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 :)