Food: Falafel

Ms. Chadha has often told me how ridiculous she thinks it is that we have one dollar bills in the U.S. "Why do you have these silly paper notes when coins are so much moe convenient and everyone else in the world is happy to use them?" she complains. Putting aside Ms. C's willful ignorance of the workings of the strip-club economy, it's a good question. I'm going to guess it has something to do with our obsessive tipping culture, but really I don't have any idea. I do know that she would be furious at the twenty-five piastre note I received with my change today at the supermarket. At today's rates, this note is exchangeable for $0.045, or just under a nickel.

That may not seem like a lot of money, but twenty-five piastres takes you one-quarter of the way to buying a delicious falafel sandwich from the little bodega just around the corner from my school. Egyptian falafel, which you can also call ta9miyya if you're able to make the gagging sound that the "9" in that word represents, is served in a delicious soft bread called "eish," along with salad and a feta-like cheese whose name I can't remember. My lunch today of two very filling falafel sandwiches, cost EGP 2, or about $0.40 cents. Adding french fries to the mix costs fifty piastres more. In my short list of places where I could potentially afford to live without ever working again, Egypt has just made a strong debut.

The school has a cafeteria on the floor just beneath my apartment, so I don't have to travel far for food. Unfortunately, the creations coming out of the cafeteria, while well-meaning, are too avant garde for me. Yesterday's breakfast options included a new twist on an old favorite - the club sandwich. The first layer was raw tuna, topped by a single slice of Kraft swiss cheese. The second layer was barbecue chicken. It was at least beautifully presented, which may explain why it was so expensive, costing the equivalent of 25 falafels!

I have a feeling that language schools in general, and Arabic language schools in particular, make a lot of their money by providing food and shelter to a nervous student population unwilling or unable to find these things on their own. It's really the only way they could possibly get away with charging such huge mark-ups on everything. In Morocco, the school charged more than twice as much to go to the airport as it cost to hail a cab in the street. Food was even worse, costing three to four times its street equivalent. I can't believe that laziness alone explains the premium I'm seeing here. Maybe there's a research paper in my future - some sort of comparison of service premiums across countries cross-correlated to a series of public safety metrics. More likely, the future holds only more falafel.