Pictures from Sinai

Ok, so it's taken me about an hour to get these pictures up here, so once again you will have to wait until tomorrow for the real blog post about our trip. For now I shall leave you on the edge with some pictures and captions. I hope you enjoy.


This is the sunrise from the first day of our vacation in "Shark's Bay," which is just a little north of Sharm el-Shiek, Sinai.

Here's Shark's Bay as seen from our breakfast table that morning. About four hours later we left and headed for Dahab.

This is from the night before, and I just thought it was kind of awesome. Understandably, so did Bill. We were staying in the "view huts" of a sort of resorty type place, and this is from the top of the resort complex.


Here is our home away from home in Dahab, "The Penguin Village." It was really great, and the people were just lovely.


Here is Bill reading in the little Penguin beach-front cafe...something we did a lot of.


Here's the sea as seen from the Penguin cafe. Pretty awesome, eh?


Here's a lovely Dahab sunset, aslo a view from Penguin


It was probably about 20 degrees F on top of Mt. Sinai, and we were quite chilly. I call this the caterpillar look.

But it was totally worth it.


Another vista.


The hoards descend.


Bill and some camel butts.


Bill touching the burning bush. I didn't see and flames.

Ok, hopefully this will tide everyone over until the morrow. :-)

Cornel West and Food Poisoning

Mild food poisoning (I asssume) being the reason I am not listening to Cornel West speak again tonight, although Bill is. More on that later....right now: why am I so sickly?? Seriously, I have not been healthy for more than one or two full weeks since we've been here. I blame the air pollution and the heat. Today, after what looked like it was going to be a landmark third full week of health, i found myself suddenly overcome by stabbing stomach pains and nausea. I am, for the most part better, but it would be really nice to be able to be fully functional for a while. Ok, my rant it done, and as your reward for bearing with me, I shall move on to topics of more general interest.

So, last night and tonight Cornel West is at AUC giving the "Edward Said Memorial Lectures." Two points of irony to point out for your amusement before I go into the lecture, one which is obvious, and one to keep in mind whilst you read the rest. a) The Edward Said Memorial Lecture was held in, I kid you not, "Oriental Hall." b) Whilst the lecture we went to was being held in said hall, in the main auditorium, right next store was a motivational lecture about "how to make yourself successful."

I will leave it to Bill to write about tonight's lecture, but I think that the talk we went to last night was hands down the best lecture I have ever been to. Not only is West incredibly intelligent, he is an amazingly charismatic speaker who manages to simultaneously channel "relentlessly intellectual professor" and "impassioned preacher." I will never be able to do justice to his talk, but I shall attempt to summarize a few of it's primary points. The talk was entitled "The Vocation of a Democratic Intellectual' -- rather provocative in a country under authoritarian rule. His main discussion was about what it means for "intellectual" to be one's calling. He was apparently good friends with Said, and so used his life and approach to intellectualism as a grounding for the rest of his discussion. His claim was that Said was one who regarded intellectual pursuit as a vocation/way of life, not as a profession. Most of the talk centered around an explication of, what West calls, the "three pillars of the intellectual" : the Socratic, the Prophetic, and the "blue note." The Socratic is the part that examines and scrutinizes life; the Prophetic is the emotion, empathy, and unflinching care for the situations of others; and the "blue note" is the sense of tragic comedy, or the understanding that you will ultimately always fail in your attempts at shaping the world, but that you remain hopeful, rather than becoming cynical.

As I said, I could never really do justice to his talk, but it was extremely provocative and inspiring. It really did make me think about what it is that I want my life to be, and why I want it to be that way. One of his (many) excellent throw aways was, in talking about those who would collect academic accomplishments for the sake of impressing others and who strut "like peacocks with all their feathers out," he remarked, "I come from a tradition that says peacocks strut because they can't fly." I liked that one a lot, and you see now what I found ironic in the talk next door.

