Night one in my unbelievably saggy bed was ameliorated by my exhaustion and by a pillow shoved under my side to keep my spine relatively straight. Woke up early to take the 9:30 bus to campus. I had found a map of Cairo sitting on a table otherwise covered in books under a sign written in magic marker saying "Book Fair," which I took to mean "free stuff," and I used the map to draw a rudimentary facsimile of my part of the island in order to find the route to the bus stop. Of course, as soon as I walked out of the dorm, I realized there were no street signs immediately apparent. I must have looked confused because within ten seconds an American girl's voice caught my attention asking me if I was trying to find the bus stop. She had a few other people walking behind her and she seemed to know where she was going so I fell in line with her and began to chat about how it was she came to know her way around already. Turns out the girl, Sallie, was a graduate of AUC who had lived in Zamalek for two years before and now she lived in an apartment about two blocks away. She lived with two girls who had just moved in with her who were both visiting AUC students like me. After Sallie deposited us at the bus (which was about a 4 minute walk away), we headed off to our first day of on-campus orientation. I ended up sitting across from Sallie's two flat-mates, Nora and Shayna, though I didn't know it at the time, and we got to politely chatting about the sights from our bus windows.
There weren't many other people on the bus because most everyone else had mistakenly chosen to take earlier buses believing falsely that there would actually be things to do on campus that early. To bad for them, they had not yet come to understand how Egyptian time works. An hour later, we arrived at the campus in New Cairo district.
This is the only part of Cairo I have yet seen where any more than 1-in-100 buildings are not in significant disrepair. In fact, the campus itself is in basically mint condition. There on campus the buildings twist and turn and meet each other in lots of astounding architectural feats and every building is built with bricks that seem to glow in shades of gold and red. There are really few campuses in the world which I think might rival Vassar's, but this one may even surpass my beloved Vassar in sheer objective beauty. It has the advantage of having been built and planned all at once, of course, so it is not the amalgamation of a hundred-fifty years of expansions and donations, like Vassar. Furthermore, it is all a completely different style, so one might argue it's comparing apples and oranges. Either way, it is undeniably a gorgeous campus.The campus itself, if you were looking at it from above, is shaped like a shallow basin, or a squashed letter U. A wide promenade-like path follows the curve with buildings on either side. For you Coloradans, imagine the outside part of Flatirons Crossing mall (where the Village Tavern is), but wider and with more homogeneous buildings, and you'll get kind of the idea (or just look at the pictures I have here). Also, there are a bunch of fountains and man-made waterways ornamenting
the middle of the path. At the nadir of the basin is where the library is which is a pretty cool building, though it can't top Vassar's. 
The main drag is widest at this point and makes for quite the impressive space. As you're looking down at campus, to the far left is the book store, I.D. Center (a very big building to fit all the people doing apparently superfluous jobs), and the arts center, while to the far right is the main auditorium, on-campus dorms, and the ridiculously nice sports complex complete with Olympic-sized swimming pool, two soccer fields, indoor and outdoor basketball and tennis courts and three weight rooms. While still looking down at the campus from above filling the 'basin' is a vast desert garden with rows upon rows of palm trees (they are here too!), fountains, flowers, bushes, cacti, and fantastically green, painstakingly manicured lawns. The garden is really quite beautiful, though when you look closely at the grounds (which are constantly being worked on by various Egyptian laborers), you see that there are permanent watering tubes going to every single plant, and one can't help but wonder just how much water is consumed by AUC out here in the middle of the desert. 
And that in fact is what gets to the heart of my discomfort with AUC's campus: the unavoidable knowledge that the campus is wholly artificial, like a fake plant, or Las Vegas. What's more, it's obviously highly-planned layout feels so inorganic, a bit like what walking around in one of those space stations in futuristic movies seems like it would feel like (I'm thinking the cloud city in Star Wars here specifically). Worst of all, it's hard not to feel like this opulent man-made oasis out in the desert exists as such because it is the American University in Cairo. But maybe I took too many classes about colonialism in the Middle East...
