Siwa pt. 2

In case you don't all look at my facebook where there are lots of pictures from Siwa by me and others, here is a gem that I am stealing from Nav, which I think is a funny picture of us. It was a timer picture, hence the poor framing, but I think I like it more that way.



The next day we let ourselves have a leisurely morning, going back to the restaurant/concrete box for breakfast, before heading out on our Safari at 2pm. Hemeida showed up at our hotel with the two drivers Abdo and Fathi (pronounced like Fot-hee), and another dude whom I can't remember the name of probably because he spoke very little--in any language--and basically just helped with chores. We split up into the two 4WD SUVs and headed out into the desert after stopping to stock up on some waters, everyone's excitement building the whole time.

I'd secretly been waiting ever since I got to Egypt for the chance to stand out in the desert with sand dunes stretching out in every direction from me as far I could see, and this was my chance. After about twenty minutes of driving south, our drivers stopped up on top of a big ridge to give us a chance to take pictures and as soon as I stepped out from the car I got my first taste of what it must feel like to really live out in--or should I say with the desert. Before then, I had always lived in the desert that is Egypt in some kind of bubble, be it my residence in a gentrified island neighborhood, the mammoth urban sprawl that is Cairo, or the wifi enabled buses I take over desert highways to get to campus five days a week. Even my torturous bus from

Cairo to Siwa maintained the delusion of a solid barrier between us and that golden thing out the window. No doubt, standing three feet away from the 4WD vehicles on our touristy safari, I was hardly living the bedouin life, but from that moment on in my time in Siwa, I kept trying to wrap my mind around that something that I felt emanating from that desert.

There's not a lot I can say to articulate it, but the thing I immediately noticed standing there on top of a sand dune was how the desert immediately felt so distinctly alive. The desert is like a stern teacher, intolerant of weakness or stupidity in those daring enough to study with it. It cares not for its students. It cares only about those who can succeed without the cushy learning environment of more hospitable geographies. To those who can make it, it offers a few springs, dates, oases, and the mystique that at one time convinced the civilized world that a preeminent oracle lived there. It's no surprise that one of the most powerful human beings to live in the pre-WMD era sought this place out. Alexander the Great knew that living in the desert begot a power that even he did not have, and I swear to god I could feel it.

After marvelling thusly over the desert, and taking some dramatic shots of ourselves, we drove a little further to the cold spring of Bir Wahed. Now I'll be honest, this cold spring at the bottom of a desert valley was more of what I imagined an oases to be; it was more like the small watering hole with a little bit of greenery clinging to existence nearby that some lost soul marooned in the desert would miraculously stumble upon in his last hour of life. We were much more comfortable than said lost soul, but the waters were still amazing to swim in. When we were down in the water it looked fairly small and I tried to swim to the far corner only to realize it was a lot longer than I had thought. I am aware on some basic levels of the science underlying desert springs--these little depositories of liquid pressured up from the ground beneath--but that being said, I still found myself wondering where the hell this water came from, and how it managed to stay there out in the middle of the desert. I mean, it's the desert, right--indeed, this is the Sahara desert, in many ways, the prototypical desert of stories--so how can that water actually stay there?

There had been a few other tourists on their own safaris (less cool than ours I am, perhaps delusionally, convinced since we had Hemeida) at the water's entry point, and when I returned from the opposite bank of the basin I found my friends talking with a haughty little Egyptian boy shooting at the fish in the water with an air-soft pistol. I think it was Nora or Julia who tried to say something in Arabic to the boy only to have the boy impatiently cut her off and tell us "I can SPEAK English..." From there on out our conversation with him and his slightly more reserved younger brother was mostly in English (this is, unfortunately, not unreflective of how all Egyptians are about speaking English with us I might add). The two told us in their perfect English about their educations back in Cairo, where they lived, and about all the things they did with their dad, who from their descriptions and from said perfect English, we concluded must be very rich. Their English was so perfect, in fact, that they used swear words with all the nuance and fluency of a college student, and we enjoyed a rather comedic moment after the older, snottier one dropped a big ol' S-bomb after narrowly missing a fish for the 89th time with his air-soft gun. When we asked him how he knew that word, he said mysteriously, "I know many bad words..." trailing off as if to allude to some dark past that he could not bear to rehash. We left the boys around the time when the older boy, having gotten frustrated with the inaccuracy of his air-soft pistol, ran off to get "the uzi." Indeed, he came back with what looked like an air-soft uzi which was apparently more effective since we heard him cheering as we walked away.

