so three more days of arabic. as of right now i can read at about the level of a preschooler, meaning that i know most of the letters and most of the sounds and it takes me about five minutes to figure out one word, plus i have to refer back to my notes on occasion. and i know the numbers well enough to haggle taxi prices, which i did tonight, so thats good. and i know how to order food and how to say thanks and ask someone their name, and i can say "thank God" if someone asks how im doing, which is apparently an appropriate response here. its really a beautiful language, mostly because it revolves around Islam; dialogs are so formal and nice, and they usually bring God into the picture. for example, instead of saying "nice to see you again" they say "i am lucky to see you again." i just think thats rather pleasant. and now that ive typed it out it seems trivial, but im going to leave it anyway.
lets see... more wild adventures. three nights ago AUC threw a party for the study abroad students. it was on the new campus so i assumed that it would be like every other party that a college administration has thrown, that is, kids sitting around making awkward small talk. but actually these orientation people throw a pretty good party. they started out by giving everyone a free robe thing-y; its not called a robe, and they actually get offended if you call it a robe because its like official traditional Muslim garb, but anyway they gave them out and most people put them on. naturally i traded my male version with a girl because hers was bright pink and covered with sequins. so then there was food and then there was a dance, surprise, so i was pretty excited because dancing in a huge crowd of strangers is awesome, so i danced for like 4 hours straight and all of the girls were like, aww, youre so cute, you suck at dancing but you try so hard, and i was like, i know, im like totally adorable. and that was that.
then two nights ago luke and mark randomly walked up to me while i was reading in the lobby and were like come with us now and i was like okay, so we hopped in a cab and went to the equadorian (sp?) embassy where we watched a random movie in spanish, but with, thankfully, english subtitles, about some kid growing up in the hectic environment and debilitated government of equador. it was entertaining, i thought, but luke and mark both fell asleep. but it was free, so thats a plus.
then one night ago, which was actually tonight just a few hours ago, i was just hanging out in the lobby and i heard about a lazer-light show at the pyramids, and i was like wow, that sounds cool, how can i get in on that, and my friends who were going said that i had to have signed up and paid like 130 pounds. mark and jonah were walking by then, too, and we all decided that we didnt want to pay that much but that we would go check it out anyway, so we hopped a cab and went to giza and found a three-story pizza hut and got onto the roof and watched the show from there while we ate pizza. so we got to see the show, which was totally not worth 130 pounds, for way cheaper than everyone else, plus we got pizza and not one but two sketchy cab rides. the only particularly cool part of the show was when they shined a giant moving face onto the sphinx; i thought that should have been the narrator, but alas, it wasnt.
and in about 5 hours my whole room plus a couple of random chicks are taking a bus to an oasis called siwa. im not sure what is there, exactly, but i know that there is water donkey carts and i think that i have heard something about a safari.
Saturday 30 August 2008
Wednesday 27 August 2008
dont click the link until you know what its about
this is from the same place too; it still doesnt show the top-spinning skirt, but it does show the dude with one over his head and one around his waist, which is pretty cool too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_67jHGS2yM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_67jHGS2yM&feature=related
im really not planning on writing every day but im sure i will forget if i dont tonight
more arabic class in the afternoon, then chilling in the lobby of the dorm for a while, then hopped a cab back to school to get in the shuttle to go to the bazaar. it was a school event which means that there were like 50 people there, so i definitely wasnt planning on buying anything because white people=hiked up prices and a large group of white people=super incredibly hiked up prices. im told that you can only get stuff for decent prices (as a westerner, that is) if you go with a very small group that includes a native egyptian. actually i was talking to an indian guy today who has been living in cairo for almost four years and he says that he still gets ripped off at this market. so my plan was just to walk around and see lots of shiny things, which was an excellent plan in and of itself since i really dig looking at shiny things. so i went and the girls i was with got embarrassingly distracted at the first dress shop that we came to so i just wandered down this crazy market street by myself. it was filled mostly with clothes, but there were also random spice vendors and food stands and knife shops and guys with big trays filled entirely with souvenir statues of ancient egyptian gods. and everything was entertainingly lit. and everyone who saw me said "hey, america! come spend your money!" or something to that effect.
