sorry about the huge lack of updates, but ive been pretty incredibly busy for the past few weeks. i have about 30 minutes before my bus comes, though, and i have decided to be irresponsible for your sakes, so im writing this instead of *starting* either one of the two term papers that are due next week. quite frankly, i work really well under pressure, and thats totally what im banking on.
while we are on the subject of procrastinating term papers, though, i would like to say a thing or two about the auc library. actually, its not completely the library's fault; mostly it is some stranger's fault, but i dont know the stranger and i want to focus my annoyance on something, so the library gets the brunt of the blame. i am writing both papers on a sufi mystic by the name of ibn 'arabi. he is considered the "greatest master" of islamic mysticism, and he wrote a lot of really profound stuff, and the auc library just happens to have 2 copies of his most profound work translated into english: the bezels of wisdom. and i wanted it for my papers. obviously. so i went to the library like 3 weeks ago and it was checked out- no problem, ill give it a few days, surely whoever has it wont hoard it because tons of people are writing term papers right now. a week later it still isnt back, so i ask the library to recall it, that is, to bump up the due date and send an email telling the person to bring back my flipping book. another week later, it still isnt here (and its rather overdue), so i ask the library to start calling whoever has it to get them to bring it back. of course, no one answers, so i havent gotten the bezels and im surely not going to before this stuff is due. and there was another book in the same situation, and the librarian talked to whoever had it and told them to bring it back today, but, of course, no. so i lack all primary sources. whatever.
yeah, ive been super busy. i cant even remember what i did 3 weekends ago; if i think to ask someone, ill let you know because im sure it was entertaining. but 2 weekends ago i played in my first egyptian rugby game. thats right, i joined the rugby team (sort of), and we had a trip to alexandria and completely destroyed the 'alexandria gladiators.' then a couple of guys from the team, one guy's girlfriend, me and a friend who had come up with me, trish, stayed in alex and played tourist. so we saw some catacombs and i went to the library again (i should have thought to check out the bezels there! dang), but mostly the trip centered around eating because there is an abundance of really fresh and amazing seafood in alex. so yeah, i stopped being vegetarian for the weekend. we ate tons of sea bass, crabs, prawns, calimari, some other kind of fish... and everything always comes with rice and salads and tahini and bread, and its usually like 40 pounds a person (8 dollars, eh), so its undeniably the best food for the lowest price you are likely to find without going to some egyptian's house.
then that week i read books in preparation for writing this paper. i have read four so far, and i feel pretty much like an expert on islamic mysticism. but a better story begins on tuesday (i think) night. i asked lauren that day if she wanted to go with me to the market because i lost my scarf and wanted to get another one, and she agreed but said that she would be at school until sort of late. i didnt particularly mind, so that night i went out with corina and smoked sheesha and waited for lauren to call to say she was back, which didnt happen until about ten. but we went anyway because, hey, its cairo, who needs sleep? unfortunately, neither of us knew how to get to the market, so we just hopped on a subway train and hoped for the best. unfortunately we had guessed wrong, and we had half a dozen egyptian men explaining to us the error of our ways in varying degrees of english. finally this one guy, who turned out to be named mohammad, go figure, said he would escort us to the right subway stop, which he did. and then he camp above ground with us to help us get a cab. and then he came with us in the cab all the way to the market. and by this time it was past midnight and the subway was closed, so i offered to pay for his cab but he refused; if you havent noticed, this guy was super nice. and not even in the creepy egyptian way (at least i didnt think so... lauren rather did, and she didnt talk to him, but thats another deal altogether). since he was so nice, i couldnt really say no when he asked me to go to dinner with him the next day.