We stayed in our bathing suits as we were heading just up and over the edge of the cold spring's valley and down into another one with the Bir Wahed hot spring. This one looked even more stereotypically oasis-y with palm trees and everything, except for the pungently sulfurous hot spring with man-made brick walls and a pipe managing the hot spring's pool. It was basically a big natural hot tub, and we only stayed in it for a bit as two sizable groups of German and Italian tourists arrived. We drove onward through the golden dunes as twilight begun to descent over us to a vast white valley full of ancient coral, shell and fossils left over from the ancient era that saw this desert at the bottom of a vast ocean.
Up till now we had been walking barefoot from the first time we stepped out into the desert and discovered that shoes were actually no more useful in this ever-sinking terrain than our own feet, and the feeling of the smooth, clean sand between our toes, even when it was still hot earlier in the day, just seemed right. Plus Hemeida was doing it...Anyway, we had to put our shoes on for the sharp fossil beds. That was all that was about.

From the fossil beds we got back into the trucks and rode up and down the natural roller coaster of dunes to a spot suitable for sandboarding. Driving in the sand dunes, let me just say quickly, is awesome. I know the other car's driver had some loud Arab pop music bumping real loud the whole time they were driving, but when I asked our driver if we could have some rockin Arab tunes also he tsked disapprovingly and said to me "Driving in the desert is not for music," and he looked over at the other car with an annoyed glare. He told us that he wanted to be able to hear his engine as he was constantly shifting gears and shifting the power distribution to different wheels in order to accommodate the difficult driving. I supposed it was probably for the best as I didn't really want to experience having the truck roll, though I never felt in danger of that even when we went up or down (seemingly) impossibly steep dunes.

At the top of a steep dune the trucks deposited us with Hemeida and what I'm pretty sure was just a snowboard, then they left to go set up our camp. Sandboarding was a lot of fun, even with the grueling hike back up the hill, and I was surprised at how doable it was considering my inability to skateboard/move laterally. I imagine it was a lot like snowboarding but slower and harder to turn towards the inside. As we boarded, we watched the sun set and looked forward to dinner.

When we arrived at camp we could smell the chicken roasting over the open fire as we settled in. The camp was on the south side of a big rock and had a covered area with what looked like walls consisting of thick, colorful rugs and an open area set up on some more of the rugs. We ate a phenomenal dinner (since all meals taken while camping are automatically even more delicious) of fire-roasted, spiced chicken, couscous with veggies, and a tasty homemade oriental salad (i.e. the generic tomato-cucumber-lemon vinegarette salad that is the standard here). I would have taken pictures but it was dark and a flash seemed out of the question in this world lite only by the fire and the stars. After dinner, the Siwans made tea (because no Egyptian could go without tea after dinner) and we tried to think of something we could all do. I came up with the idea of playing telephone half-jokingly, and then realized that it could potentially be really funny to play with the three Siwans. We played it with phrases in almost every language any one of us knew and we had lines going around in Arabic, English, Siwan, French, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, Italian, and Eritrean. We could have gotten Thai and Punjabi in there too if Nav, our resident omniglot, had felt like sharing those languages too, but regardless it actually turned out to be probably the most fun game of telephone I have ever played.

Hemeida, our guide, watching the sunset.

The game petered out and our conversation grew quiet as we all began directing our attention to the bright, clear stars. It's hard to convey how many stars there were, but it may be illustrative that I couldn't find any constellations...because there were too many stars to pick out the main ones. It seemed a perfect night (also, our only night) to go dune-exploring, so we all set out to climb the adjacent dunes. I made the ill-advised decision of climbing (barefoot) one of the rock mountains (as opposed to the sand ones) because I thought it looked highest, only to realize the dune to the right of it was taller still. Daniel had climbed to the top of that one some time ago and not come back, so we decided to follow him and see what had captured his attention. A slight breeze kept us cool as we trudged up the sandy incline, and the cool sand felt pretty amazing on my bare feet, so the hike up the sinking terrain seemed pleasant. At the top of the dune we could see the town of Siwa almost on the Northern horizon and eventually we all ended up laying on the side of a dune and just watching the stars mostly in silence. All in all it was just beautiful.

The crew lined up looking out at the sunset as Daniel sandboards

For the sake of getting this out, I'll post this without pictures for now, and then I'll add them tomorrow and try to finish this recounting. We were supposed to head back the next night, but instead we stayed another night, which ended up being the best decision imaginable.