All the same, it is an undeniably beautiful campus, and I'm mostly just glad the buildings are so well air-conditioned and there is a bagel place right across from the ALI building which has about the cheapest food that could serve as a meal on campus so far as I can tell. Not even my very excite-able campus tour guides seemed excited about the food options on campus. These include Subway, Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Cinnabon (seriously), El-Omda (an Egyptian fast food chain), and then Tobascos which is a confoundingly popular fast food chain here in Egypt which serves crappy versions of not only American-style foods, but also Italian, Greek, Mexican AND Egyptian. There are also 2 Quick Stops (think what you could get at a gas station minus the gas), and something like 3 Cilantros which is maybe the closest thing to Starbucks here (there are some Starbucks here, but Cilantros is much more plentiful). I don't know why they named a cafe chain after a spice that should never go with coffee, but that's just how it is. Probably for the same reason I have seen Egyptian guys wearing T-shirts with uninvestigated English words like “Strokers.”
After our first day on campus, I and three other AUC students, including Nora and Shayna, the girls living in their own apartment on Zamalek, took the bus back to Zamalek and decided to explore the island and find a hookah bar. After one strike-out we found a cafe where we went up stairs and got some sheesha and some aseera (fruit juice).
The juices were delicious and vibrantly colorful as they were layered with different kinds of fruit to great visual—and taste—effect. After that we decided it was time to find some good cheap Egyptian food for dinner. Unfortunately, by this time it was about 5pm, which is pretty much the worst time to try and get anything in Egypt right now, because it is Ramadan. During this holy month of fasting, the hour or two before sundown, when Muslim Egyptians will break their fast at a meal called Iftar, many things close down, except for some businesses who might expect to still do a fair amount of business during this time. This means that Western-style restaurants stay open, but not the small Egyptian street-food vendors. Unfortunately, we wanted something from the latter group, so we had to wait.We walked around the island for quite a while until well past Iftar and as he walked we saw many groups of people, in shops, on the sidewalk, in alleys, and wherever else we looked, happily sharing their meals together. Though sometimes consisting of nothing more than a takeout from a KFC (yep, the American KFC), Iftars are often big communal affairs, I have been told that rich Egyptians will frequently put out big spreads for general consumption. This is in line with the standard saying for the holy month (a la “Merry Christmas” during the Christmas season), “Ramadan Kareem,” which means “generous Ramadan.” As such, because Egyptians are also known to invite random strangers over for Iftar, I think we were secretly hoping that something like that would happen so we could get the full Iftar experience, but it just wasn't happening for us that night. On the other hand, we did get free cantoulope flavored Fanta from some young Egyptian guys who were stopping cars to give away the sodas for free to drivers.
We got the sodas mostly because the fourth person in our crew, Daniel, seems to be every Egyptian's favorite foreigner. On multiple occasions Egyptians have stopped us to get a picture with our approachable shaggy blonde, blue-eyed friend. I don't seem to be as interesting to most egyptians, though to my credit, a guy standing near a mosque saw us in one of our moments of confusion as we were walking by and handed me four dates to eat from his pocket. Not eating them seemed an impolite response to his spontaneous token of generosity and since we clearly didn't know where we were going we couldn't exactly make a quick exit and throw them away later, so we ate them even despite possible sanitary issues. There were pretty tough, but actually quite delicious and rather satisfying to eat. I think he had probably had them as little snacks to cheat his fast if he needed to.
After another forty-five minutes of walking and searching without luck we had wandered down to the eastern riverfront of the island. Most of the restaurants on the water seemed rather expensive so we asked in our best broken Arabic one well-dressed Egyptian man sitting on a curb where the best “cheap Egyptian food” was nearby. He told us a place called Nile City just a little further down would only cost us “16 or 17 for two people,” which was more than we had been hoping, but still not bad considering the 5-to-1 LE to dollar ratio.