but then he finally left and lauren and i wandered in the market and bought scarves and smoked more sheesha until about three in the morning when everyone started cleaning up and packing in. but then we got another sheesha... so by about 345 it was just us and a bunch of egpytian men sitting in this huge square; we were talking and they were waiting for us to leave so they could clean, so we left. but for some reason we didnt feel like taking a taxi (even though we were several miles from anywhere we knew), so we just started walking in the general direction of downtown. a couple of hours later we arrived at a square that i knew where we got some food and decided on a course of action. it was almost dawn, so i suggested that we wander over to chelsea's house (no more than a mile away) to watch the sun rise from the top of her roof. the only problem was that i had never walked to chelsea's from that direction and, cairo streets being what they are, we got lost, so finally at about seven in the morning we gave up and went home, and then i got up at 830 for school.
then the next night (wednesday, i guess) i went to chelsea's to hang out and at about 830 i remembered that i had a date with muhammad! he had sent me a text earlier telling me to meet him at the downtown subway station, which was quite near, so i thought, cool, we will get food and chill downtown for a while, nothing to worry about. so i went and met him and he was like, okay, now we are going to maadi (he lives in a completely separate district of cairo). and i was like, sure, whatever. so we went and got food and talked about arabic and ourselves and why eyptian men make white girls uncomfortable, and then he invited me back to his place for a drink... it was seriously the closest thing that i have had to a date for several years. when we got back to his apartment, though, i had to bail, so i excused myself and left, but he came with me to the subway station (and bought me some juice on the way) and then bought my ticket for the train and then got on the train with me and rode all the way back downtown and then came back up to the street with me and then walked a couple of blocks back toward chelsea's house with me and finally i was like, muhammad, you have to go home! i figured chelsea would be mad if i brought a random egyptian home with me... so he left and i went and talked with lauren in the hammock until like 5 in the morning and then got up at 830 for school the next day. so thats three days, less than five hours of sleep.
and i have more stories about last weekend, but i really have to go to the bathroom and then i have to catch the bus home, so yall will just have to wait until after thanksgiving. sorry.
and happy thanksgiving, whoever reads this :)
Wednesday 26 November 2008
Friday 7 November 2008
november what?
i havent really done much egyptian stuff during the past few weeks. mostly i have been acting the part of the very worldly college student, which isnt usually a niche into which i fit, but its been fun nonetheless.
ive been doing a lot of fretting about school, but im trying hard not to let that put a damper on the rest of the semester. i have about six labs to make up (they canceled all labs during ramadan and then expect us to make them up on saturdays... retarded? i think so) and just these past two weeks i was assigned three papers that were all pretty much unexpected, so i will be writing a grand total of about 35 pages over the next 4 weeks. i know that in the grand scheme of things 35 pages isnt that much, but it is way more than i have ever had to write, so im a little daunted.
but other cool stuff has happened too. last weekend was halloween, as im sure you are all aware, and so dressing up was necessary. luke and lauren and i went to this unbelievably huge outdoor thrift store downtown to find cool clothes for costumes. luke bought a rather hilarious and surprisingly well-fitted pair of snakeskin pants and a matching shirt that was way too big; his costume was "snake-man," or something of the sort. i originally bought some flowery pants and a ridiculously printed top, but there wasnt much of a theme in the costume other than "bright, colorful person," and then i found this tiny purple and red vest and decided to go as aladin. i borrowed some of lauren's pajama pants that just happened to match and went to school dressed like an arab street rat, but most of my friends didnt notice that i was dressed up. they just thought i was wearing my regular clothes, which is sort of good, i guess, since acceptance of my ridiculous clothes is what ive been going for all semester.
that night was christiana's birthday dinner, so i got really dressed up (i hadnt yet had a chance to wear the hodge-podge suit that i brought), and i have to admit that i looked pretty stellar. we went to a super-nice restaurant out on a dock at the top of the island of zamalek. it was rather lovely, even though i did sort of spend a week's worth of food money, but ill try not to dwell on that :) then the group decided to head to a jazz club (this was at midnight or so, i think), and i was really excited about that because i was picturing the 'catcher in the rye' style jazz club with a really awesome pianist or maybe a horn player and a lot of dark, smokey tables, but alas, it was just a bar, and they werent even playing jazz, so i left to go to bed.