we actually only had about 30 minutes to wander in the bazaar, though, because, much to my surprise, the trip was actually centered around a sufi dance. im not sure that is spelled right, but sufi-ism is a sect of Islam that uses music and dance to connect with God. they dance and spin in circles in special costumes until they reach a nirvana-esque state. needless to say, the show was pretty powerful and also extraordinarily entertaining.
it started out with about a dozen musicians, mostly percussionists but also including a couple of weird string things and a couple of oboe-esque winds, standing on a stage. they would all play together and then one would come to the center and do like a call and response solo deal and he would spin and his skirt would fly out (which is the characteristic feature of sufi dancing). they went really crazy, especially the guy with the djembe and the guy with the hand cymbals. so at the end of their set, which was pretty long by itself, i was expecting a bow and a return to the market, but no, that was just the intro set.
so next they brought out a couple more musicians and a random old man singer and started a new set, only this time filling center stage was a guy in a green robe and this gigantic skirt. it truly looked like a very thick quilt, and judging by the way that it spun i think it had weights in the hem, so it must have been incredibly heavy. anyway, he spun... and spun... and spun. for literally a half hour straight. and his buddies were dancing and spinning and playing drums and stuff all around him, and every ten minutes or so he would untie a layer of skirt (it turns out that he was actually wearing three) and throw it up over his head. so that was neat, a real sufi dance, extremely colorful and loud and energetic. and at the end of half an hour or however long it was the guy looked ready to fall over, and i was like, cool, good show, i guess its time to go.
but no.
that was the warmup act. the band came back, and this time they added in a few more oboe-thingies and a few more djembes, and this time there were three guys in gigantic quilt-skirts spinning in the center. so they would spin, and then they would spin around each other, and then they would untie skirts (they were each wearing four) and hold them up over their heads so that they had one swirling out high and one low. and in the middle they had this special double skirt thing so that when they lifted them over their heads they really looked like giant, fabulously colored spinning tops. you could only see their feet. so then they got down to the last skirt, and when they untied that one (they still had swirley robes on, no worries), they started throwing them around like pizza crusts. they would spin the skirts over their heads one handed and toss them and strike weird poses and lie on the ground and get back up and dance around each other, all while spinning in circles and twirling these huge, heavy quilt skirts.
and after this one it really was over :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jsSdelV7Qg im pretty sure that this is actually the exact same show that i saw (on a different night, obviously). this is the green guy in the middle, so no top-twirling, but you can look that up yourself.
and then we went to a cafe and i drank bananna juice, which is delicious.
we actually only had about 30 minutes to wander in the bazaar, though, because, much to my surprise, the trip was actually centered around a sufi dance. im not sure that is spelled right, but sufi-ism is a sect of Islam that uses music and dance to connect with God. they dance and spin in circles in special costumes until they reach a nirvana-esque state. needless to say, the show was pretty powerful and also extraordinarily entertaining.
it started out with about a dozen musicians, mostly percussionists but also including a couple of weird string things and a couple of oboe-esque winds, standing on a stage. they would all play together and then one would come to the center and do like a call and response solo deal and he would spin and his skirt would fly out (which is the characteristic feature of sufi dancing). they went really crazy, especially the guy with the djembe and the guy with the hand cymbals. so at the end of their set, which was pretty long by itself, i was expecting a bow and a return to the market, but no, that was just the intro set.
so next they brought out a couple more musicians and a random old man singer and started a new set, only this time filling center stage was a guy in a green robe and this gigantic skirt. it truly looked like a very thick quilt, and judging by the way that it spun i think it had weights in the hem, so it must have been incredibly heavy. anyway, he spun... and spun... and spun. for literally a half hour straight. and his buddies were dancing and spinning and playing drums and stuff all around him, and every ten minutes or so he would untie a layer of skirt (it turns out that he was actually wearing three) and throw it up over his head. so that was neat, a real sufi dance, extremely colorful and loud and energetic. and at the end of half an hour or however long it was the guy looked ready to fall over, and i was like, cool, good show, i guess its time to go.
but no.