Even the question and answer session was superb, something which, in my experience, pretty much never happens. It wasn't just that his answers were great, but the questions themselves were actually really good! I have to say, the whole thing made me really excited about going back to school next year. i am really enjoying the gear shift this year, but ultimately, I know what environment suits me best. :-)

I shall now return to my glass of sprite and moaning on the couch, but I promise another post from Bill, which I'm sure will be characteristically much more in-depth.

Cleanliness in Cairo

About a week and a half ago, we finally managed to hire a cleaning lady, or so we thought. The deal was that she would come once every week and to mop our floors, wipe down the bathroom, and beat out our carpets. Most middle and upper class Egyptian families hire someone to clean their apartments like this, and our landlord recommended this woman as competent and reliable. However, she didn't show up last week, she didn't show up this week, and she's not answering her phone. Apparently when we said, "You'll come every week to clean the place," she thought we meant, "nice to meet you, we'll never see each other again." Whatever, stuff like this is par for the course in Cairo. We have friends who live in an apartment down the street who have had a cleaning lady for several weeks now, so we'll talk to them to see if she wants another client.

Anyway, the upshot is that we spent about two hours cleaning the whole apartment yesterday, even though we had done a similarly huge cleaning operation only two weeks before. All of which is to say, Cairo is a very dirty city. First of all there is the air pollution, a cloud of which hovers over a different section of the city depending on the wind and the weather. Some days when the smog is to our West over Mohandiseen and Doqi, our drive to school in the morning is mostly clear, but other days we cannot even really see across the Nile, or even from one side of Tahrir Square to the other. Added to that is the sand and dust, which have turned most of the buildings in the city a dull brown-gray color. (The brilliant colors of the buildings was one of the first things we noticed about Alexandria). Claire has observed that when she first steps into the shower, the water from her hair runs brown for the first few seconds, and when we wash our clothes, the waste water is usually practically black. Since we leave our windows open most of the time, this dust coats the floor of our apartment within a few days, making it almost unlivable if we don't mop every week or so. (A classmate of ours is married to an Egypian, and told us that the expectation is that one should mop one's floors 3 times a week.) Another friend of ours has mosquito netting over his bed, and it has trapped so much dirt that if you touch it your hands look as if you have been working with greasy engine components.

Despite all of this dirt, however, the people and the interiors of buildings are extremely clean here. As you walk down the street, most Cairenes are well-groomed, wearing clean clothes, with shined shoes. One of the most common items for poor street vendors to sell are boxes and small packs of kleenex, which people use to mop their brows. Garbage men sweep the streets of trash and dirt every night (all by hand with a broom and a wheeled garbage can), janitors clean the floors of the university at least 3 times a week, and shop owners even wash down the sidewalks in front of their stores on an almost daily basis.

All of this makes for a strange dynamic of a very dirty city with very clean people living in it. At least part of it is cultural and religious, as ritual washing is an important part of Islam. (For example, Muslims have to wash themselves before they can pray, which is why most toilets here have a built-in bidet.) Apparently when Europeans first came to the Middle East, one of the reasons Arabs had such a low opinion of them was because they were simply so dirty by Arab standards. In any case, it does make dealing with the dirt a lot easier.

I don't really know what my point was anymore, but the upshot of all of this is that we are definitely getting a cleaning lady. Also, maintaining an apartment in New Haven next year is going to seem like a cinch after this.

City Stars

Thursday night we ventured forth to the neo-liberal triumph/monstrosity that is City Stars Mall in Nasr City, a suburb of Cairo. It was, well, interesting. After our hour long cab ride there, hooray Cairo traffic, we emerged wobbly-legged but ready for action. About four times the size of any mall I've been to (though I am sure there are plenty that rival it in the US), City Stars mall is located right off one of the "highways" out of the city and is connected, on one side, to a huge international hotel, and on the other to, I'm not kidding, a residential apartment complex.

To get into the mall you have to go through fairly extensive security, for a mall, where they apparently confiscated our friend Mae's pepper spray once, lest she go on a pepper spray rampage inside. Once we got inside, our jaws dropped at the scene before us. The mall is five stories of pure first world capitalism. Scores and scores of stores selling luxury clothes and technology fill the mall, and if it weren't for the fact that you are surrounded by Egyptians, you would never know that you were in Egypt. Walking into the stores, it feels even less so, once you look at the price tags. Here you can be jeans for a mere 1200 pounds (~ 200 USD). To give you some sense of the disproportion we felt, we pay our doorman 50 pounds a month.