right as i got back to the dorm, luke and lauren were walking out, so i fell in with them and went downtown where we had a dance party in chelsea's apartment and her roommate john taught me how to play mandolin. then i slept in a hammock (!!) and... yeah, that was that night.
i dont remember what i did on that friday during the day. probably not homework. but that night there was a halloween party at chelsea's, so i donned my aladin suit again and bought a bottle of egpytian vodka and was ready to go. just for the record, that was a bad decision; egpytian vodka is really disgusting and doesnt sit well with me at all. most of the night was really fun; i only say that it doesnt sit well because i ended up being rather sick for a while. but over the course of the night i 1) loaded five people into the aforementioned hammock and broke it, 2) restrung it and took a nap, 3) traded pants at least three times, 4) sat topless in the kitchen and told people how to find clean cups as i threw up into the trash can, 5) washed all of chelsea's dishes and 6) spoke ONLY in a british accent. seriously, i refused to speak like an american. i dont know why.
enter allegra and aahoo. actually allegra came to siwa with me during the first week, so she isnt a new character. anyway, at like seven the next morning (after i had fallen asleep at around five) allegra called me and asked if i was on the way downstairs because they were about to leave for alexandria, and i was like, woah, i forgot i told aahoo i wanted to go to alex for the day... i woke lauren up while on the phone and she wanted to come also, so the two of us scampered to the train station and the four of us hopped a train to alexandria. the ticket was only 21 pounds, which i found super awesome.
we wandered around alex and looked at some palaces and a mosque and some tombs and the library, which is gigantic and really wonderful, and then, with a little difficulty, found the lighthouse. you would think they would put up signs; the lighthouse at alexandria is sort of historically significant, no? it was super hard to find, though. and then we had dinner at a wonderful cafe, very chic but also quite cheap, and they had the best pizza i have yet had in egypt. and then we went home, but the ticket home ended up, because of circumstances outside of my control, costing something like 65 pounds. first of all, we didnt go to the main train station but a smaller one instead, which is actually sort of our fault because we told the guy the wrong name... and also because i confused the arabic words for "restaurant" and "station," so i was asking him to take us to the train restaurant. but apparently the tickets are 45 pounds if you dont buy them at the end of the line. and then the teller only had three tickets left, so we bought them and planned to buy another from the conductor on the train. we had to separate, so lauren and i took one ticket and picked some seats and hoped not to get kicked out. when the ticket checker came, he didnt speak english at all, so i told him that i needed to buy another ticket and he told me that it would be 104 pounds. naturally i was like, wtf...? lauren kept telling me not to worry about it, but i didnt want to pay that much, so i was trying to figure out why the ticket was so expensive, but it was really difficult since my arabic sucks, so she just handed him the money and he gave me the receipt and left before i could get to the bottom of the ridiculous robbery. then i checked the receipt and realized that lauren hadnt given the guy her ticket and that he had charged us for two. simple, i thought, ill just go get the money back for one, so i chased the guy down and tried to explain what i wanted, but i couldnt even come close; luckily there was a bilingual guy nearby (who, i later found out, goes to auc) who translated, but the ticket guy told me he couldnt give me the refund because he had already recorded the sale and if he changed it the company would assume that he had stolen the money. i asked to speak to his superior, but it turns out that he ran the whole train, so i thought it was really weird that he couldnt decide on whatever rules he wanted, but that was that. so finally we resolved that he would try to sell my first ticket to someone else who had hopped on and then i could have that money. the only problem was that my first ticket had cost 45 pounds and the standing room tickets are like 30 so no one wanted to buy it and not get a seat; finally i found a guy to buy it for 30 and i went back and berated lauren for being retarded.
that was a really long story.
then school for a week, nothing unusual there.