that was the warmup act. the band came back, and this time they added in a few more oboe-thingies and a few more djembes, and this time there were three guys in gigantic quilt-skirts spinning in the center. so they would spin, and then they would spin around each other, and then they would untie skirts (they were each wearing four) and hold them up over their heads so that they had one swirling out high and one low. and in the middle they had this special double skirt thing so that when they lifted them over their heads they really looked like giant, fabulously colored spinning tops. you could only see their feet. so then they got down to the last skirt, and when they untied that one (they still had swirley robes on, no worries), they started throwing them around like pizza crusts. they would spin the skirts over their heads one handed and toss them and strike weird poses and lie on the ground and get back up and dance around each other, all while spinning in circles and twirling these huge, heavy quilt skirts.
and after this one it really was over :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jsSdelV7Qg im pretty sure that this is actually the exact same show that i saw (on a different night, obviously). this is the green guy in the middle, so no top-twirling, but you can look that up yourself.
and then we went to a cafe and i drank bananna juice, which is delicious.
Tuesday 26 August 2008
i started drinking the water tonight, so we shall see how that goes...
so my blog is for some reason under review. apparently the server thinks that this is a "spam blog," and when i looked up what the heck that means, they said that spam blogs, and i quote, "can be recognised by their irrelevant, repetitive or nonsensical text,"
so...
i dont have much of an argument. but its still annoying because i am not, in fact, an obnoxious program designed to clutter up bandwidth and sell ipods or whatever it is that the spam people do.
anyway.
remember that whole hot sauce on the koshary story? well, that stuff didnt just jack me up in the instant; i have been sick the last three days. i just ate my first real meal for about 72 hours. just for my own edification, im going to list everything that i ate between the koshary and tonight: about 8 pieces of wheat bread, half of a pear, a handful of raisins, a handful of grapes, and 2 pieces of pita. and. thats all. im thinking about 500 calories? maybe? oh, and some mango juice. but i didnt die, and i guess im now acclimated to the food, hopefully, so that is good.
i have been learning arabic the last 2 days. it is crazy hard. i have had 6 solid hours of class time so far and there are zero cognates except, ironically enough, "zero." and technically that isnt even a cognate since the word for zero is "sifr;" zero is just a colloquialism.
i guess this is like what freshman year would have been like without crew. yesterday i went to a random pub with like 18 people but that was rather overwhelming so luke and i and a couple of chicks that we met there went to a cafe and ate and talked about religion and fruit for a few hours, which was much more my style. and then tonight a few of us went to, i kid you not, a queen tribute concert. seriously. and what was even more surprising than finding a queen tribute concert in egypt was finding a fantastic queen tribute concert. they had (and i might run out of adjectives here) one incredibly amazing guitarist and one above-decent one; a mind-blowing drummer; a superb pianist who also sang well and incidentally conducts the cairo symphony orchestra; an impressive violinist who also sang tenor in the surprisingly cohesive 8-person chorus line; and, last but not least, 4 nationally acclaimed feature singers, one of whom won egypt's equivalent to american idol. oh, and they had a bass guitarist and a keyboardist, too. see, ran out of adjectives. and yes, the chorus line (and the egyptian idol guy) did sing bohemian rhapsody, and yes, it was stupendous.
and then we went to a really nice tai place and i had the nicest dinner that i have eaten thus far in egypt, complete with crystal goblets, for about 8 american dollars. im really a fan of the exchange rate here :)
so...
i dont have much of an argument. but its still annoying because i am not, in fact, an obnoxious program designed to clutter up bandwidth and sell ipods or whatever it is that the spam people do.
anyway.
remember that whole hot sauce on the koshary story? well, that stuff didnt just jack me up in the instant; i have been sick the last three days. i just ate my first real meal for about 72 hours. just for my own edification, im going to list everything that i ate between the koshary and tonight: about 8 pieces of wheat bread, half of a pear, a handful of raisins, a handful of grapes, and 2 pieces of pita. and. thats all. im thinking about 500 calories? maybe? oh, and some mango juice. but i didnt die, and i guess im now acclimated to the food, hopefully, so that is good.
i have been learning arabic the last 2 days. it is crazy hard. i have had 6 solid hours of class time so far and there are zero cognates except, ironically enough, "zero." and technically that isnt even a cognate since the word for zero is "sifr;" zero is just a colloquialism.
