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.
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