Week 6-Never Live without your Bathmat!

Our stuff came this week. All glorious 1400 lbs of our “must haves” arrived from the US a mere 8 weeks after shipment. We opened it to a barrage of sights and sounds of “home” and it was tough…the finality of our move. The relative permanency of not being able to get on a plane and come home to say “just kidding!” As we touched our soft clothes, yet unmarred by the highly chlorinated Cairo water and lack of clothes dryer, I briefly reconsidered our decision. What were we doing here?

I’m told that everyone has a breaking point and mine was our bathmat. Literally. After 2 days of unpacking and sorting, I finally put out the bathmat bought at Linens and Things. It is a gorgeous green color. I remember well the day it was bought. We had just moved into our new Raleigh house and somehow I had bundled up infant Virginia and post-partum me long enough to drop Aedan off at preschool and run to the store to get a new bathmat. I fell in love with the color. I loved the length…just perfect for a leisurely step out of our new garden tub. I remember berating myself for paying so much. We were “house poor” and had little expendable cash for such luxuries. I remember thinking of ways I could stretch a few groceries and come out almost even….the justifications went on all day and I think I probably even proudly presented them to Joe that night. Now, standing in my new bathroom and flooded with the memories, I wondered why nothing was soft in Egypt. Burlap and siskal seem to be the order of the day and the planned gifts of cheap, Egyptian cotton, to folks back home have been humorously dismissed. Walmart has better quality cotton than anything I have seen in Egypt. The mat is simply the softest thing we now own….it is thick, not bristly, and has a good, strong, no slip guard. I fell in love with it again. I bent down to take a closer look and my eyes fell upon the price mark (apparently left through various laundries to torture me again and again). Right beside it lay the words “made in Egypt”. Pretty ironic. My bathmat made it halfway around the world and back home again.

-Ashley