i guess this is like what freshman year would have been like without crew. yesterday i went to a random pub with like 18 people but that was rather overwhelming so luke and i and a couple of chicks that we met there went to a cafe and ate and talked about religion and fruit for a few hours, which was much more my style. and then tonight a few of us went to, i kid you not, a queen tribute concert. seriously. and what was even more surprising than finding a queen tribute concert in egypt was finding a fantastic queen tribute concert. they had (and i might run out of adjectives here) one incredibly amazing guitarist and one above-decent one; a mind-blowing drummer; a superb pianist who also sang well and incidentally conducts the cairo symphony orchestra; an impressive violinist who also sang tenor in the surprisingly cohesive 8-person chorus line; and, last but not least, 4 nationally acclaimed feature singers, one of whom won egypt's equivalent to american idol. oh, and they had a bass guitarist and a keyboardist, too. see, ran out of adjectives. and yes, the chorus line (and the egyptian idol guy) did sing bohemian rhapsody, and yes, it was stupendous.
and then we went to a really nice tai place and i had the nicest dinner that i have eaten thus far in egypt, complete with crystal goblets, for about 8 american dollars. im really a fan of the exchange rate here :)
Sunday 24 August 2008
please pardon the lack of capitalization; i dont like to waste time pressing "shift" all day
this is egypt. it seems way more efficient to release outlines of my stories to the masses so that everyone gets all of the kicks and i dont have to repeat everything nine times. of course, im a better storyteller in person, so i will leave out the nitty details and if you want to hear about something else i can repeat with gesticulation and proper emphasis.
anyway.
august 21- i sat down on the plane from chicago to frankfurt and i busted out my egypt travel guide and this guy next to me looked down and said "youre going to egypt? me too!" so it turned out that he was on his way to a study abroad program at auc (that is, in case you dont know, the american university in cairo) as well. his name is luke and he will be a prominent character in most of my stories.
anyhoo, we get off of the plane and venture out into the cairo airport, which really isnt too overwhelming. i hadnt requested the pickup service from the university, but luke had so i figured that if i tagged along with him i could bum a ride; its not like theyre just going to leave me in the airport if im standing there, right? so we meet the bus driver and he groups everyone up and says "go through customs and meet me at the baggage claim," and i was like score, free ride. unfortunately by the time my bags came, everyone else was past ready to go and they had, in fact, ditched me. alas. on the other hand, while i was standing there looking foreign this egyptian guy started talking to me, just making small talk, and he ended up giving me his business card and telling me to call him if i ever needed anything, so that is my first example of random egyptians being really friendly.
i just took a cab (the first time i have ever been in a cab, incidentally) to the dorm, and i ended up arriving at the exact same time as the bus, so i met up with luke again on the steps of the building and we went to reception together. a quick word about traffic in cairo: it is insane. it makes atlanta look like a quiet country lane. the horns never let up, people dont turn their headlights on at night, the white lines dividing lanes mean absolutely nothing, and red lights are only respected if there is actually another car in the intersection blocking your forward progress. when you cross the street, cars dont stop; they swerve around you, if you are lucky, but i am regularly grazed and i have been hit once already, and sometimes they dont swerve at all, or slow down, and you just have to jump out of the way. there are no stop signs, so everyone goes at the same time at four-way intersections. it is really quite a rush riding anywhere in a taxi here. but on the plus side, it only costs 5 egyptian pounds (which is less than one american dollar) to get from my dorm all the way downtown. and that is enough about traffic.
so luke and i walked up to reception and asked to be assigned rooms and the girl behind the desk kindly explained to us that we werent allowed to check in until the 22nd. obviously we were like... "what? how can you possibly just kick us out of here? we have nowhere to go and we dont speak arabic." then she recommended a lovely four-star hotel in the neighborhood and said that she would be happy to direct us there. luckily luke is as cheap as i am, and we both opted to find the nearest internet cafe to check hostels.com. we found a hostel downtown for 6.50 a night (i know, right? dont act like you arent impressed), so we hopped in a cab and took off. (on an amusing note, we, being rather naive and new to the city, paid 50 pounds for that cab ride...) the only problem was the fact that the google map from hostels.com did not match up with the address given for the hostel, so the cab driver just drove in circles for a while. he never ended up finding it; we just decided to find it on foot so we got out. this was a horrible decision. i havent mentioned this yet, but we were both carrying all of our luggage; the receptionist wouldnt let us leave anything at the dorm. based on the airport scales, i had about 90 pounds of stuff (incidentally, dad, thanks for recommending the wheel-y bag) and it was pushing 100 degrees, so needless to say the next 45 minutes of lost wandering was quite exhausting.
