At some point a year or two ago, the staff at my local Giant supermarket started randomly greeting me and asking if everything was all right, if I had found everything I needed, if there was anything they could do to make my shopping experience more pleasant.
When I'd booked my ticket to Cairo a few months earlier, I had envisioned a pleasant week and a half spent wandering around the city, meeting up with old friends and gathering material for a novel that was inspired in part by my time as a student at the American University of Cairo.
My go-to Saturday morning recipe is an old one that owes its pleasant acidic edge to a shot of white vinegar a substitute for what would have been sour milk in thriftier times, when cooks were loathe to let any ingredient go to waste.