ive been here a month???

in case you havent already caught on (and actually even if you have; its sort of odd to start a sentence like this with a conditional since the following statement is true regardless of your amount of understanding or attention, i.e. its not as though cairo is fairly conservative if you havent caught on and extraordinarily liberal if you have caught on, if you understand my meaning), cairo is a fairly conservative place. some of the women on the street are in full burka, covering their entire faces; most of them have at least shawls over their hair and necks; and even the ones who are uncovered are wearing long pants and modest shirts. even at school, where a surprising number of girls uncover and let their hair down, so to speak, no one wears skimpy shorts or shirts. the population of the egyptian museum, however, consists mostly of americans and europeans, and so, for me at least, after spending a month of seeing nothing but facial skin, walking into the egyptian museum was a lot like walking off a street in america into a strip club. (not that i have been to a strip club, but you understand the alalogy.) that place was filled with girls wearing the tiniest shorts i have ever seen, super-tight spaghetti strap shirts, no bras... you name it. there was even this russian chick who had on a blue bikini covered with some entirely transparent lace thingy. i know that reporting all this may make me sound like some sort of sexual predator, but some of these european chicks were dressed like sluts even by american standards. i totally understand why egyptians think that white women are loose; after 35 years of interacting with women in long dresses and hair wraps, a girl in shorts must appear scandalous indeed.
oh, and there were lots of egyptian artifacts there also. whatever.
actually the museum itself is a little overwhelming, even for me, and i consider myself a pretty experienced museum-goer. (i rarely consider myself thus out loud, but still.) it isnt a huge building- i could walk end to end in about five minutes, and i walk really slowly. but the place is comprable to a warehouse in some places. it is just chock full of tiny statues and sarcophogi and jewelry and mummies and weapons and chariots and giant statues and heiroglyphics... im told that if you spent a minute looking at every artifact in the place, it would take (a lot of) years to complete your trip. personally, i got my fill in one go because i dont really care about ancient egypt, but most people return many, many times. oh, and also, only about a tenth of the artifacts are labeled, and a lot of the labels are just note cards with arabic scrawl on them, so its really difficult to tell what anything is or what it did. fortunately for us, we brought an egyptology major along, so she was able to explain a lot of the carvings and statues and symbolism and whatnot. unfortunately, she was actually doing the "spend a minute looking at every artifact" thing, so most of the group ditched her pretty quickly. luke, jonah and i got our fill after about 3 hours; im not set for life on ancient egypt. huzzah.
on wednesday luke and i went to the downtown campus for a meeting with the scuba diving club. we wandered around for a while looking for the meeting, but it was nowhere to be found, so we finally asked the sports club manager, who also, it seemed, worked as a janitor at night, and he said that the meeting was the next day, so we sat around talking to hot chicks until the shuttle came to take us back. we were out in the courtyard in these lovely wicker chairs just relaxing when this guy walked up with a big stack of papers and said "scuba?" and we said yes and thus commenced the meeting. needless to say, it was pretty informal. but the guy gave me a packet and a price list and, after conferring with luke about prices in america, i decided to give it a shot (its way cheaper here, plus you get to learn in the red sea as opposed to some lame american freshwater lake). i went to the dive shop on sunday- i was alone, but i figured that other kids would show up and we would have a grand old time learning together, but no. i paid for the class and waited with the instructor for a while but no one else came, so i had my own private scuba tutor for the next 2 days. then yesterday (wednesday) luke (who needed to take a refresher course) and i went to the pool with this other guy, eric, who had taken the class at a different time, and we met the instructor for a confined water dive.
we reviewed all of the signals and went over putting on and taking off the gear, and then we suited up and "giant stepped" into the pool. it was rather sensational, despite the fact that my rental mask felt like it was going to devour my nose. we swam around and practiced emergency air sharing and learned to neutralize our buoyancy and just generally got used to breathing underwater. about halfway through, the swim team showed up (seriously), so as we were working on stills, kids in speedos and goggles were paddling by above us. i was really astonished at how lackadaisical everyone was about having practice on top of half a dozen scuba divers, but i guess that sort of thing happens all the time in egypt (??); at any rate, no one stopped and pointed.
the confined dive complete, we headed to the bus station to buy tickets to hurgada (sp?) where i will complete four open water dives to finish my open water certification. we leave tonight at 1130, so basically we will sleep on the bus, wake up in hurgada, and be out on the water by 8 am tomorrow. they dont mess around with scuba here :)
my last story of the moment requires a return to those guys who luke and i met at the arabic speaking contest. we met up with the one i was talking to, hassan, on tuesday and accompanied him, after 2 taxi and 2 subway rides, to his enormous and beautiful mosque. this was the first time i had been inside a mosque before so i was quite intrigued; it was nothing (to my ignorant Christian surprise) like a church at all. it was basically all open space, which makes sense since muslims spend most of their "church time" prostrate and praying. we walked into a great marble courtyard and then into a huge carpeted room filled with muslims praying. i felt sort of out of place, but there were random egyptians lying down and talking and sleeping in the back of the room, so luke and i sat among them while hassan prayed and few people even looked at us twice. then hassan came back and the three of us sat and talked for a while, and then he opened his bag and began to dole out muslim information books. im going to give the titles of the books because both the names and the sheer quantity of literature are rather amusing:
"women in islam"
"the Qur'an and modern science: compatible or incompatible"
"muhammad, the messenger of Allah"
"human rights in Islam and common misconceptions"
"Islam, the religion of all" (not Allah, mind you- "all," as in everyone. even you.)
"a brief illustrated guide to understanding Islam" (yes, illustrated)
"stories of new Muslims"
"is the Bible God's word?"
"the true message of Jesus Christ"
and finally, my personal favorite,
"the truth about Jesus"
so apparently i was right in thinking that mr hassan wanted to convert me.
but we stayed and talked for a while longer anyway and gradually we started to build up a little crowd; eventually luke and i werent even talking to hassan or to each other. luke was talking linguistics and language with two random guys (usama and ahmed, if i remember correctly) and i was talking religion with an indonesian guy named nadi, so we were both pretty much in our element and i found the evening very satisfactory.
and plus we set up a date with hassan for next tuesday; he is going to come to tutor us in arabic and we are going to "learn him" english. i think the first lesson will have to be days of the week, because setting up a date with this guy is neigh impossible. you cant just say "tuesday at seven," you have to start with today and work your way into next week or he gets lost. in his defense, though, i do the same thing with arabic days of the week...
and, insha Allah, luke and i are going to syria next week, along with whoever else wants to come, assuming that we are able to get visas, so between scuba diving in the red sea and exploring damascus, my next few entries should be pretty rocking.