Sporting Season!! or Vagabondblogger vs. Horny Toad

Well, I was going to write on how quiet it is in Old Maadi yesterday morning. At least it was the night before. For several days, since Number 1 Son left, we've had nightly visitors who make a lot of noise. I wasn't sure what was going on, but one night it sounded like the noise was getting closer and closer to my bedroom porch door. We live on the ground floor. So, I slammed the door shut! I'm in Egypt - I thought, "maybe it's a crocodile that swam through the sewer system" - what do I know? Alligators used to show up in bathroom toilets in the U.S. It sounds like this, but more (a lot more) low-pitched. I laid in bed trying to breathe with the same rhythm, trying to figure out what animal could breathe so raspy and with such a wheeze.

So when Boss Man and I went for a walk a few nights ago, I insisted we investigate. We listened and found the noise source coming from 2 sewer wells, a few feet from each other and looked into them. They are across the street from our apartment - directly across from our bedroom porch. We figured it was frogs, but we weren't sure, since we really couldn't see them. They just sounded like frogs - like a ratchet bouncing off the walls and being answered by another ratchet - like this but non-stop.

While we were on our walk, the cats were out seizing up, screaming, screeching for - well, you know - it's mating season.

Yesterday and then last night when I asked the boabs (doormen), they all said something strange and twisted their hands. Now, I know what the hand sign for "fuck" is in a few languages, but this was new to me. It looked like a grinding motion with the knuckles nested in the palm of the opposite hand and making a grinding motion. A taxi driver said, "fish." Finally after the noise reappeared last evening, I took our miniscule flashlight (one you get with the Swiss Army Knife and being from a family with the Boy Scout motto practically written on their foreheads - "be prepared" - I was embarrassed, to say the least) and shone it into the wells. The noisemakers got angry and started clattering together. I could see a frog staring up at me from one of the well's side holes. He was bigger than the cute little tweeping ones we have in Connecticut. Maybe he just looked bigger, because he scared the shit out of me. Regardless, as accomplished as I was at catching geckos in Abu Dhabi (especially after getting my courage up with a few drinks) I was not about to go toe to toe with some horny frog. A flashlight is supposed to paralyze them, "just momentarily" according to the Boss Man. Haha! I didn't have a real flashlight! I had some itty, bitty thing that just pissed them off.

So, my boab being missing, I asked the one across the street (after looking up frog in Arabic = dafda'.) He said, something like "oh yeah." I said yeah, I saw them and showed him my small and mighty flashlight. He laughed and said something about dafda's, sewers, sport and "no sleep"- and with all that handywork going on with his hands down below there (between his legs near his crotch), I got the message - loud and clear.

It's "sporting" season!!"

And my bowab? Probably off sporting with his wife.

Apparently every known animal in this region is gearing up for one heck of an orgy.

I would just like to get some sleep (another addiction) without wild dogs barking, feral cats screeching and frogs croaking.