Where do you come from? Where do you go?

One of my unanswered questions about the workings of Alexandria has just recently been answered.  It has to do, again, with the butcher shop around the corner of our street.  I've been noticing for some time now that somehow there is meat at that place, but I'm not quite certain how it arrives there.  I have never actually seen a live animal near there, yet somehow at some point in the morning meat shows up and somehow at some point in the afternoon again it goes.   Deductively, this only means one thing: it comes in a refrigerated truck from another undisclosed location.  

It comes in a truck because that's how you transport things around here (although there are plenty of donkeys and horses on the streets as well.  That would be another nice topic to touch on at some point.) and the truck is refrigerated because that's how you preserve the freshness of the food and prevent diseases from being borne.  Well, as it turns out only half of the previous statement is true, the second part not being it.  The meat comes in an open-air truck.

The first time I saw that I nearly stumbled, or something like that.  I was surprised to say the least.  

Picture your favorite uncle's pick-up truck.  Now put a travel cap over the bed and imagine that the tail gate, when closed, only covers half the space between the bottom of the bed and the top of the travel cap.  This should give you ample room for slinging pieces of meat into the back of the truck at the end of the day when packing up shop.  As for morning time, when unloading the meat, you'll probably have to let down the tail gate  and crawl over it a little, towards the meat, to reach the good pieces.  

There are two things I'm not too keen on discovering in this equation: one, how long the meat sits outside of a climate controlled area before it is finally eaten; and two, when the last time the back of that truck was cleaned.  I, personally, purposefully avoided looking at the condition of the actual bed of the truck to avoid knowing the truth of that matter.

Another distinguishing factor of butcher shop activities is how meat is handled here.  I mean literally handled.  There seems to be no shyness towards hoisting a cow leg or set of ribs over one's shoulders, or man-handling (I mean hugging) a cow carcass to hang it up on one of the hooks positioned outside the shop.  On top of all that, I can only remember one instance of somebody actually wearing an apron.

In closing, keep in mind that standards of cleanliness here are radically different than they are in America.  The FDA does not exist here (nor does OSHA by the way) and that probably, at least partly, explains why we had to avoid stepping on the slaughtered goat another butcher shop was skinning on the sidewalk the other day.  Also, as one friend put it, "If you have any problems with people handling your food, come to Egypt.  You'll get it over it real quick."