eventually, while standing on a corner examining our map, a very nice man fluent in english came up to us and offered to help. he didnt understand the google map either, so he took us to another internet cafe, looked up the actual street name, escorted us to the hostel, talked that receptionist into accepting us on such short notice, and then gave us his card and phone number and told us that he would be back in an hour to take us out to dinner. the coolest part is that, while egyptian born, he married a german woman and gained german citizenship like 6 years ago and was quite fluent, so i got to practice my german with him (he also spoke french, bringing his tally up to four including english and arabic). so we met up with him and he took us to this really small place with amazing beans and hummus and falafel, all of which are egyptian staples. we, of course, paid for his meal, but it wasnt a big deal; we got like seven plates of food plus two baskets of pita for 50 pounds, which is less than 10 dollars.
then we crashed in the hostel; i sat in the windowsil and wrote poetry and it was very romantic and quaint.
august 22- i know, this is like a novel. but i figure that anyone who cares enough actually to check out my blog is interested in details... actually this day was much less eventful. luke and i made our way back to the dorm (henceforth probably called zamalek, which is the name of the island and also the neighborhood in which it is located) at about noon and, since we checked in at the same time, we were assigned the same room. since then we have acquired two more roommates: mark and jonah. anyhoo, that afternoon we met up with some people and went down the street to smoke sheesha (arabic for hookah) and drink beer, only i didnt drink beer for obvious reasons. i did smoke hookah for like an hour, though, and i got a pretty hefty buzz but then i had a headache for like five hours so i dont think it was worth it. then there was a movie night which didnt hold my attention for very long; eight or ten people wanted to go wander around cairo, so we did. only the girls didnt really want to wander; they really wanted to find a cafe and sit, so we looked for a cafe, but cairo isnt like france or italy. it is really difficult to find places where women can just sit (outside, that is) and chill. so we walked the crazy busy streets filled with lingerie stores and shoe stores and prosthetic limb stores and anything else you can imagine, and then we walked the tiny alleys filled with goats and people slaughtering the goats and old men smoking sheesha on rickety old tables and kids beating each other with shoes. after like an hour the girls got whiny and decided to go back the the sheesha bar next to our hostel, and most of the guys agreed, so they all piled into cabs and headed back, but luke and i were like, we have already smoked today, we want to explore, so we did. we started walking and pretty soon we were hopelessly lost. we had a map and we used the moon to figure out direction, but we still couldnt find a road that led to the right bridge to get back to our island. so once again we found ourselves standing on a corner looking at a map and suddenly approached by an overtly friendly egyptian man. this guy told us where we needed to go, but then he decided to take us to his cousin's teashop instead, so we chatted with him there for a while and then he started trying to convince us to come to his shop to see his array of perfumes. we were actually interested, but it was like 1230 at night so we said maybe later, but this dude was incredibly persistent; he ended up setting up a meeting with us for 2 the next day, and then he and luke exchanged numbers so that he could call us and remind us. so then we followed his directions and made it back to zamalek. hooray.
