Jasmine

"People who love beauty find or create it wherever they can (travel journal)."

"Jasmine sounds like “Yasmina” when the attendant says its name (travel journal)."

Toilet paper is a rare commodity in Egypt. We became quite accustomed to paying the ubiquitous bathroom attendant a couple pounds for a few squares of toilet paper. The attendants also look after the bathroom, cleaning it and helping one to figure out the different style of flushing. You pull and pump rather than depress a button or lever, they also help guests get water from the faucets. Often these attendants were women, but sometimes there was a male attendant.

At one rest room on the way to Alexandria we actually had four attendants, a young girl was posted outside of each of three stalls. She washed the toilet after each patron left, an older woman was near the door handing out toilet paper and towels. While the three lines trailed out into the hall, it was a unique experience to receive this degree of attention to ones toileting!

When Sammy was little she was fascinated with bathrooms, everywhere we went she had to see what the bathroom looked like. At one point we all firmly believed that she was doing research for an eventual travel book on the worlds bathrooms. Sam would have loved the toilets of Egypt!

In the bathroom at the high dam I paid 1 lb for toilet paper. The middle aged male attendant was in a light blue galabia, the full length, long sleeved, A line, light cotton gown worn by both men and women. He stood just outside the entrance to the bathrooms, a woman attendant would usually be just inside the door.

After I went to the bathroom I couldn’t get water from the faucets, a common occurrence in Egypt. Not a problem as I had my trusty disinfectant wipes in my purse. I prefer as much as possible to be self sufficient. I would not call a male attendant into the rest room while I was using it, indeed it's doubtful I would even call attention to myself in this way with a female attendant. Two very important items to keep in one's purse when traveling are a small packet of disinfectant wipes and a small container of band aides...both served me well in the course of this trip!

While washing my hands I commented to Alice about the pretty flowers. They were lovingly put on the ledge above the sinks, placed in vases of old soda or juice bottles and had a vine like the one from Sam’s birth trailing above them. It was a simple arrangement, but could not have been more beautiful. When someone does something with so much attention and care, it's beautify transcends all else.

These flowers smelled delicious! Fragrant little white blossoms scented the entire area. I couldn’t identify them, they were sweet like a gardenia, but smaller with more of a double or triple petal formation rather than the singular petal formation of a gardenia…but the sweetness of the smell was similar.

The attendant heard me talking with Alice and he came in to help with the water. I said no, that wasn’t a problem. I was just wondering what kind of flowers they were and I wanted to take a picture of them because they were so pretty and smelled so nice. He told me they were Jasmine and helped me to pronounce it..."Yasmina." I took a picture and then he gave me a blossom from one of the vases!

I put the blossom in my lapel pocket and enjoyed the lovely scent of Jasmine throughout the day. These little kindnesses are such an amazing thing, I don’t have the words to properly convey what they meant to me. What they might have meant to the person offering the kindness or even if I’m properly interpreting what I took to be kindness.

I kept my Jasmine blossom in a cup of water for several days; it made me smile and offered its perfume to my room. Soon it was time to pack up and fly back to Cairo, my little blossom had begun to turn from a milky white to a deep amethyst, marking my time in Egypt.