To be continued...

Edit: Hope you like the pictures. The rest of the album is on my facebook.

Siwa pt. 1

Last week, for the end of Ramadan four-day holiday, Eid al-Fitr, six AUC friends and I decided to head to Siwa Oasis, and let me tell you, Siwa is unbelievably, fantastically wonderful. I saw and did things which defy words and pictures. In some ways, Siwa is the kind of awesome place I would hide in if I ever became an internationally wanted criminal. Granted, it would not be a logistically ideal place to be on the run I suppose--a military airport was recently built nearby, and there are buses running not so infrequently to and from the town--but it is quite possibly one of the most pleasant places I have ever been in my life and it has that ideal laid-back atmosphere that all bad guys in their later years seem to like to retire to in movies (I'm thinking Kill Bill 2 here). Maybe I won't hide out there, but I most definitely intend to go back there again.

Wednesday night, we took an overnight bus to the oasis which is located only about 50k from Egypt's Western border with Libya. We should have known the bus ride was going to be horriblew when it left almost an hour and a half late, but we were still excited about our trip so it seemed inconsequential. Unfortunately, we got what we paid for (LE65) in terms of the bus, and it turned out to be one of the most torturous experiences of my life. The seats were incredibly small, their were 4-year-olds literally screaming and clawing at my seat, the air conditioning was kept at such a high level that most of us actually started shivering at some point, and for unknown reasons the bus made an inordinate amount of stops thus turning what could have been an 8-hour trip into an 11-hour trip.

All the same, we arrived alive in Siwa around 7 in the morning and suddenly all the bad things in the world were no longer bad. We stepped off the bus at the white stone bus-station into a land of serenity. The sky above was cloudless, which is not uncommon in Egypt, but here it was that bright shade of blue I have only really ever seen in Colorado. It took me a while to realize it, but that peaceful tranquility (and really I only have cliches like this to describe it) was largely due to that one thing above all others that I had not experienced in a long time: silence. It was early in the morning, and especially since it was the last day of Ramadan, most of the town was still asleep, including the self-advertising "very eco-friendly" "taxis" like the one pictured. The only creature that seemed to be awake besides us and our pick-up party was a singular rooster which welcomed us upon arriving at our hotel with a genuine cocka-doodle-doo.

Last day of Ramadan and their early rise notwithstanding, the Siwans who met us at the bus station cheerfully helped us with our bags (without so much as a lingering look to ask for a tip) and took us on a two-minute drive to our cheap, yet comfortable hotel. If such a short drive seems unnecessary, you're not mistaken, but that's just Siwan hospitality for you.

The main Siwan we interacted with was named Hemeida and he was the guy who organized what was to be our Safari for the next day. Coincidentally, Hemeida is something like the Prince of Siwa, who knows everyone worth knowing everywhere in Siwa and furthermore how to get whichever people he's with hooked up. Time and time again, be it at the restaurant that didn't have sheesha for my friends, with the mini bus driver who filled in when one of the tires on one of our 4x4 chauffeurs went bust, or with the guy who wanted to charge us LE60 each to come to his desert party, Hemeida simply talked to whoever needed to be talked to quietly and politely and made sure it all worked out. It turns out he came from a very important family in Siwa, which explains his nigh-perfect English and conversational French skills, and after studying at Cairo University and playing for a club soccer team (which here in Egypt means he's one step below the National team-level players), he had come back to his beloved Siwa to run the tour business in the mean time before he goes back to school.

After recouping in the hotel for a bit, we headed into town to rent some bikes for the day (Hemeida had made sure the bike guy would be there for us that early). Daniel, Mulu, and I got some Kuffayas which besides looking awesome are literally the most useful and comfortable things in the world to have besides, say, water. We were all pretty hungry after the long bus ride, and even though nothing in the town's main (and only) square was open (square pictured from the ancient fortress in the middle of town), the bike salesman hopped on Daniel's bike (because "he is big, strong man!") and led us to a funny little restaurant tucked away in something like a three-room, not entirely walled-in concrete box. Despite, or maybe because of, its appearance, the food (tomato-onion-goat cheese omelettes and chocolate crepes with Siwa's famous dates) was outstanding and the drinks were even better (in the course of the two times we were there i had about 4 or 5 of a drink made with pure mango and yogurt called a Mango Lasy). There was only a regular, four-stove-top oven in the kitchen so the meal was slow to come, but it just felt relaxing and sort of luxurious.