on wednesday we did another faluca adventure; there were only about ten of us, and half werent even auc students but random egpytians that luke and i have met over the semester. it was fun, though, and afterward i went out with two indonesian friends i met in some mosque to smoke and have tea, and after that i went to a birthday party on top of the nile hilton. i arrived at about midnight and everyone was quite drunk but no one was dancing; they all wanted to take shots before going onto the dance floor, which i thought was silly because its way easier to dance sober. and also i couldnt afford to get drunk there because a shot was like 50 pounds. insane. location, location, location. after a while the dance party started, and it went until maybe three and then we drifted away and went home. there isnt too much else to tell about that night, except that someone stole my shoes. i took them off (they were flip-flops) to dance and put them next to the stage, but apparently flip-flops arent allowed on the nile hilton, so some waiter or host hid them. it took me like ten minutes of asking people in broken arabic if they had moved or seen my shoes, and i dont even know the word for shoe, so it was extra hard. i did find them eventually, though.
then last night i went to a reasonably nice pizza restaurant with luke, chelsea, and corina; i would have been a really nice restaurant except that they put mostly raw egg on top of their pizza, which i thought was gross. then corina and i went back to her building and hung out at her neighbors and listened to funk and smoked sheesha for a while, and then i had to catch the shuttle out to heliopolis because lauren and kira and sarah invited me to go horseback riding.
im definitely never going horseback riding in egypt again. (note that the first time i went riding in the desert, my horse fell and threw me over its head.)
they asked if i was a good rider and i said yes (mistake) so they gave me this ridiculous stallion who absolutely refused to walk. he tried to canter everywhere, and even with my full weight pulling back on the reins, i was only able to slow him to a trot. i kept him under control most of the way out, but on the way back he just sprinted out into the desert in the completely wrong direction. please remember that 1) its one in the morning, 2) its dark and im alone, and 3) its the freaking desert, complete with rocks and ditches for a horse to fall into and die and kill me in the meantime. so i was working incredibly hard to stop this horse, but i was mostly failing miserably. eventually i forced him back to the group, but when we were about a quarter of a mile from the starting point he stopped listening to me completely and i just had to hold on. he pushed past a canter and into a gallop; it was the fastest i have ever ridden on a horse before, and, just as i was starting to consider enjoying it, we rushed up on a concrete wall and a 90 degree turn at full speed to avoid it. long story short, i couldnt hold on during the turn, my left stirrup broke off, and i flipped onto the ground and did my utmost to roll away from both my horse and the others running behind. i walked the rest of the way back, covered with sand and blood (i sort of smashed my head on a rock) and dragging my stirrup, but i got lots of sympathy hugs, so it worked out okay.
then lauren and i went back to zamalek (this was maybe 230 this morning) with every intention of going to another apartment and getting drunk. when we arrived, though, they were out of alcohol and everyone who i wanted to talk to was pretty sober anyway, so i sort of lost interest in drinking and stayed up talking to the girls who live in the apartment until the party dissipated. we went to sleep at around six and got up at ten, and now im about to take a shower and go back to bed.
and dangit, i still have to make up a ton of labs tomorrow (yeah, saturday...) and write proposals for two papers. curse my sloth.
ive been doing a lot of fretting about school, but im trying hard not to let that put a damper on the rest of the semester. i have about six labs to make up (they canceled all labs during ramadan and then expect us to make them up on saturdays... retarded? i think so) and just these past two weeks i was assigned three papers that were all pretty much unexpected, so i will be writing a grand total of about 35 pages over the next 4 weeks. i know that in the grand scheme of things 35 pages isnt that much, but it is way more than i have ever had to write, so im a little daunted.
but other cool stuff has happened too. last weekend was halloween, as im sure you are all aware, and so dressing up was necessary. luke and lauren and i went to this unbelievably huge outdoor thrift store downtown to find cool clothes for costumes. luke bought a rather hilarious and surprisingly well-fitted pair of snakeskin pants and a matching shirt that was way too big; his costume was "snake-man," or something of the sort. i originally bought some flowery pants and a ridiculously printed top, but there wasnt much of a theme in the costume other than "bright, colorful person," and then i found this tiny purple and red vest and decided to go as aladin. i borrowed some of lauren's pajama pants that just happened to match and went to school dressed like an arab street rat, but most of my friends didnt notice that i was dressed up. they just thought i was wearing my regular clothes, which is sort of good, i guess, since acceptance of my ridiculous clothes is what ive been going for all semester.
