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.