sketchy bowling

I love bowling. I'm not very good at it, but I love the inherent tackiness and sketchiness of a bowling alley, everything from the questionable rental shoes to the pitchers of cheap beer. But the thing is, I often forget how much I like bowling until someone brings it up, and then I realize I really want to go. So I haven't been bowling in a really long time -- definitely not since I came to Cairo, and before then I can't even remember the last I went in Chicago.

But a friend told me about a bowling alley in Giza called Nile Bowling, and after going this weekend with four friends I am delighted to say that it was spectacularly sketchy. First, no bowling shoes necessary: you bowl in whatever footwear you have on, which in my case was a pair of flip-flops. Second was that in our lane, the bowling pins seemed to have some slight wobbling issues. Sometimes they just fell down of their own volition, even if a bowling ball was nowhere in sight, or the ball would roll into the gutter halfway down the lane and then the machine would give you credit for two pins down anyway (this actually happened to me on several occasions). Other times when you would go to bowl, the machine would just decline to acknowledge that roll, automatically reset, and randomly give the bowler extra frames. Ultimately, I bowled a 56, which might be a lifetime high for me without bumpers.

The whole point of this, though, is that after having been here so long, I expect things in Egypt to run inefficiently. That's part of the charm of Cairo, in my opinion. If we had gotten to the bowling alley and everything had worked properly, I think I actually would have been disappointed. Yes, people, it's come to that: my expectations are so low that I don't even need something to function to make me happy, I just need it to exist.