After wandering around for about an hour looking at ridiculously over price clothes (which, also, it seems to me, would be difficult to wear any where in Egypt, seeing as mini skirts are not so much the thing) we finally hit the main reason for our visit -- the Mexican restaurant on the sixth floor. Prepared to be totally disappointed, this place totally blew us away. They gave us a ton of corn ships and salsa (both quite good) for FREE, and the service was actually fast and accurate....aside from one snaffu regarding my eating habits. In a very "Everything is Illuminated" moment the cheese enchilada I ordered with the understanding that it had no "meat" arrive covered in carne sauce.

"Is this meet?"

"No, no meat, cheese."

"Yes, but the sauce?"

"No, no, no meat."

"But I really think this is meat." I display what is clearly a large chunk of beef."

"Yes, beef."

"But I don't eat meet."

"Chicken?"

"No."


After dinner we continued our vain search for a bookshelf in "Spinneys," which is basically the same thing as Carefour, except a little less crazy. We didn't find any bookshelves, but we did find this excellent sign outside. What I like most about it, aside from the term "hypermarket." which is always funny to me, is the fact that it is designed exactly like an American road warning sign. "Danger, Danger! Hypermarket next 1.5 miles. Beware crazed shoppers and stray housewares!"

We headed home after Spinney's, completely exhausted by our adventure. (We never found the Starbucks, but apparently there is one). I was talking to our roommate about it the other day, and he was saying that it made him really angry when people say that the mall "doesn't feel like Egypt," because it is part of Egypt and it's all Egyptians who go there. I both agree and disagree with this sentiment. While, on the one hand it is true that it is a part of Egypt, I think the question of who's Egypt is an important one. Sure, the people that go to AUC can probably shop there, but they are maybe about 1% of the Egyptian population. The majority of Egyptians could never afford these prices, and in fact, though there were a lot of people there, I saw almost no one buying anything. So what is the place of things like City Stars and the satellite gated communities around Cairo in Egyptian society? I'm not sure, but I can't help the bad taste it leaves in my mouth.

This article is a good, though extremely basic, overview of the current class/economic dynamic in Egypt, and I think it's worth a read.



Though I don't usually go in for the cheesy effect of night blurring, I actually think this picture conveys something of the chaos of being in a cab in Cairo. (This was on our way home from the mall).

Pictures of Alexandria

So, here is a lovely little photo album of our trip to Alexandria. If you want to see more pictures of anything, let me know in the comments section--I simply had too many to put them all up!

For better pictures and information about Alex, go here.

Here is the waterfront of the Eastern Harbor, where are hotel was located. It is really something else.

This is the harbor from the inside of the old Mamluk fort on the Western tip of the harbor crescent.










Here are a few pictures I took walking around the street. I thought they were kind of National Geographicesque. One big thing to notice about these pictures is the sheer amount of color in the buildings and sky. You won't see anything like this in Cairo...ever. The buildings are all pretty much the same dirty grey color and you can't really see the sky for the smog most days. This color was one of the first things that struck me about Alex.



























This is a shot of the big archaeological site we went to. (you couldn't take pictures in the catacombs.) It is called "Pompey's Pillar" (I don't think it actually had anything to do with Pompey historically) and it is one of the few remaining vestiges of the ancient city which once occupied the area.




These last two pictures are from the new Bibliotheque Alexandria...it was finished in 2002 and is built on the site of the historical Great Library. It is a kind of weird and futuristic structure, but still very beautiful. It is supposed to look like a disc coming out of the ground (symbolizing something but I don't remember what) and that is exactly what it does look like. Inside, the main reading room cascades down in a series of terraced levels, while the ceiling slants down into the ground, with skylights completely covering it.
















