i was going to do this tomorrow, but since ben asked so nicely i guess i can stay up an extra hour on a school night...

i actually wrote a really nice blog about the first week of school and all that jazz on thursday, but when i tried to copy it on to word my computer exploded (and by that i mean froze obnoxiously and had to be restarted) and i lost all of it. and no, smart alecs, i couldnt do the document recovery thing; my computer is just that awesome. whats more, luke just told me that i can spell check on this very website instead of copying into word, so im extra bummed. but anyway, thats my excuse for such a long gap between updates. im not dead.
so school started. i have had one week, and the jury is still out on the institution overall, but all in all it seems quite better than neutral. i dont know that i prefer it to tech, but i definitely like most of it.
auc has 2 campuses at the moment; one is in downtown cairo (which is a six pound cab ride from my front door) and the other, the new campus, is in new cairo, which is about 45 minutes away in the early morning lack of traffic. all undergrad classes are on the new campus, so i get to get up at 745 every day to catch the 830 bus to new cairo. it is remarkably reminiscent of middle school, actually, but i have decided that its a good deal because i have nothing to do on those bus rides but a) read or b) talk to people, so i will either get all of my homework done with time to spare or i will make lots of new friends. it will probably be the former, but its a plus either way. of course, coming home at 5 in the afternoon (during the rush as all of cairo tries to get home for iftar) usually takes about 2 hours, but whatever, more time to learn about muhammad.
the first time i saw the school itself, i seriously thought that it looked like a prison, an extremely lavish and artistic prison. it is all gray stone, and all of the outside is fenced. im not sure who they are trying to keep out, since the school is in the middle of the desert, but there are only two entrances and both are guarded by at least three men checking ids at all times. this was a pretty radical change from tech, where bustling atlanta streets run straight through campus at several places and bums can just wander right up to your classroom door.
another gross difference is that there is no green anywhere on the new campus. there are a few gaps in the expansive stone courtyards, but they are all filled with sand as though someone thought that grass might be a good idea but then got preoccupied. there are palm trees, though, which are better than nothing...
in typical egyptian contractor style, the construction is way behind schedule, so the first week many of the classrooms had no air conditioning; some lacked electricity; and all had various technical difficulties. chairs and tables (and sometimes ladders and scaffolding) were just piled into classrooms, nothing was set up, and everything was rather dirty. and, to top it all off, the cafeteria is totally inaccessible so i, refusing to pay eight pounds for a bagel every day, just fast during the school week. which is okay because its 70% muslim so everyone is fasting so who cares. my philosophy teacher walked into the first class literally punching the wall because he was so frustrated that nothing worked and he couldnt get into his office because he couldnt find it and his id wouldnt scan him in to the right building... its is unbelievably chaotic.
but the teachers are pressing on anyway, and classes are very promising. im taking electricity and magnetism because it is way easier than e and m at tech (enough said about that); islamic philosophy; studies in the Qur'an; and modern standard arabic. yes, that is only 4 classes and only 13 hours and its less than i have ever taken in college, but i really did try to add another arabic class, one focusing on egyptian colloquial, but that would have put me at 16 hours. apparently study abroad students are only allowed to take 15, so the school would have charged me 1000 american dollars for the extra hour, so i said screw that, ill just have an easy semester.
my arabic teacher is a little bit insane; she has spent 15 years developing this odd new way of teaching the language, and we are the rats forced to study her experimental book. we have had four days of class thus far and we have spent every one "reading" arabic sentences (with english translations underneath), but she has yet to teach us the individual letters. she reads the words to us sometimes, but she hasnt told us what sounds go with what symbols. she says that we should become familiar with the shapes of the letters before we learn what they mean... whatever. i decided to give her a shot. by the way, modern standard arabic is sort of the arabic equivalent of shakespearean english, that is, no one speaks it. but the arabic world is filled with different dialects, and everyone understands msa, so it is more practical than learning egyptian colloquial, for example, because people in morocco speak a completely different dialect. and also, there is not a written form for any of the dialects; all publications in arabic are in msa. so i will be able to read and everyone will be able to understand me, even though they will make fun of me for speaking so formally (imagine if someone walked up to you on the street and asked a question in 16th century english; you would understand the question, but you would think they were retarded).