After that we headed out on our bikes to our first stop, the Mountain of the Dead. The mountain is pretty much exactly what it's name says it is--a particularly tall rocky hill that has a bunch of tombs in it and affords a fairly nice view of the whole oasis. Still enchanted by the beauty of the abundant palm trees, unpolluted air, and the not-yet-too-hot weather, the sight of the oasis stretching out around was awe-inspiring. Siwa is maybe about 1/3 or 1/2 the geographic size of Boulder and from our perch we could see the salt-lake and salt-flats to the east and the cold lake to the north and west while to the south was the village and then the unending Sahara desert (called the "Sea of Sand").

As you can see in the picture, we could also see our next stop from the mountain top, the Oracle of Siwa, i.e. the same place Alexander the Great felt it necessary to consult before going out on the Asian portion of his conquests. Walking on the same ground as Alexander the Great certainly got the history major in me excited and I briefly allowed a daydream about someday doing some kind of project (grad school perhaps, if I am so unfortunate as to end up there?) about Siwa's historical significance form and then sift away. We followed our guide, Omar, around the ruins of the Oracle as he tried to tell us in a mix of very basic Arabic (basic for our benefit) and simple English about what the oracle was like in its prime and what has happened with it since then. Again we had an awesome view, this time with a great look from above of the salt flats to the east. After exploring the ruins, because some of our crew were feeling tired and a little sick, we sat in a shaded part of the ruins and talked with Omar about his life, his thoughts about Siwa, his family, and about languages in general. He talked mostly in Arabic, but he also taught us some of his native language, Siwi, which is more like the Berber (forgive my political incorrectness history people who would point out the connection so-called "Barbarians") languages that dominate the Arabic in much of the rest of North Africa. We taught him how to say "I love you" in English and when it was best to use "Prego" with Italian people who seem to be the most common tourists nationality in Siwa. He was a very nice guy and we happily tipped him even though he never asked or indicated that he wanted payment.

We got back on our bikes in search of a particularly famous cold spring only find ourselves nice and off track which caused the most scenic two hour detour of my life. We ended up riding along a narrow strip of land crossing the Southern end of a big salt lake from which we could see a gigantic salt flat and an intriguing-looking road crossing the diameter of the lake that we turned away from in order to get back going toward the town. Only at the point of nearly giving up on ever arriving at our destination we did we find our way to the natural cold spring called Cleopatra's Bath (though she probably never swam there as it would turn out). I was actually secretly happy to go for the long bike ride and having worked up a good sweat made the day feel like a good healthy contrast to the sedentary bus trip. The local Egyptian boys who seemed to be in charge of keeping the shop and bath clean started diving and doing backflips into the pool with us as Iftar approached and Daniel and I joined them up to the point where they did the backflips.

After drying off from the cool, natural waters of Cleopatra's Bath we left an hour later happy about our day and looking forward to a delicious dinner. The ride back into town took us down a road lined with date-laiden palm trees and the white houses of the poorer Siwans which was made only slightly less fun by the clouds of dust thrown up by the donkey carts and intermittent trucks. Showers and naps later, we set out into town and found our way to a roof-top restaurant that had the third best food I have had in all of Egypt. I got a lot of food (pictured here is my meal after I had already eaten my salad), but Daniel topped me by getting not only a steak, but a half chicken entree on the grounds that even with both and a drink his meal would be under LE100. One of the very nice waiters picked some dates for us from a low-hanging palm tree and brought them to us to munch on, informing us that we could pretty much do this with any tree we found. You just have to look for the redder, kind of wrinkly ones. They were indeed delicious, and though I haven't had a lot of these elsewhere in Egypt/the world, I could see how these could be deemed the best dates in the world. They are very sweet, but even I liked them a lot. We took adantage of the low-hanging treats pretty much whenever we wanted the rest of our time in town.

We then headed to a cafe to meet with Hemeida and discuss our safari plans for tomorrow. This is where he arranged for sheeshas to come when the cafe had none and it was nice watching as the town really came to life at night for the Eid. There I had some mint tea ("shay bina'ana"), which has fast become my drink of choice when partaking in the Egyptian pasttime of drinking copious tea, and then we headed back to the hotel, with only a bried stop at a shop with some sweet Kuffayas and camel-bone swords. The shopkeeper had spent part of his life in San Francisco and kept telling us that he was going to help us, his "homies." out. He insisted we come back tomorrow and "drink his hospitatity" because we were Americans, his homies. After that it was to bed, because we had a packed day before us and all of us were exhausted from the overnight bus trip.

