Cairo Orientation Pt. 1

The first thing you notice in Cairo is the heat. Before seeing anything else from the window of my airplane I saw that cooked golden sand hue that sets the color palate for everything I've seen here so far. The heat accosted me the minute the plane and its A/C powered down. Our plane's gate (and maybe every other gate at Cairo International too?) didn't have one of those slinky elevated hallway things that i can't remember the names of that stick out from the terminal to meet planes' hatches, and so we had to walk across the tarmac to a bus which took us to the international security area. I was already sweating. After entering the air conditioned international terminal I walked straight to the "Banque Misr" ("Misr"=Arabic for "Egypt") desk to beat the line of more-confused tourists and get my visa-payment receipt to take to the visa desk. Having cavalierly chosen not to get my visa ahead of time, a part of me worried that something would go wrong here but all told the visa process took about twenty minutes and went very smoothly. All the same, this two-step process would foreshadow the multi-step processes that clog nearly every official experience I have partaken in. Everything, be it getting my bus pass, creating my school ID, reigstering my school email or registering for my classes has required going to different desks in different buildings and excessive paper documentation. Someone told me it was to create more jobs for people to perform. I don't know if that's true, but it is sort of confounding how inefficient everything is here.

Despite the problematic bureaucracy I was able to exchange my American dollars for Egyptian Pounds at the Banque Misr. This turned out to be a mistake as the airport bank gives a relatively bad exchange rate (duh), but it seemed prudent to have some Egyptian cash on hand and it was helpful to not have to figure out how to get money that night before I went out to get a phone. Waiting for my bags, the group of twenty-something looking american students all more or less realized that we were probably going to the same place and so began the introductions. Luckily my bags made it here with no complications and we AUC students made the usual small talk. No lasting friends were made there by the baggage claim, but it was nice to have some people to talk to while we waited and then on the bus ride to our dorm.

Most of the international students are here for some kind of Junior year abroad experience, which served to remind me of the fact that I am in fact older than most of my dorm-mates. Luckily I did meet some Arabic Language Institute students later that night in my dorm so I'm not all alone in my old-age here in the dorm. Most of the ALI students seem to be graduates too, but I did meet one girl who had convinced her school to let her go abroad and take classes at the ALI as a senior. She had already done her JYA here and then decided to come back to get started on her path to becoming an Arabic PHD. She already speaks Thai, Hindi, Punjabi, English, and maybe some other language fluently, plus she knows a lot of Egyptian colloquial Arabic (an extremely enviable skill considering how little my Modern Standard Arabic is understood here...) from her previous semester. I felt distinctly unaccomplished when I found all this out. She was very nice though, and it was nice to have her with me when she bargained a cab driver down from 25 to 15 egyptian pounds later in my trip.

There are many other nice and interesting students here, but I admit I feel a little jaded about devoting enough social energy to making friends with every single person I meet here, especially with all the JYA-ers who are mostly interested in impressing eachother more than learning things. It's in that distinction that I feel the age-difference most distinctly. It will be interesting to see how the social situation plays out after Orientation week ends.

After a very excited bus ride to the island of Zamalek on which my dorm is located we got off the bus and were told that we were not to take our bags up to our rooms, only to check in. This was to be my first experience with "baksheesh," or tipping, which as every single Egytpian tourist guidebook will tell you, is like the only way Egyptians ever make any money apparently. In my few days here so far, this has not turned out to be nearly as common as they would have me believe, but maybe this has been anomylous. The books insist I will have to dole out at least an Egyptian Pound or two every time anyone does anything for me, be it carrying my bags the thirty feet to my elevator, or giving me directions to an Egyptian restaurant (the former of which did warrant a tip, the latter of which, did not). I took the elevator up to my sixth floor room and opened the door to find that my roommate was already there. His name is Kun Ha (spelling?), and he is from Singapore here to begin what will be 3 years of study to become an Egyptologist. He is a rather skinny and tall fellow with glasses and lightly bleached hair and he doesn't talk much. He was playing Starcraft 2 when I walked in, and he has played a lot of it since. We haven't really hung out yet as he has not really participated in many social situations so far, but the two of us are pretty compatible as roommates I think, as we are both prone to moderate cleanliness in our room (neither of us has fully unpacked yet to this day) and we both sleep heavily (though, as most of you would guess, I sleep the heaviest). I haven't spent much time in the room yet except asleep, but I keep meaning to engage him more if I ever see him again for more than a two minute period...