islamic philosophy promises to be quite a spectacular class. it is, as the professor has stressed ad nauseum, not the philosophy of the islamic religion but of the islamic civilization which, over the course of history, has included huge numbers of non-muslims. the philosophy itself is a fun combination of western and eastern philosophy. it is not nearly as straightforward and rational as western thought, but it is equally distant from stereotypically existential eastern thought that centers on smoking and yoga, and it all, of course, focuses on Allah. the professor is quite a fascinating speaker; he usually says about 10 lines of relevant material in an entire lecture, and he spends the rest of the time on tangents about linguistics or nuances in translations or thought processes or "some guy that i met in china who spoke flawless fus-ha."
studies in the Qur'an will probably be equally spectacular, though it will surely be more challenging. our reading list is 25 or 30 books long, plus the Qur-an, some of which, im told, we will be expected to read in the original arabic. so not only do i have to read and comprehend the scriptures from a holy book of another religiou, but i have to do it in a language whose alphabet i have yet to learn. but the class is chill and the professor is this really soft-spoken old arab guy who says "yani" a lot (yani is the arabic equivalent of "like," so he, like, says, like, like, a lot, like, you know, whatever).
enough about that. i do have some actual stories from the week.
first off, luke and i went to a meeting for the scuba diving club. i signed up for classes (luke is already certified, alas), and so i will hopefully have my first class tomorrow. the whole deal entails 2 days of theory in class, 1 day in the pool, and then 9 or 10 actual dives. the super exciting part is that the dives are in the red sea. if you dont know about diving in the red sea, look it up now; its sort of a big deal. so maybe as soon as next weekend i and whoever else signs up for the class will be taking weekend trips to dahab and sharm to go scuba diving. huzzah. of course, the downside is that i have to live off of spaghetti for the next 4 months because the class is so expensive, but thats okay.
on a not at all similar note, this girl in my philosophy class randomly invited me (it wasnt that random, but the story of the conversation is really long and not that interesting so i will say random for the sake of flow) to accompany her downtown to 1) meet some sudanese refugees and 2) have dinner with her mom's neighbor's daughter who the girl had never met. i know that sounds like the most ridiculous invitation ever, but i was intrigued so i went. and i met some sudanese refugees... not such a good story. and then we left the shelter place and met this other chick, who also had 2 other friends with her, only then the girl from my philosophy class had to leave, so i was caught in downtown cairo with my friend's mom's neighbor's daughter and her two friends. so that was weird. but they were like, show us cool places to see and take us somewhere cool to eat, and i was like hey, why not. so we wandered around downtown for a few hours and watched iftar, and then we cabbed back to a cafe in zamalek and ate and smoked and talked about politics and religion for like 3 hours; it was actually very pleasant, which was unexpected given the inauspicious beginnings.
k so some background for this next story. last weekend when we went to the bus station to find a bus to al-fayoum, luke and jonah and i were standing in the middle of this big square and some random egyptian dude came up and said "american?" and a conversation ensued. he ended up getting luke' s number and promised to call so that we could hang out later. whatever, no way that random guy is going to call us, we will just forget about it. but no, contrary to our wildest expectations he called luke tonight and asked if we wanted to do something. i believe my exact words were "hell yeah; wait, let me take the money and credit cards out of my wallet just in case he decides to mug us." so we went to the cultural center to meet this guy, and he told us that we were going to watch an arabic speaking contest. i was like... wtf, thats your native tongue, what kind of a contest is that? but no, the contest was for modern standard arabic (fus-ha), which, when you get into the grammatical nuances, is incredibly complicated and difficult. our new friend participated in the contest, along with 3 or 4 others (the auditorium was almost empty, believe it or not), and he ended up winning 200 pounds, which is pretty cool since all he had to do was talk. but it worked like this: you stand on the stage and talk in msa for a minute, and if you make a single mistake you are disqualified. if you make it to "round two," you start with a possible 500 pounds and you have to talk for 10 minutes in msa, and every time you make a mistake you lose 50 pounds. admittedly it would have been more interesting if i understood any of the words, but it was still neat to watch.
after the contest, luke and i went with our new friend and some of his friends to a cafe across the street where we all had tea and talked for like an hour; they were all moderately proficient in english, and we both suck at arabic (luke much less than i), so the conversations were difficult, but i made friends with an arabic teacher who promised to take me to a mosque and give me lots of literature about islam and about muhammad. i think me might want to convert me, but that could be interesting... and he also offered to tutor me in msa for free, which is pretty cool. it was amusing, though, because every time an english speaker would use the verb "like" he used the word "love," so he said "because i love you, i will learn you arabic free," and i was like ...whats that now?? but we got it settled in the end.
and now it is 2 am and ben i hope you enjoyed reading this.
and also, screw spell check. sorry if i mistyped, but ive been awake for a long time.