Part II of the trip coming soon, but here's a picture of where I went the next day...

Feedback!

In a response to my post about Robert Wright's NYT aritcle on the "Meaning of the Koran," one of you recently pointed out that the spelling choice may simply be the NYT editorial standard. After having done some inspired research on the NYT web archives, this reader found that searching spellings other than the one with the K got no hits, while the one with the K got over 10,000. In light of this, I guess I have to retract my lofty criticisms of Robert Wright and blame whichever NYT editorial staff member who got to decide it should always be spelled with a K however many decades ago.

That being said, I though I'd take the opportunity to harp on that most common bloggers' refrain, which is to say, I love getting feedback! Besides letting me know that there are people besides my mom and dad (hey guys!) reading this blog, it helps me make this a better blog. Whether it's comments on the blog posts, or emailed reactions, or telling me my blog title is pretentious on my facebook wall, I love any and all feedback. I'm going to be out here in this crazy adventure of mine for another 9 months almost, and I'd like to keep writing about it here for the whole time, as I've come to really appreciate this outlet for my reactions and thoughts. With your help and feedback, I hope to make this an enticing enough blog that you'll want to keep reading it throughout my stay here.

To that end, I'm going to take the advice from my the very first comment on this blog ever and make a twitter feed that will show up here on this blog. I realize I've kind of dived (dove? Mooses? Meese? I never know these things) headlong into this whole social media business--something I was skeptical of, and a bit self-conscious about, before now. Not only do I find all this a good way to keep whoever is interested updated, having knowing I have this little corner of the internet open to the public has helped me process what all is going on

as I try and relay it to you. I feel like the benefit of getting twitter is that I can record those quick little thoughts or crazy stories that happen to me when I'm out and about with no other way of noting what happened. My Egyptian phone company periodically sends me text messages in Arabic that I can't really understand yet, but I assume I should be able to tweet from it. I'll just have to get over my aversion to being involved in something called "tweeting."

And finally, since my recent feedback-giver also

mentioned that she likes when my posts have pictures, here's a few just for fun. I'll go through the trouble of figuring out how to give the pictures captions soon...heh...Here's a picture of me in the Sea of Sand outside Siwa. That Kufayya that I am wearing is maybe one of the best purchases I have ever made in my life. Ever. Those things are super handy in the deserts, and if the Hollister and Polo shirt wearing Egyptians at AUC wouldn't think it was impossibly uncool, I would totally wear it all the time.

Speaking of pictures, I've taken almost a thousand pictures since I've been here, so it's taken the You're here too, oh palm webteam (i.e. me) a long time to cull through them all. An intern would be nice here. Anyway, Facebook albums coming soon also.

Arabic in Blood

Rarely do I ever have obviously symbolic or meaningful dreams (I can actually only think of 2 in my life), but I had one last night. It happened after my first night going out in Cairo, what turned out to be a pretty eventful night involving a huge AUC party on a boat on the Nile, a rooftop party at one of Nora's friend's apartments in Garden City, some rather long conversations with Australian and German travelers, and the tail-end of a birthday party at one of the most expensive night clubs in Cairo, which I thankfully did not have to pay the LE150 cover charge for. I got home really late and went to bed savoring the prospect of sleeping in for the first time since that coma day that I slept for 15 hours. And in this big night of sleep, I dreamt.

I actually had a lot of dreams, but the one with the obvious significance was the one that started with the belligerent Germans, karate Jersey shore character, and the two obese Egyptian girls all trying to kick or punch me in the balls. All of them seemed fairly sure of the fact that I needed to be kicked in the balls and in doing so they indicated that I needed to learn some sort of lesson about being here in Egypt. In my dream-prescience though, I knew this really was an excuse they were looking for to beat me up. In the beginning, the girls were there trying to goad me into a fight so the karate Jersey shore guy could have a reason to step in and start to fight me. Then the Germans came and spent their time trying alternately to get really close and (to an American) seemingly intimate with me or to throw a kick or punch at me.

From the beginning of the dream I vividly remember the very distinct feeling I have had only a few times in my life where I felt it was basically a fight or flight situation. I've never been one to have a temper or snap and lose it with someone, and that adrenaline rush always makes me feel extremely calm and quiet on the outside while all my senses feel on edge. As they continued trying to provoke me, sometimes they would just try to make me flinch, but my middle school wrestling experience precluded me from taking their bait. When one of the characters would take a swipe at me with the intention to make contact I would move or block, but playing defense like that when you're cornered like that is a frustratingly helpless experience, because if you're trying to avoid a full on fight, you can't hit back. I could feel a quiet anger building.

