I Live in Rehab ;o)

For those of you who know me, you know that I don't now, ever did, nor will I ever drink alcohol or take drugs. So, why do I live in Rehab? Well, I live in a small suburb of Cairo, and the actual name of it is El Rehab. We have lived in several apartments here in Cairo, and I do have to say, that this one is probably my favorite, for several reasons. When you move to Egypt, it is really easy to find a furnished apartment. All of our apartments before this one have been furnished. When our two oldest kids went back to the States, we decided to downsize because we were not even using even half of the apartment we were living in. Also, the rent was getting high. In Egypt, if you are renting an apartment, the rent usually goes up 10% a year. This makes it hard to stay in one apt. for very long at a time. We had not even thought of moving to this new area, but Tim saw an add for it in one of the local papers. We decided to check it out and it was perfect. It was about half the size of the one we were living in, but it still had three bedrooms, which we were having a hard time finding. The area is very different from living directly in Cairo because it is kept much cleaner, it is quieter, and there is a lot of greenery and flowers. One reason it is quieter is because in Cairo, the bottom floors of most buildings are businesses. Here in El Rehab that is not permitted. So, you have the living areas, and the market areas are separate.

Another reason I really love this apartment is because it was unfurnished and we got to buy our own furnishings, putting our own little touches in it. This was a lot of fun, but a little stressful at the same time. We live on the 5th floor, so you can imagine trying to bring up all of the heavy items. Fortunately, the places we bought from always delivered their items so we did not have to do too much of the heavy lifting. One of the reasons it was stressful was because we could not afford to buy everything at once, so there were certain things we had to do without for a while. But, we are all settled in now and feel really at home in our newly furnished apt.

Above is a picture of the view from our apartment and just a little of the new furniture we purchased. We also have an area we furnished with Bedouin type furniture that I will share about in a future post.