she had enjoyed meeting me, didn’t give me her phone number and turned to walk home. 

“Oh, are you walking, me too!.” 

She stuck out her hand, making sure to be far enough away so that she could give me a quick karate kick to the head if I tried anything.  “Ok, then bye.”

We both turned left… then continued walking… we both crossed the road. We both continued walking down the road, side by side. There was that sort of awkward silence that happens when you really think you are about to head off in the opposite direction.

“Umm, are you following me?”

By now, even I have got the idea that this is looking very suspicious. 

“No, I am going home… I live at the end of this road.”

Here, she turned sharply on her heel, cocked her head to the side and did that squinty thing with her eyes…

“Where exactly do you live?”

Turned out, I not only lived across the street from her, but my bedroom window looked directly into her bedroom window.  What were the chances!  From Australia to Egypt, and this poor lass ends up with me being able to watch her brush her teeth each morning.

Eventually, she softened and decided that I was not an axe murderer.  We became friends, the sort of friends that say, “Hey, I have just put the kettle on, come and have a cuppa.”  Or the sort of friends that call up and say crazy stuff like, “My maid is driving me insane today, can I come and hang out at your house until she is gone.” (seriously, now that I am back doing all my own housework… I miss having a housekeeper…and can’t believe I ever complained…spoilt brat that I am) Even the sort of friends that say, “I think I have a lump… what do I do?”

One of the topics of this morning’s conversation was our ‘dry spell’ in the blogging world.  It occurred to me that we had often laughed together at some manic Egyptian episode, and then there would the race home to see who could put up a blog post first.  “Now that is a blog post just waiting to be written!”, we would say.

There just don’t seem to be so many funny ‘blogging’ moments here.  Everything is too clean and orderly, people are predictable and do the right thing.  There is not that level of insanity that helped to keep a constant stream of witty anecdotes flowing. 

Perhaps I need to start looking at this country through the same eyes I saw Egypt, or for that matter, Turkey, India etc.  Perhaps it is time to shake things up a bit.

 

PS:  If anyone is interested in reading any of the LuLu in Egypt adventures, you will find the rough ‘saved’ version sans photos here:  LuLusbay in Egypt  It is really just a stream of words now, one day I will try to put it back together.

PPS:  If you don’t know what happened to LuLusbay in Egypt… you can read about it here:  Disaster!!!!!!