At the end of the dream I was standing in my room with a distinctly Egyptian-looking German while one of his German friends waited somewhere behind me impassively. The Egyptian-German told me he wanted to show me something that I needed to see and then without waiting for my response he lifted up his shirt to reveal bright red Arabic words cut disturbingly into the skin all over his chest, stomach, and going down below his pants line. He then pulled me close, which I let him do because I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of flinching, and he put his arm around my shoulders ostensibly to tell me the important secret he'd been saving for me but instead using the hand around my shoulders to get a free punch to my head while yelling something about how I had stupidly let him have such an easy first attack. The second his hand connected with the side of my head, my dream self snapped. Without thinking, I hit him right in the jaw faster than would ever be possible in real life with a full on reverse punch and then followed up again with a speedy jab to his nose. He went down immediately unconscious and bleeding profusely from his broken nose, and the other German rushed over looking distressed about his friend and angry at me for knocking him out. I muttered something like "sorry I knocked out your friend after he punched me in the head..." and the dream ended.

I often think about these fight or flight situations from an evolutionary perspective as I am fascinated by how this most important of instinctive survival reactions must manifest itself just so to get the animal to do whatever it needs to do to stay alive. That adrenaline rush we get is the same as our ancestors got when cornered by a sabre-toothed tiger, or what those little kids who lift up cars to save their trapped mothers get. But that anger is something that seems uniquely related to inter-human conflicts. The anger grows from something very small, giving us humans time to try and reason our way out of the situation, but if that's not possible, eventually it builds to a point where there can only be one more straw added to the pile before suddenly, we are moved to take action. Furthermore, because injustices feel all the more so when they are caused by other supposedly rational, thinking human beings I think it feels like a betrayal when your predator is none other than your fellow man. It seems to me like the sensation of anger is what humans need to get past any moral obstacles that might make them hesitate in a split-second decision to make a move or not against another human being. The building anger I felt in my dream tapped into a feeling I've increasingly had here in Cairo, which draws on my sense of disillusionment with people here in Cairo.

I think I sort of talked about how in-your-face Cairenes can be already (or maybe that is in one of my half-finished posts...) and how that has been especially bothersome since I got back from Siwa. My problem with their pushiness and their frequent contempt for foreigners is pretty elementary school, but nonetheless, it's a little disheartening knowing that other humans' gestures of good will are nothing more than their best attempt to screw you over. In my dream the characters maintained the pretense of trying to be helpful, of wanting to just teach me a useful lesson, when, in fact, I knew the characters in my dream actually intended to kill me. I despise when Egyptians feign concern for my well-being, employing all the physical mannerisms of putting their arm around your shoulder and telling you blatant lies with concern and sincerity meant to replicate an intimacy of friendship and trust just to dupe people. On a fundamental level, this willful extortion just feels wrong to me and even though I was warned that this would happen coming from my spoiled existence, I resent being duped by having a basic faith in humanity's trustworthiness. And that--until I had this dream and wrote this blog post--is what was bothering me most about Cairo.

It wasn't bothering me much before I went to Siwa and actually experienced wonderfully hospitable Egyptians and somehow my dream has made me feel ok with it all again. Perhaps because I got a brief instance of retribution, or perhaps just because it helped me come to terms with it all. That is the whole point of dreaming, right? To help our brains come to terms with the crush of information that is our everyday experiences.

And don't get me wrong, Egyptians also have a warmth and generosity unlike anything else I've experienced and I'll be able to talk about that more as I adjusted I think, it just coexists paradoxically with this other stuff. This is what I came here to experience, and if it was easy, it wouldn't be worth doing.

Order vs. Disorder: Sure, the things in this list could be linked by that theme...maybe.

1. Squeaks- For some reason, the materials Egyptians have paved many of their walkways with make my tennis shoes squeak a lot. It happens to my friend Daniel too, so I've deduced rather unscientifically that it has something to do with men's shoes. This phenomenon seems more prevalent the nicer the walking surface, so it happens especially often on the AUC campus. I suppose I never found it abnormal to have shoes squeaking walking on marble floors like the ones in nice U.S. office buildings, but it seems to happen on surfaces that I wouldn't expect to squeak. I'm talking like cobblestone paths and apparently rough and unpolished walkways. It doesn't really matter, sound has just always irked me. Whatever.

