Strange Pizza Toppings

Thursday I ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut and asked for pepperoni and sausage. I was thinking the sausage would be like the sausage at home, but I was wrong. There was even a red flag that I ignored. When I ordered the pizza the Egyptian lady on the other end of the line told me that sausage was “hotdog.” I just figured she was getting her English mixed up and she wasn’t saying the correct word. Twenty minutes later the pizza arrived, and sure enough, the pizza had little cut up circles of hotdog on the top. Yech! Whose idea was it to put hotdog on a pizza? I’ve heard of some strange stuff, but that was just weird. What are you thinking Pizza Hut? I ate it anyway, but I learned never to ask for sausage on my pizza in Egypt.

Friday night I babysat for the Graftons. David Grafton is a professor at Evangelical Theological Seminary and is in charge of the graduate program. I don’t know yet what his wife Carla does, but she is very busy, so she does something important! They have three children, two girls and a boy. They were the best kids I have EVER met. We began watching The Incredibles at about 7:30pm, and when the girl’s bedtime came around an hour later, they didn’t even complain that they hadn’t finished the movie. They just got up, brushed their teeth, said goodnight, and went to bed. At about 9:20 I told the boy that it was his turn. He didn’t look up from his game boy, but said, “Okay.” I went to the kitchen to put a glass in the sink, and when I returned, he had gone to bed.

This week has been a slow week for various reasons. First, the 150th Anniversary Celebrations are over, so my work at the Synod has dropped off significantly. I have started on a website design to update their current one. You can view the current one, if you like, at www.epcegypt.org. I am basically going to give the site a facelift and finish some of the incomplete pages from last year. I haven’t really told the folks at the Synod that I am doing this, but in the mean time, I don’t think it will hurt anything to generate my own work.

Another reason this week has been slow is I got terribly sick. I think the cleaning ladies here at Dawson Hall stirred up some strange dust and it irritated my throat. After a few days, that irritation had turned into an infection and I was congested, coughing, and had a sore throat. On Saturday, I went to sleep around 5:00pm. This particular Saturday I had scheduled to talk to my parents on the phone at 10pm, so I got up and called them, but told them I was in no shape to talk. I had to cough every few words, so it wouldn’t have been a very good conversation anyway. I could tell I had a fever and I went immediately back to bed… and slept till about noon on Sunday. Unfortunately I missed out on hearing Marian McClure speak to the Presbyterians on Saturday night. Marian is the Director of the Worldwide Ministries Division of the Presbyterian Church, and had spoken recently at the 150th Anniversary Celebration. She came to Dawson Hall to speak to the Presbys, but I was completely out of it by the time they were meeting. I ended up staying in my room the rest of Sunday and just took it easy. My fever ended up breaking Sunday evening. On Monday I felt like a new person. I would hope so after all that sleep! I still have a bit of a cough and some nasal congestion, but I am doing much better.

This weekend we will be visiting St. Anthony’s Monastery near the Red Sea. It is the very first Christian monastery EVER, and it is still operating. I’ll report on that more when we get back.

Take care. Rabbina My-ak [God be with you]

-Jason