The Qibla is Just a Little to the Left

The sign hangs on a tree outside the mosque that abuts the Maadi metro stop.  I get off there sometime to drop by the supermarket, a place where prices are rarely listed underneath the items that are on the shelves, and where everything from juice to eggplant is found in a different place than it was before.  I still can't figure out why the yogurt is not with the cheese but rather around the corner, past the sandwich meats, and in a refrigerated display all its own.  Even then, I had to ask around in the best dialect I could muster what exactly had happened to all the regular yogurt tubs.  I was finally brought 5 small tubs from the back room. Shopping, even at the best Americanized grocery store there is in Egypt -- they were playing a twangy Thompson Square, "You Gonna Kiss me or Not" over the speakers when I arrived -- is an inexact science.

The qibla, for you unlucky non-Islamicists out there, is the direction of Mecca.  I've seen it indicated by pasted stickers on the ceilings of hotel rooms.  I've seen it indicated in an airplane while in flight with an ever-updating swinging arrow that shifts ever so slightly as the journey goes on.

But nothing quite so much captures the feeling of prayer as the sign posted to a tree... "the direction of your prayer is just a little to the left."  Inexact, debatable, but utterly inevitable.