that night was christiana's birthday dinner, so i got really dressed up (i hadnt yet had a chance to wear the hodge-podge suit that i brought), and i have to admit that i looked pretty stellar. we went to a super-nice restaurant out on a dock at the top of the island of zamalek. it was rather lovely, even though i did sort of spend a week's worth of food money, but ill try not to dwell on that :) then the group decided to head to a jazz club (this was at midnight or so, i think), and i was really excited about that because i was picturing the 'catcher in the rye' style jazz club with a really awesome pianist or maybe a horn player and a lot of dark, smokey tables, but alas, it was just a bar, and they werent even playing jazz, so i left to go to bed.
right as i got back to the dorm, luke and lauren were walking out, so i fell in with them and went downtown where we had a dance party in chelsea's apartment and her roommate john taught me how to play mandolin. then i slept in a hammock (!!) and... yeah, that was that night.
i dont remember what i did on that friday during the day. probably not homework. but that night there was a halloween party at chelsea's, so i donned my aladin suit again and bought a bottle of egpytian vodka and was ready to go. just for the record, that was a bad decision; egpytian vodka is really disgusting and doesnt sit well with me at all. most of the night was really fun; i only say that it doesnt sit well because i ended up being rather sick for a while. but over the course of the night i 1) loaded five people into the aforementioned hammock and broke it, 2) restrung it and took a nap, 3) traded pants at least three times, 4) sat topless in the kitchen and told people how to find clean cups as i threw up into the trash can, 5) washed all of chelsea's dishes and 6) spoke ONLY in a british accent. seriously, i refused to speak like an american. i dont know why.
enter allegra and aahoo. actually allegra came to siwa with me during the first week, so she isnt a new character. anyway, at like seven the next morning (after i had fallen asleep at around five) allegra called me and asked if i was on the way downstairs because they were about to leave for alexandria, and i was like, woah, i forgot i told aahoo i wanted to go to alex for the day... i woke lauren up while on the phone and she wanted to come also, so the two of us scampered to the train station and the four of us hopped a train to alexandria. the ticket was only 21 pounds, which i found super awesome.
we wandered around alex and looked at some palaces and a mosque and some tombs and the library, which is gigantic and really wonderful, and then, with a little difficulty, found the lighthouse. you would think they would put up signs; the lighthouse at alexandria is sort of historically significant, no? it was super hard to find, though. and then we had dinner at a wonderful cafe, very chic but also quite cheap, and they had the best pizza i have yet had in egypt. and then we went home, but the ticket home ended up, because of circumstances outside of my control, costing something like 65 pounds. first of all, we didnt go to the main train station but a smaller one instead, which is actually sort of our fault because we told the guy the wrong name... and also because i confused the arabic words for "restaurant" and "station," so i was asking him to take us to the train restaurant. but apparently the tickets are 45 pounds if you dont buy them at the end of the line. and then the teller only had three tickets left, so we bought them and planned to buy another from the conductor on the train. we had to separate, so lauren and i took one ticket and picked some seats and hoped not to get kicked out. when the ticket checker came, he didnt speak english at all, so i told him that i needed to buy another ticket and he told me that it would be 104 pounds. naturally i was like, wtf...? lauren kept telling me not to worry about it, but i didnt want to pay that much, so i was trying to figure out why the ticket was so expensive, but it was really difficult since my arabic sucks, so she just handed him the money and he gave me the receipt and left before i could get to the bottom of the ridiculous robbery. then i checked the receipt and realized that lauren hadnt given the guy her ticket and that he had charged us for two. simple, i thought, ill just go get the money back for one, so i chased the guy down and tried to explain what i wanted, but i couldnt even come close; luckily there was a bilingual guy nearby (who, i later found out, goes to auc) who translated, but the ticket guy told me he couldnt give me the refund because he had already recorded the sale and if he changed it the company would assume that he had stolen the money. i asked to speak to his superior, but it turns out that he ran the whole train, so i thought it was really weird that he couldnt decide on whatever rules he wanted, but that was that. so finally we resolved that he would try to sell my first ticket to someone else who had hopped on and then i could have that money. the only problem was that my first ticket had cost 45 pounds and the standing room tickets are like 30 so no one wanted to buy it and not get a seat; finally i found a guy to buy it for 30 and i went back and berated lauren for being retarded.