Nile city ended up being a sort of mini food court on a boat permanently connected to the island which housed an Italian restaurant, and Egyptian bakery and dessert place, a Chile's (which is unforgivably popular here in Egypt for no reason I can think of), and a buffet style Egyptian restaurant with open-air seating. We opted for the buffet, which was good-ish, but not great, and afterward when we saw the bill, we realized that that Egyptian man who had pointed us here, had meant 16 or 17 DOLLARS, and worse, he had been low-balling his estimate to boot. To our dismay, it ended up being about $35 per person, which considering I had dinner for about forty cents tonight, is really bad. The other three liked the food better than I did too, so I was especially annoyed at first, but I've since justified that expenditure and all others during this “orientation” period as acceptable because I'm considering it “vacation.”We then wandered back to the area around our dorm to drop some things off at Nora and Shayna's apartment (the view from whose window is pictured to the right) before heading to another Zamalek apartment nearby.
An Egyptian student had basically passed out flyers inviting people to a party he was throwing at his apartment, so we decided to check it out. It turned out to be your standard college party with beer pong (though not in solo cups, which apparently don't exist here), bad beer (Stella [not Artois], the only real Egyptian beer), and questionable spiked punch made with vodka and mango juice. I met a guy from West Point who was living in an apartment on the island with 10 other guys from his school, and he promised to throw some more parties later in the semester. 
I also met a drunk guy from Louisiana in the kitchen who was complaining that Obama wanted to take 50% of his parents' income because they make so much money. He also assured us that his dad used to share box seats with George W. Bush, and that he was for Universal Healthcare, but not right now while the debt is so big and he didn't want it to be Socialist healthcare. I just left the kitchen at that point. There were a bunch of people packed onto the porch smoking hookah. It was interesting and fun to talk to people, but after a while I wasn't feeling like drinking anymore Stella or like I wanted to be going to college parties like that while in Egypt, so I headed home for bed after an hour or two.The next day I went back to campus for more ridiculously inefficient ID acquisitions, and then me and my crew from the night before went to the gym.
I swam some laps and worked out, but the best part was really just getting to be in the pool which is the perfect temperature and unimaginably refreshing in the 100 degree weather that it was. After the pool closed at 3:45 (for Ramadan of course; it opens again at 9), we decided to take the shuttle going to downtown instead of Zamalek to explore. After arriving we hunted down a food stand and got some chicken and kofta (minced and spiced lamb which is amazing) cooked on a spit over a grill as well as some fresh fruit. I gave my chicken bones to a stray cat. 
All in all, my meal cost me about a buck I think. Then we wandered for a considerably long time until we got to what I think was Meedan Ramses (Ramses Square) where there was not only this really sweet mosque (pictured) but also a place that sold really delicious falafel sandwiches for LE1.By the mosque, there were also some street vendors and I bartered with one for some sandals, partially to see if I could get some cheap sandals but more to just practice bartering for later. This particular attempt at bartering ended as many of my other bartering sessions have since: with the salesman literally clawing at me as I walk away while he yells out a lower price than he had been demanding before. This one was uniquely funny perhaps because before I walked away he kept trying to shove the sandals in my hand and militantly repeating “C'mon, money, c'mon, money! Money! C'mon! Money!” I think I'm actually going to like bartering a lot when I'm really in the mood for it. It's very satisfying getting them to lower their prices. I'll write a separate post about Khan al-Khalili which is the gigantic market in Islamic Cairo full of sly yet forceful salesmen.
After my falafel sandwich and a relatively uneventful cab ride home (if you can really call any trip in Cairo traffic uneventful; more on that also some other time), I called it a night. The next day was my third day on campus and my third day of assorted slow bureaucratic tasks and then me and the crew, Daniel, Nora and Shayna, headed to Nasr City in eastern Cairo to keep exploring. The main thing to do in Nasr City is go to the Citystars Mall, a gigantic Western-style mall with about 6 levels, so this trip was not really my first choice of destinations. Though the mall is as nice or nicer than most American malls I've seen, it was for that very reason that I had littler interest in seeing it. The kind of rich Egyptians who go to a mall like Citystars in Egypt act just about the same way as most American mall-goers do, so I felt like it would be a wasted experience here. Besides that, the prices for most things were nearly on par with American prices (which I have already come to bawk at), or in some cases, more expensive (a regular Nike soccer ball for LE600?!).