august 23- i guess i lied about that day being less eventful. anyway, we left the dorms at about 10 for one of the biggest malls in the middle east. it really wasnt interesting for the most part since it was filled with excessively expensive clothes and trinkets, but it did have a gigantic wal-mart-esque store in the basement, so luke and i bought a stove and a couple of pots so that we can cook in our room (which is basically equivalent to a freshman dorm at any college, complete with community bathroom, alas). then we went back to zamalek just to re-board the busses to go to the nile where we hopped aboard "falukas" (probably spelled incorrectly), which are about 30 foot sailboats that look incredibly ancient. so we sailed around the nile for a while... thats all i have about that. it was really lovely, but you sort of had to be there. then we came back to the dorm and called our german friend and he took us and mark (jonah was jet-lagged out and crashing) to another hole-in-the-wall restaurant, this time to have koshary, a medley of noodles, rice, lentils, onions and tomato sauce. it was quite delicious, but i feel that it is necessary to note that this restaurant had no menus. the only options were "small," "medium," and "large" koshary. i thoroughly enjoyed about the first half of mine, but then i foolishly decided to try the sauces on the table, despite my german friend's warnings. the first one, a sort of odd mixture of vinegar and garlic, was tasty, albeit mildly smelly. the second, however, was incredibly, unbelievably, unbearably hot and i, thinking that i could easily handle tobasco sauce, put way too much into my bowl. i mixed it up and diluted it as much as possible and finished the bowl, but by the end i was literally crying and sweating profusely and my face was bright red.
august 24- i was mildly nauseous all day, sort of like something inside my stomach was trying to punch its way out, and i blame the excessive ridiculous hot sauce. but today we finally got to go to the campus, which is actually downtown so we could have gone there before but whatever. there was a free breakfast and then a presentation by the president and a "roll call of nations," all very lovely and moving and boring. amusingly, the vice president taking "roll" of the nations forgot about half of them. she called out like 15 and then "united states" and 98% of the room stood up and then she called for any countries that she had missed and at least 12 kids stood up to represent their countries, including a chinese kid and an indian kid, and i thought it was rather unbelievable that such huge countries could be overlooked, but anyway. then we went on a bus tour of cairo, which was totally useless; we sat in the bus and chatted for an hour and a half while the driver drove around and said nothing. then i registered for *some* classes, including basic modern standard arabic, islamic philosophy, and studies in the Qur'an. naturally, i am super psyched about all of these. i still have to get signed up for physics because, you know, i need it to graduate or whatever, but that really isnt interesting.
last but not least, tonight we went on a horseback riding trek through the desert. there were about 20 of us, plus some egyptian guides, and these were no trail horses; we actually had to ride, not just follow. we rode through the city for a while and then passed through a gate and just busted out galloping into the desert. it was quite dark and im not much of an equestrian so it was sort of scary, but all in all it was a really fun time. we ended up at this random "bedouin" camp, complete with fire and a little hut thing and egyptian tea (at 5 pounds a glass, of course). and did i mention that the view from the dunes we were riding on included the great pyramids at giza? yeah, so that was neat too. then we galloped back, only i was on a different horse this time and the stupid thing tripped and threw me which was extra exciting, and then it wouldnt get back up so the leader came and beat it with a whip for a second. it got up pretty quickly at that point. and then i tried to get back on but my stirrups were mysteriously gone, fallen off somewhere in the sand, but the dude was yelling at me so i scrambled on anyway and raced the rest of the way without stirrups. if you have never galloped without stirrups... dont.
thats it. i would have proofread but this thing is just crazy long. if you made it to the end, congratulations.
anyway.
august 21- i sat down on the plane from chicago to frankfurt and i busted out my egypt travel guide and this guy next to me looked down and said "youre going to egypt? me too!" so it turned out that he was on his way to a study abroad program at auc (that is, in case you dont know, the american university in cairo) as well. his name is luke and he will be a prominent character in most of my stories.
anyhoo, we get off of the plane and venture out into the cairo airport, which really isnt too overwhelming. i hadnt requested the pickup service from the university, but luke had so i figured that if i tagged along with him i could bum a ride; its not like theyre just going to leave me in the airport if im standing there, right? so we meet the bus driver and he groups everyone up and says "go through customs and meet me at the baggage claim," and i was like score, free ride. unfortunately by the time my bags came, everyone else was past ready to go and they had, in fact, ditched me. alas. on the other hand, while i was standing there looking foreign this egyptian guy started talking to me, just making small talk, and he ended up giving me his business card and telling me to call him if i ever needed anything, so that is my first example of random egyptians being really friendly.
