Our landlord

This is Abdullah, our landlord. He always wears his traditional cotton dress called galabeya. It is very comfortable and has handy zippered pockets, where one can easily slip his Nokia phone, money and keys. He is always smiling and helpful.

One of the most important tasks of the landlord is to keep unwanted guests away. In other words, Egyptians of opposite sex. People in groups and foreigners are okay. On the bottom floor Abdullah has a small room, equipped with a mattress, and he constantly peers the people who is coming and going, even at 4 am.

He also has spare keys to our apartment. But here's the catch: If we forget the key on the inside of the lock, the door cannot be opened from the other side. This happened to me once, on my birthday, late in the evening after a long day at work. My neightbor wasn't home, so we had to wait for her to arrive, because the only way to get back inside was to climb into my balcony from hers and get inside through my balcony door. I climbed, but of course the balcony door was also locked. Then Abdullah climber over the balcony rail in his galabeya – on the height of 5th floor. He cracked into my room with his tools and then fixed the door. Voilá, I was back at home.

Landlord's other tasks involve supplying us with the household equipment that is included in the rental contract. We received the ironing board and laundry lines in due time, within a week after our arrival, but the balcony furniture never showed up, and the shower curtain was installed punctually in the middle of the bathroom – two meters from the shower itself.

However, we concretely discovered the meaning of Egyptian time concept while waiting for the bed covers. Officially, the expression goes, 'bukra, insh'allah' (Tomorrow, the Lord willing'). This roughly means the same as 'mañana' in Spain.

We started asking for warm blankets in the end of October, when the apartment started getting cold at night. Abdullah does not speak many words in English, but he made most of it. The first few times the answer was 'tomorrow'. After several inquiries, apparently aiming to calm us, he then promised to bring them 'after ten minutes'. I came back after two hours, but there were no blankets, neither the next day. (Those who have lived in exotic countries can probably relate. It was no helping the case that I was going through culture shock in other ways, too.)

We really needed to get the covers, so my flatmate and I took turns asking, but the answer was always the same; either ten minutes or one hour. However, it didn't make any difference. After few more weeks of this I called my Egyptian colleague and asked him to interpret for our landlord, that we couldn't risk becoming sick, because it was freezing cold at night, and we didn't have the promised blankets that were supposed to be there when we had arrived. Calmly Abdullah walked into the laundry shop in front of our flat and said the guy working there something in Arabic. He produced two blankets. They were clearly used, but our landlord explained that they had been washed. Actually we were supposed to have new blankets, but after all the hassle and waiting I was more than glad to have them.

Miraculously, after another month the new king-size covers and even more pillows arrived. Our boss had found out that Abdullah had actually visited the household store, but it had been out of stock for a while. Anyway, now I know what 'five Egyptian minutes' stands for.