Me and KH live in a very nice double which has tiled floors, two desks, two closets, shelves and two very saggy beds. He has the far side of the room with the window and i have the side by the door. The bulbs in our main overhead light and bed lamps are all burnt out, though the fluorescent light above our desks work, thankfully. Both of us I think have been too busy or too prone to inertia to figure out who we need to talk to about that, but I'm sure it will get done some time next week when our school schedule makes things less hectic. Aside from the weird pieces of wood on the bottom of my closet, everything is very clean, and we supposedly get free housecleaning to come up and clean everything, including our bed sheets and towels.

If my dorm, Zamalek, sounds like a hotel kind of, that's not totally far off. The building is beautiful and in fairly good shape which makes it VERY nice relative to almost every single building in Cairo. The dorm is toward the Northern quarter of the island of Zamalek in the Nile river. We're about a 10 minute cab ride to downtown Cairo just across the river to the east and it's about an hour-long bus-ride to the AUC campus located in the far southeastern district of New Cairo. More about the AUC campus later.

After dropping off my bags and hanging around long enough to talk with KH and change my clothes, I went down to the common area where there was a free meal being offered by the restaurant/cafeteria thing we have down there. The food was ok except for the weird, giant pickled olive I ate (and by giant I mean like almost 2 inches in diameter), but I barely even remember what it was I ate (it didn't help that I didn't really know what it was...).



I sat with some random people for a while and then we headed out for our first organized trip, a felucca (old school wooden sail boat) cruise on the Nile. After a fifteen minute bus ride that left about twenty minutes late (also a common trait about most things in Egypt—everything starts or leaves late, a phenomenon many just call “Egyptian time”), we arrived at the mainland river front area and split up into groups of 15 or so to get on the boats. The temperature was absolutely perfect and the slight breeze offered a welcome change from the sweltering heat of the afternoon. It was fascinating to see all the lights and activity going on in the city as well as to see the skyscrapers which all had English language titles adorning them.



Before pushing off, the boat driver (captain?) plopped down a case of Fanta for our consumption. Fanta is quite the popular beverage here, which actually answers a question I had long wondered about in the States: who actually drinks Fanta? Answer: Egyptians do. It also comes in exciting flavors like cantaloupe here too. This flavor, like most beverages here, is rather cloying. I found this out the next night when I got another Fanta, this time in that particular flavor, for free. After roughly an hour on the river, we took the bus back to the dorm and I quickly went to sleep.

I realize that this post is getting long and i haven't even gotten past the first day, but I gots to give background info on my actual comings and goings so just bear with me. Next post will be super action packed.

Tweet??

I have a phone here in Egypt now, and I'm trying to decide if I want to get a Twitter account for it. I haven't totally figured out how much it costs me to text message, but would that maybe be a good idea for ways to update people in little small ways while I'm over here? I don't even know how I actually feel about Twitter, but I suddenly nderstand why it might be a practical means of communication that I can do on the go any time. Feel free to email me or leave comments if you think that is a good idea.

In other news, I will post about about my first days in Cairo soon, and hopefully it won't take me as long to edit this upcoming post as it did the last two. From what I can say so far, in short, the traffic here is insane, the super cheap street food downtown is amazing, Egyptians work on roughly the same five-minutes late schedule that I do, the cats roam free in the city, I really think I'm going to like bartering for stuff, I am sweaty all the time, and I am very excited to start learning Arabic again, especially the Egyptian colloquial. I'll post an actual post non-run-on-sentences and hopefully some pictures real soon. In the mean time, tell me how you all are doing and tell me what you think about my twitter idea.

The Comedy of Ultimately Unimportant Errors in New York

Admittedly, this trip did not start auspiciously. All the same, in the seconds I first had to compose myself sitting on the oh-so-familiar metro north train leaving New York City I had enough of a respite to realize that I had perhaps let myself wax a bit overdramatic and told myself not to fret so much.