2. Hunger- When I first got to Egypt, my appetite took a big dive--which was convenient, because I had no idea ever where to find food, especially since it was Ramadan. This happened to a lot of the foreign students when they came here, and it was generally ascribed to the heat. It's starting to get ever so slightly cooler here though (like now we're usually just in the low 90's, and it's really quite pleasant in the mornings), and I think I forced myself to adapt to the heat by walking around and sweating profusely for hours and hours almost everyday of the first week. For those reasons (maybe), my appetite has come back with a vengeance. Now, I am alwayshungry. I have to bring snacks with me to school everyday and then pace my eating out until I get to whatever break I may have that day. This observation brings me to my next unclassified thought:

3. Peanut Butter- Is my comfort food, I've realized. It is the only thing for which I don't even feel bothered by having to spend above-American prices, because I feel the need to have it so strongly. I've been buying a regular sized jar of Supercrunch Jiffy peanut butter for about $5 and a loaf of sliced-bread (which Egyptians rather humorously call "Toast") to make pb sandwiches to sate my resurgent hunger.

4. Flies-The little bastards (in arabic, "flies" is "Zubab") here are not only unfairly fast, but also super aggressive. Given that it is never cold enough here to make them sluggish and that they have a more or less constant supply of food in the piles of trash that litter every single street in Cairo, the flies reign free throughout most parts of Cairo, the super-clean AUC campus excepted. It is one of my goals to kill at least ONE fly before winter sets in. They are really that fast here.

5. Squeaks, reexamined- Seriously?! My shoes squeaked on the concrete sidewalk? I really don't understand what they paved this stuff with...

6. Cleanliness/Cities- I am by no means a clean freak as most of you probably know. I generally prefer having a moderate amount of clutter in my life most of the time, and harbor a not-so-well-hidden belief that excessive use of things like antibiotics is worse rather than better for me. That being said, there are many parts of Egypt which I find deplorably disgusting. As I mentioned, there are literally piles of trash everywhere in downtown Cairo, and even at the big time tourist destinations like the Pyramids and in smaller towns like Siwa and the suburbs of Cairo I saw on the way to the southern Pyramids are choked by trash and garbage in the streets. It shocks me most of all in Cairo, though. So many times I find myself thinking "Really? This is your capital, guys?" But everyone just throws their trash wherever they feel like it, and, to make things worse, the city doesn't seem to feel it necessary to provide a whole lot of trash cans. Recycling, of course, is nonexistent.

Here's a picture of a nice big pile of trash in the tombs right by the famous Step Pyramid at Saqqara, an important destination for tourists and a milestone in Egyptian history for Egyptians to look back on with pride, which no Egyptians feel it necessary to prevent from being covered in trash.

It may be unfair, but I can't help but wonder how this reflects Egyptians' feelings about their country. Egyptians are incredibly proud of being Egyptians above maybe all else, and yet they don't seem too inclined to take care of their country. Perhaps it is unfair to make comparisons based on standards which are by definition set by my own experiences, but garbage is garbage, and while Washington D.C. is certainly dirty in a lot of places, no one would ever describe our nation's capitol as "dusty and decrepit" in the Lonely Planet travel guide for that city.

The whole thing just makes me appreciate how good the American metropolises (Denver, DC, Miami, NYC are the ones I've had the most experience in) are at their city maintenance. You would never see the number of cracked (or in places, it looks more like exploded) sidewalks, potholes, crumbling buildings, or defective man-hole covers (one of which my leg fell through when it flipped beneath my step). Occasionally it makes me a little mad to see such disregard, sometimes it makes me sad for the city and the people who probably just feel it's too widespread an issue to ever address, but usually I just don't even notice it.

7. Cats- Besides the ever-present flies, the abundant trash around the city does have one nice trade-off in my opinion: It supports the abundant population of friendly stray cats. When researching for my thesis, I read about the innumerable Persian cats that roam everywhere in Tehran. Supposedly, no one owns cats as pets per se there in Iran, the cats sort of temporarily move into and out of Iranian houses whenever they feel so inclined, and the Iranians will feed them while they're there. It's not too different here. Everywhere you go in Egypt (or everywhere I've gone at least) you will find cats sometimes hovering just out of reach of the humans around them, sometimes perched just a foot away staring intently at you as you eat, and sometimes ignoring you completely as they prance around/lick themselves/root through trash for food/generally do cat-like things. Some people don't like them, but the way that cats just go about their business in their own self-contained way without obtruding on mine provides a nice contrast to the in-your-face you-have-no-personal-bubble-or-space attitude of many Cairenes. I think I also like cats because a friend of mine's infectious adoration for cats has forever colored my opinion of them. Either way I like seeing them out and about.