i just took a cab (the first time i have ever been in a cab, incidentally) to the dorm, and i ended up arriving at the exact same time as the bus, so i met up with luke again on the steps of the building and we went to reception together. a quick word about traffic in cairo: it is insane. it makes atlanta look like a quiet country lane. the horns never let up, people dont turn their headlights on at night, the white lines dividing lanes mean absolutely nothing, and red lights are only respected if there is actually another car in the intersection blocking your forward progress. when you cross the street, cars dont stop; they swerve around you, if you are lucky, but i am regularly grazed and i have been hit once already, and sometimes they dont swerve at all, or slow down, and you just have to jump out of the way. there are no stop signs, so everyone goes at the same time at four-way intersections. it is really quite a rush riding anywhere in a taxi here. but on the plus side, it only costs 5 egyptian pounds (which is less than one american dollar) to get from my dorm all the way downtown. and that is enough about traffic.
so luke and i walked up to reception and asked to be assigned rooms and the girl behind the desk kindly explained to us that we werent allowed to check in until the 22nd. obviously we were like... "what? how can you possibly just kick us out of here? we have nowhere to go and we dont speak arabic." then she recommended a lovely four-star hotel in the neighborhood and said that she would be happy to direct us there. luckily luke is as cheap as i am, and we both opted to find the nearest internet cafe to check hostels.com. we found a hostel downtown for 6.50 a night (i know, right? dont act like you arent impressed), so we hopped in a cab and took off. (on an amusing note, we, being rather naive and new to the city, paid 50 pounds for that cab ride...) the only problem was the fact that the google map from hostels.com did not match up with the address given for the hostel, so the cab driver just drove in circles for a while. he never ended up finding it; we just decided to find it on foot so we got out. this was a horrible decision. i havent mentioned this yet, but we were both carrying all of our luggage; the receptionist wouldnt let us leave anything at the dorm. based on the airport scales, i had about 90 pounds of stuff (incidentally, dad, thanks for recommending the wheel-y bag) and it was pushing 100 degrees, so needless to say the next 45 minutes of lost wandering was quite exhausting.
eventually, while standing on a corner examining our map, a very nice man fluent in english came up to us and offered to help. he didnt understand the google map either, so he took us to another internet cafe, looked up the actual street name, escorted us to the hostel, talked that receptionist into accepting us on such short notice, and then gave us his card and phone number and told us that he would be back in an hour to take us out to dinner. the coolest part is that, while egyptian born, he married a german woman and gained german citizenship like 6 years ago and was quite fluent, so i got to practice my german with him (he also spoke french, bringing his tally up to four including english and arabic). so we met up with him and he took us to this really small place with amazing beans and hummus and falafel, all of which are egyptian staples. we, of course, paid for his meal, but it wasnt a big deal; we got like seven plates of food plus two baskets of pita for 50 pounds, which is less than 10 dollars.
then we crashed in the hostel; i sat in the windowsil and wrote poetry and it was very romantic and quaint.
august 22- i know, this is like a novel. but i figure that anyone who cares enough actually to check out my blog is interested in details... actually this day was much less eventful. luke and i made our way back to the dorm (henceforth probably called zamalek, which is the name of the island and also the neighborhood in which it is located) at about noon and, since we checked in at the same time, we were assigned the same room. since then we have acquired two more roommates: mark and jonah. anyhoo, that afternoon we met up with some people and went down the street to smoke sheesha (arabic for hookah) and drink beer, only i didnt drink beer for obvious reasons. i did smoke hookah for like an hour, though, and i got a pretty hefty buzz but then i had a headache for like five hours so i dont think it was worth it. then there was a movie night which didnt hold my attention for very long; eight or ten people wanted to go wander around cairo, so we did. only the girls didnt really want to wander; they really wanted to find a cafe and sit, so we looked for a cafe, but cairo isnt like france or italy. it is really difficult to find places where women can just sit (outside, that is) and chill. so we walked the crazy busy streets filled with lingerie stores and shoe stores and prosthetic limb stores and anything else you can imagine, and then we walked the tiny alleys filled with goats and people slaughtering the goats and old men smoking sheesha on rickety old tables and kids beating each other with shoes. after like an hour the girls got whiny and decided to go back the the sheesha bar next to our hostel, and most of the guys agreed, so they all piled into cabs and headed back, but luke and i were like, we have already smoked today, we want to explore, so we did. we started walking and pretty soon we were hopelessly lost. we had a map and we used the moon to figure out direction, but we still couldnt find a road that led to the right bridge to get back to our island. so once again we found ourselves standing on a corner looking at a map and suddenly approached by an overtly friendly egyptian man. this guy told us where we needed to go, but then he decided to take us to his cousin's teashop instead, so we chatted with him there for a while and then he started trying to convince us to come to his shop to see his array of perfumes. we were actually interested, but it was like 1230 at night so we said maybe later, but this dude was incredibly persistent; he ended up setting up a meeting with us for 2 the next day, and then he and luke exchanged numbers so that he could call us and remind us. so then we followed his directions and made it back to zamalek. hooray.