It had all begun, of course, with a poor night's sleep—-a nap really—-thanks to a combination of my procrastinatory packing habits and the restless insomnia that usually strikes before big trips. Unfortunately, my body tried to turn my nap into a full night's rest by having me sleep through my alarms the morning I was to leave. Good job me. This in turn caused me to rush as I tried to fit an hour of showering and last-minute preparations into half an hour. I thought I had managed it until after about three minutes in the car I realized that I had forgotten my checkbook—-an item I could not do without since I had to bring my tuition check to AUC's New York office on Monday. Going back to get the checkbook caused me to miss my bus to the airport, but it was ok because I was secretly happy for the extra hour of time with my parents afforded by the drive to the airport. I felt bad that I had killed my parents' morning with the extra driving, so it seemed like a bit of karmic justice when on my first flight the passenger in the seat next to mine was so large she veritably overflowed (I had originally written “oozed” here but that seemed a little mean, if more illustrative) past the arm rest and well into my seat's sovereign territory.

All the same, my trip was not to be derailed by such minor setbacks, and I had a new Radiolab podcast on my ipod so I was content to let the soothing voices of Jad and Robert lull me into a peaceful snooze. My sleep was interrupted only briefly by my three hour layover at Kansas City where I slept in the terminal with my shoes as a pillow. I then got on my second flight and slept through most of it to arrive in New York feeling slightly rested, though, inexplicably, a bit uneasy.

At first I chalked it up to having no phone (won't do me any good in Cairo), and then as I waited at the bag carousel, I began worrying that the wine and beer bottles I had so meticulously wrapped in towels and duct tape had somehow broken and soaked all of my Egypt-bound belongings. Looking back, worrying that the bottles had broken was sort of irrational, but thee two beers and the wine bottle all had some kind of sentimental value. I had won the wine bottle for selling the second-most (and if it weren't for Larraina...) amount of that wine at my restaurant, and the two bottles had come from purchases I had intended to save for a special occasion before I headed off for the land of prohibited alcohol intake, so as the minutes stretched longer and longer as I stood before the baggage carousel, my sleep-deprived imagination tormented me with the irony that would have been a situation where my prized booze bottles broken and soaking all my belongings. As such, when the conveyor belt stopped, my bags were still nowhere to be seen, and a group of ten other people from my plane also had not received their bags, my first thought was that somehow my libations had not only ruined my bags, but all of theirs too.

Of course, that's not at all what had happened. Instead, my bags, and all of the bags belonging to people who had traveled from Denver through Kansas City to NY, were simply just lost. All my clothes were not ruined, they were just gone. So...super.

Many calls on borrowed phones (a problem that would plague me the entire trip) and some unclear paper work later I arranged to have my bags delivered to Christine's apartment in Brooklyn whenever they were found, and took a cab to Sophia's (and Lizzie's, but she didn't want to see me) summer apartment in Soho. I have a not so secret envy for all my friends living in the city, and Sophia's lovely apartment reminded me of how a part of me wished that I were moving to the City and simply beginning to live a real life with a real job and a place that I could call my own. Having only ever lived at Vassar or with my parents, I still find all those things exciting and interesting. I jokingly tell people how “I'm putting off making real person decisions for another year with this trip,” but there's more than a grain of truth to it, even if I have a good excuse for doing it. I won't be making a lot of decisions about finding a job and getting my own place for quite a while.

Then again, I also have the feeling that maybe I'm really going on this whole adventure so that my life isn't ever dominated by those things? I don't mean that in such an arrogant way, just that in some ways where I live and what my job title is does not matter as much as living some kind of fulfilling existence does to me wright now. I'm just not ready to settle down like that yet...

After I dropped off my stuff at Sophia's we went out for some Chinese food and cocktails for what would be the beginning of my mission to get all the food I wouldn't be able to get over in Cairo while I still could. We then took the 4 train down to Christine and Chloe's new Brooklyn apartment for their house-warming party. It ended up being quite a lot of Vassar people there which was incredibly wonderful, and I was reminded a) of how much I like the people from my alma mater, and b) of something Chloe had said to me earlier this summer, about how nice it is going to be from now to be able to see Vassar people not just on campus, but in the real world, in each others' elements. The Rolling Rock and Evan Williams reminded me of school too, so I was really happy to have gotten to be there (thanks for changing the day Christine!). We rode the train back up to Sophia's with another Vassar friend who lived nearby and then we went home and to bed.