Despite my pessimism, it turned out to be a fairly interesting experience as Ramadan added a different ingredient to the mix. Because everything closes in the afternoon before Iftar, most of the shops in the mall were actually closed when we got there. Nonetheless, lots of young Egyptians and Egyptian families kept streaming into the mall. This confused us at first, but after we got some food from a Lebanese fast-food restaurant and couldn't find a single table to sit at, we soon realized they were staking out all the tables for their Iftar. Sitting on the ledge of a fountain—the only place we could find—we watched as everyone sat down where they could find space in the crowded mall. After the tables and fountain ledges were taken, many just sat down on the grand spiral staircase curling all the way up to the top floor. You can kind of see the heads of the people sitting on the stairs in the picture here, and you can see pretty well from this picture how fancy the mall was.
From where we sat, we could see how Egyptian teens flirted and talked and walked around in clumps just like any American teens would.On a side note, just to get to a topic that some of might have been wondering about, yes, some older women were indeed fully covered, but I don't remember seeing a single younger girl with anything more than a head-scarf. I don't have a specific moral or political position on head-scarfs per se, or the covering of females in Islamic cultures in general, I mention this only as an observation that all levels of covering were accepted and basically considered unremarkable which is more or less how I think it should be.
The trip to the mall was mostly a pleasant, if kind of unexciting, experience but for one instance when a punkish looking Egyptian boy strutting with his girlfriend clearly said “fuck you” to me and Daniel while we were standing and waiting for the girls in the bathroom. More than some kind of latent anti-American sentiment, I think this mostly just reflected the dude posturing for his girl, so we found it more amusing than anything else. Some dudes will just be dudes wherever you go.
In order to get home, we decided it would be monetarily in our best interest to take a cab to the nearest Metro stop and then take the subway to our island. The location of the Metro stop ended up being in a particularly non-touristy part of Cairo, as evidenced by our cab driver's incredulous reaction when we told him our destination. On a side note, when the cab driver changed his radio station to the crappy American music station, I was rather pleased when I was able to communicate to him in Arabic that we wanted him to switch back to the Arab pop music station and to turn it up. I think he probably only understood the words “Arab music” but that was enough and it made me feel slightly competent.
We had the driver drop us off at the Metro and we then bought our LE1 (i.e. like 20 cents...which is awesome) metro ticket and got on the train. The Egyptian subways have between 2 and 4 female-only cars for those who are not comfortable with lots of men pressed up against them and/or possibly groping them if they are foreigners. The other cars are mixed gender, and because we were going at a particularly busy time of day just after Iftar, Daniel and I found ourselves barely even able to fit into the car (I wanted to get a picture, but felt weird doing it and I couldn't really get to my camera in my bag anyway). They don't have A/C and they smell horrible, yet the Egyptian metro system is considered very good by Middle Eastern standards. Which is to say it runs frequently and usually on time. I still missed the NYC and DC subway systems. We transferred to another train to take us to Zamalek and then made the 40 minute walk up from where the island's sole metro stop lies at the southern tip of the island.
I got back to my dorm completely exhausted and savored not setting my alarm for the next day as I didn't have to go to campus for anything. I felt like I had pretty well adjusted to the Egyptian time zone as I had been sleeping very well every night and waking up in the morning just fine, so I thought I would wake up naturally around 11 or so after a grand 10 or 11 hour night of sleep. I was wrong. Instead, I entered a temporary coma and slept for 15 hours, until 3 in the afternoon. I would go to Khan al-Khalili that afternoon with two friends from ALI but Khan is a post unto itself and I can't remember exactly what I did the day after that so I think it's time to let this post go for now. Yesterday I went to the pyramids which was quite the adventure (though I got thoroughly sunburned in the process) and I started my classes today which I’m pretty excited about at this point. The Egyptian students at AUC are all really interesting, even from afar, and the experience of being a foreign exchange student and a member of a large minority group has sparked some interesting situations and thoughts in my brain which I'll try to write about some time. All those, Khan, the pyramids, AUC's super-wealthy students will be separate posts too I think, so in addition to some of the other ones I've started writing about some of Cairo's quirkier aspects, so I should get a good number of posts up in the next week I hope. Inshallah they will be more concise than this one too! For now, here's a little teaser picture of the pyramids:
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