august 23- i guess i lied about that day being less eventful. anyway, we left the dorms at about 10 for one of the biggest malls in the middle east. it really wasnt interesting for the most part since it was filled with excessively expensive clothes and trinkets, but it did have a gigantic wal-mart-esque store in the basement, so luke and i bought a stove and a couple of pots so that we can cook in our room (which is basically equivalent to a freshman dorm at any college, complete with community bathroom, alas). then we went back to zamalek just to re-board the busses to go to the nile where we hopped aboard "falukas" (probably spelled incorrectly), which are about 30 foot sailboats that look incredibly ancient. so we sailed around the nile for a while... thats all i have about that. it was really lovely, but you sort of had to be there. then we came back to the dorm and called our german friend and he took us and mark (jonah was jet-lagged out and crashing) to another hole-in-the-wall restaurant, this time to have koshary, a medley of noodles, rice, lentils, onions and tomato sauce. it was quite delicious, but i feel that it is necessary to note that this restaurant had no menus. the only options were "small," "medium," and "large" koshary. i thoroughly enjoyed about the first half of mine, but then i foolishly decided to try the sauces on the table, despite my german friend's warnings. the first one, a sort of odd mixture of vinegar and garlic, was tasty, albeit mildly smelly. the second, however, was incredibly, unbelievably, unbearably hot and i, thinking that i could easily handle tobasco sauce, put way too much into my bowl. i mixed it up and diluted it as much as possible and finished the bowl, but by the end i was literally crying and sweating profusely and my face was bright red.
august 24- i was mildly nauseous all day, sort of like something inside my stomach was trying to punch its way out, and i blame the excessive ridiculous hot sauce. but today we finally got to go to the campus, which is actually downtown so we could have gone there before but whatever. there was a free breakfast and then a presentation by the president and a "roll call of nations," all very lovely and moving and boring. amusingly, the vice president taking "roll" of the nations forgot about half of them. she called out like 15 and then "united states" and 98% of the room stood up and then she called for any countries that she had missed and at least 12 kids stood up to represent their countries, including a chinese kid and an indian kid, and i thought it was rather unbelievable that such huge countries could be overlooked, but anyway. then we went on a bus tour of cairo, which was totally useless; we sat in the bus and chatted for an hour and a half while the driver drove around and said nothing. then i registered for *some* classes, including basic modern standard arabic, islamic philosophy, and studies in the Qur'an. naturally, i am super psyched about all of these. i still have to get signed up for physics because, you know, i need it to graduate or whatever, but that really isnt interesting.
last but not least, tonight we went on a horseback riding trek through the desert. there were about 20 of us, plus some egyptian guides, and these were no trail horses; we actually had to ride, not just follow. we rode through the city for a while and then passed through a gate and just busted out galloping into the desert. it was quite dark and im not much of an equestrian so it was sort of scary, but all in all it was a really fun time. we ended up at this random "bedouin" camp, complete with fire and a little hut thing and egyptian tea (at 5 pounds a glass, of course). and did i mention that the view from the dunes we were riding on included the great pyramids at giza? yeah, so that was neat too. then we galloped back, only i was on a different horse this time and the stupid thing tripped and threw me which was extra exciting, and then it wouldnt get back up so the leader came and beat it with a whip for a second. it got up pretty quickly at that point. and then i tried to get back on but my stirrups were mysteriously gone, fallen off somewhere in the sand, but the dude was yelling at me so i scrambled on anyway and raced the rest of the way without stirrups. if you have never galloped without stirrups... dont.
thats it. i would have proofread but this thing is just crazy long. if you made it to the end, congratulations.
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