that was a really long story.
then school for a week, nothing unusual there.
on wednesday we did another faluca adventure; there were only about ten of us, and half werent even auc students but random egpytians that luke and i have met over the semester. it was fun, though, and afterward i went out with two indonesian friends i met in some mosque to smoke and have tea, and after that i went to a birthday party on top of the nile hilton. i arrived at about midnight and everyone was quite drunk but no one was dancing; they all wanted to take shots before going onto the dance floor, which i thought was silly because its way easier to dance sober. and also i couldnt afford to get drunk there because a shot was like 50 pounds. insane. location, location, location. after a while the dance party started, and it went until maybe three and then we drifted away and went home. there isnt too much else to tell about that night, except that someone stole my shoes. i took them off (they were flip-flops) to dance and put them next to the stage, but apparently flip-flops arent allowed on the nile hilton, so some waiter or host hid them. it took me like ten minutes of asking people in broken arabic if they had moved or seen my shoes, and i dont even know the word for shoe, so it was extra hard. i did find them eventually, though.
then last night i went to a reasonably nice pizza restaurant with luke, chelsea, and corina; i would have been a really nice restaurant except that they put mostly raw egg on top of their pizza, which i thought was gross. then corina and i went back to her building and hung out at her neighbors and listened to funk and smoked sheesha for a while, and then i had to catch the shuttle out to heliopolis because lauren and kira and sarah invited me to go horseback riding.
im definitely never going horseback riding in egypt again. (note that the first time i went riding in the desert, my horse fell and threw me over its head.)
they asked if i was a good rider and i said yes (mistake) so they gave me this ridiculous stallion who absolutely refused to walk. he tried to canter everywhere, and even with my full weight pulling back on the reins, i was only able to slow him to a trot. i kept him under control most of the way out, but on the way back he just sprinted out into the desert in the completely wrong direction. please remember that 1) its one in the morning, 2) its dark and im alone, and 3) its the freaking desert, complete with rocks and ditches for a horse to fall into and die and kill me in the meantime. so i was working incredibly hard to stop this horse, but i was mostly failing miserably. eventually i forced him back to the group, but when we were about a quarter of a mile from the starting point he stopped listening to me completely and i just had to hold on. he pushed past a canter and into a gallop; it was the fastest i have ever ridden on a horse before, and, just as i was starting to consider enjoying it, we rushed up on a concrete wall and a 90 degree turn at full speed to avoid it. long story short, i couldnt hold on during the turn, my left stirrup broke off, and i flipped onto the ground and did my utmost to roll away from both my horse and the others running behind. i walked the rest of the way back, covered with sand and blood (i sort of smashed my head on a rock) and dragging my stirrup, but i got lots of sympathy hugs, so it worked out okay.
then lauren and i went back to zamalek (this was maybe 230 this morning) with every intention of going to another apartment and getting drunk. when we arrived, though, they were out of alcohol and everyone who i wanted to talk to was pretty sober anyway, so i sort of lost interest in drinking and stayed up talking to the girls who live in the apartment until the party dissipated. we went to sleep at around six and got up at ten, and now im about to take a shower and go back to bed.
and dangit, i still have to make up a ton of labs tomorrow (yeah, saturday...) and write proposals for two papers. curse my sloth.
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