The next day Sophia and I said our goodbyes, thank yous, good lucks, etc. and then I took the oh-so-familiar train up to Tarrytown to have a brunch that turned into brunch and dinner with my good family friends (adopted family might be a better term) in Nyack. Full day #2 was spent hectically in the city delivering my tuition check to AUC, trying to figure out how to set up an Egyptian bank account, and getting my bags from Christine's apartment where they had been inconveniently delivered around 1am the night before. In my rush, I further complicated things by locking Christine's keys in her apartment after picking up my bags, which ended up being not so big a deal, but which at the time seemed like yet another development in an increasingly overwhelming comedy of errors. Luckily, the car I had parked at the Tarrytown train station turned out to have avoided a ticket despite being illegally parked for an hour after I missed my intended train, AND my sudden, intense craving for pizza was conveniently satisfied by a decent mom-and-pop joint on my drive back to Poughkeepsie. It seemed my luck was pretty much turning around, as it always does.

Spent the next day in Po-Town doing some last-minute Egypt shopping and going to the much-vaunted Poughkeepsie walking bridge which I had never managed to explore while at Vassar. Ended the day drinking my wine and eating some quality (not that I would know it if it weren't) Indian food, and falling asleep watching a movie.

The next morning (after missing only one train!) I headed to the city to meet a friend for lunch just before she was about to go to Vassar. I felt unreasonably tired so I spent a little bit of time recuperating in a Starbucks and writing down some things for here. After a little of this caffeine therapy I set out on the arduous process of getting my bags back down to Christine's apartment (and yes, it has been pointed out by multiple people that I should have just left them at her flat in the first place) which again required the added step of finding Christine so I could get her keys from her first. I then re-tracked down Christine and the small crew of Vassarites with her for some delicious dinner at a Cuban food restaurant in Soho. The steak rivaled the Village Tavern's steaks and came with some deliciously spiced rice and beans. After a little more wandering around in the city, the remnants of our dinner crew headed to a bar near Times Square that we had heard had uncommonly cheap drinks to pass the time while waiting for our friend working nearby to bring us up to her workplace for a tour. She worked on something like the 20th floor in a skyscraper overlooking Times Square and we were all pretty excited to be getting a sneak peek into our friend's cool job. It was such an interesting instance of seeing our friends growing up and moving on in the world in so many cool ways, and the complimentary towncar ride home that our friend got for working so late made the experience all the more surreal. Riding with the windows down and feeling the cool breeze, I distinctly remember thinking what a fantastic last night to spend in the States it had been.

The contented feeling from the previous night's ride home continued as I repacked my bags and carried them through Brooklyn. It was a beautiful day, and the tree-shaded cobble-stone walkway I lugged my bags over to the metro stop seemed ever so picturesque with the families eating lunch on the benches and the pigeons flying in small flocks around me. It seemed like New York was doing its best to give me something to miss. Even when my train got stuck at Borough Hall for twenty minutes thanks to a malfunction, I didn't feel too perturbed. I headed on up to Christine's homey little bar to meet a friend and have one last beer and a hamburger. Then I was off to a quick meet-up with my former housemate Dylan (as well as another of my housemates by phone) in Grand Central before taking the bus to JFK. Waiting for the bus I realized I needed to eat something for dinner so I grabbed a slice of pizza from the store across the way which turned out to be one of the best pieces of pizza I have ever had. I of course spilled some of the sauce on my shirt, which only seemed a fitting end to such an accident-prone stay in the Empire State...and I'll be honest, the pizza was so good, it was worth at least three more weird spots on my shirt.

Now as I sit in the airport surrounded by Egyptians I am finally catching the whiff of an understanding of what it is I am going to be doing—and it's kind of freaking me out. I've decided I will let myself entertain all these doubts and anxieties for now only. This will be the time Egypt because I am too intimidated at the moment. I let myself do this now in this one instance, because, at the same time I am making a pact with myself to never again to let myself wimp out starting from the moment I get off that plane. Next time--and every other time the opportunity presents itself--I will talk to those strangers. I will make an ass of myself and mispronounce every word in Arabic so that they can barely understand me. And then I will do it again. I am writing it down here so that you all can hold me to it when I get back. Ask me if I talked to lots of Egyptians. Feel free to be openly disappointed if I don't say hell yes.