8. Beautiful Egyptians- I somehow was actually totally unaware of this before coming here, but Egyptians, if you also didn't know, are ridiculously beautiful people. I don't have any pictures of the especially beautiful Egyptians at AUC, who are pretty much all--male or female--stunningly beautiful, but here's a picture of Amr Diab, pretty much the most famous singer in the Arab world, who also happens to be an Egyptian.

Furthermore, like Amr Diab, the Egyptians at my school are all incredibly cool. This makes them largely uninterested in things American for the sake of those things being American since they make no such distinction. They like the things they like because they are just what's cool in Egypt, not because they also happen to be cool in America. If I ever talk to any of the pretty Egyptians, I'll tell you how their personalities hold up. I have some thoughts I've come upon thinking about them from the perspective of a minority student about these young, rich Egyptians at my school, but I'll save that for its own post perhaps. I bought a soccer ball a few days ago to set in motion my master plan of making Egyptian friends via pick-up soccer games. I'll let you know how that goes.

I'll post about Siwa this weekend and then I'll finally write something down about the pyramids too. I know I say something to this effect every post, but I'm sorry for being such an inconsistent blogger. Contrary to some of your opinions, I am not getting burned out, I just have homework now...And I swear I'm working on making posts shorter.

On Islam, Q's and K's

As an American living in an overwhelmingly Muslim country, and as someone who has studied a decent amount of things about or related to Islam and its politics, I feel compelled to bring this rather good NYTimes blog article called "The Meaning of the Koran" up. The article is written in reaction to the apparent wave of morons in America who think burning the Qur'an on 9/11 was/is a right, or even justified thing to do:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/the-meaning-of-the-koran/?src=me&ref=general

If you don't feel like reading it, the gist is basically that those morons in America who would burn the Qur'an out of either nationalistic or religious righteousness are just operating with the same willful tunnel vision that leads some morons of the Muslim faith to do horrible and violent things in the name their faith. The author also points out that the more liberal interpreters of any faith are also obscuring a full understanding of their subject matter. And finally, just as America's best President in history once pointed out (here's a clip of him doing it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1-ip47WYWc), every religious text has its failings, and to pretend the Qur'an is the only one that exhorts its followers toward violence is incredibly stupid.

There's really only thing I don't like about this article though, and it's the way he spells Qur'an. (Ima get a little bit arabic-snobby right now, so be ready.) Basically, there is no good reason to spell Qur'an with a K. Not putting the ' in the middle is ok because it represents a glottal stop, i.e. a letter we don't have any sort of equivalent for in English. (Plus I've always felt that ' is sort of an awkward key to hit on the keyboard.) But the K is just stupid. Fine, yes, some Europeans when they first came into contact with Muslims couldn't hear the semi-subtle difference between the Arabic letters "Kaff" and "Qaff" (like a K noise that hits toward the back of your throat instead of on the roof of your mouth), so when they were writing from what they heard, they wrote it out "Koran." But seriously man, that was the 7th century. We have a lot of bilingual speakers now. For god's sake we have google translate now. This is obviously a pet peeve of mine, and I wouldn't just expect every single one of you to know all of that as Arabic is still a pretty obscure language for us Americans. But why would this apparently well-educated and thoughtful scholar of Islam and the Middle East spell it with a K? Has he not even studied the letters of the alphabet in his supposed decades of study and teaching on this topic? Has he not seen it spelled multiple ways and thought to investigate which transliteration might be best? I don't get it.

All the same, this is a pretty good article in spite of this little thing and it makes me interested to see what other ideas he has about religion and such.

P.S. Two more posts coming today and tomorrow, promise.

Cairo Orientation pt. 2

Opening note: I apologize for the really disorganized picture placement in this blog post. Blogger's picture uploader makes you sort of have to guess where the picture will end up in the blog without knowing anything more than where it will be aligned. Furthermore, I don't know how to change the alignment without reuploading the pics altogether, so I'm afraid I'm just going to leave this post being rather aesthetically displeasing and write it off as a learning experience...

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:

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.