Ok, I lied and this is the real last picture...for our respective boat obsessed dads :-)

Alexandria

Today we just returned from a wonderful weekend trip to Alexandria. We left Thursday night, taking the express train--which, given how fast it travels, is rather optimistically called the "turbini"--arriving in Alexandria at around 9pm. From the train station we walked to the water, where we promptly realized that we'd gotten off one stop too early, and that downtown Alexandria was still 3 or 4 km to the west of us. This prompted us to take our first microbus ride in Egpyt, which was fun in a slightly hairraising kind of way. Ubiquitous in Cairo, microbuses are small, boxy vans designed to hold about 10 passengers, but which you can often see holding almost twice that number. (They also often load and unload without fully stopping. But they're really cheap!) Anyway, we managed to find the main square, and checked into our hotel. Called the Hotel Crillon, it was nice enough, if a little bit small and dingy. The important thing is that it was cheap, served breakfast, and was located right on the Corniche (the roadway and walkway that run along the water). Also, the manager and the two bellhops (whose uniforms looked rather comically like monogrammed pajamas) were extremely nice.

Over the course of our two days, we managed to see four interesting sights. Friday morning we started the Catacombs of Kom ash-Shuqqura, which are apparently the oldest surviving Roman burial grounds in Egpyt. Our guidebook reports that they were discovered in 1900 when a donkey cart servicing other excavations suddenly fell underground! The catacombs consist of a vertical circular shaft, off of which there is a main tomb, a hall where last rites were performed, and a maze of passageways for more bodies. All in all, the complex housed about 300 bodies, which doesn't seem like all that much given how much digging it must have required. The most interesting aspect of the catacombs was the weird mix of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artistic themes in the decorative carvings. From there we walked over to Pompey's Pillar, which, confusingly, apparently has nothing to do with Pompey, but once supported a statue of Diocletian. Anyway, its a huge pink pillar surrounded by some very rather indistinct ruins of a temple and a Roman cistern, which an overly friendly member of the Egyptian tourist police insisted on leading us through.

In the afternoon, we walked on the Corniche around the harbor to a 16th-century Mamluk fortification called Fort Qaitbey. The famous Alexandria lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, once stood on the spot where the fort now lies, helping fishing and trading boats keep track of the location of the harbor. For a structure that is half a millennium old, the fort is very well preserved, and we had a lot of fun exploring it. (It reminded me a lot of clambering around ruined castles as a kid on a family vacation to Scotland.) Claire has lots of great pictures of it, some of which she'll post.

Which brings me to the one big disappointment of the weekend: I lost my camera. It was completely my own fault, but that doesn't make it feel any better. As we got into a cab, I took it out of my pocket so that I wouldn't sit on it, and then when we got out I only remembered it moments after the cab had driven away. This is particularly frustrating because I hadn't been able to download any of the pictures I had taken thus far here, since I left the requisite cord at home. And of course, that cord is arriving in a package that we are expecting to receive any day now. Such is life. Fortunately, Claire has her camera, and she has almost all of our really good pictures anyway. I can get a new one here very soon, but it still sucks.

I have a few more random thoughts about the trip and the contrast between Alexandria and Cairo, but this post is plenty long enough as it is, so I'll save them for later.

Trivialities

This afternoon in our Ameya class we learned that unlike their American counterparts, Egpytian sheep say "maa," Egyptian dogs say "how" and Egyptian cats say "neow." You learn something everyday!

Also, I scored a major victory today in my never-ending quest for small bills that I can use to pay taxi fares, procuring 200 LE worth of 5 LE notes from the bank branch at the university. A good day all around.

Marsa Alam

This past weekend we had our first excursion out of Cairo, and it was fantastic. For Muslims this weekend was the Eid, the holiday celebrating the end of Ramadan, so we had two days off from school. We took advantage of a the long weekend by going on a trip our program organized (and subsidized) to a beach resort on the Red Sea about 100km north of the town of Marsa Alam. We left very early Friday morning, and our very slow-moving tourbuses arrived in mid-afternoon (if you look on a map of Egpyt, Marsa Alam is on about the same latitude as Luxor, i.e. very far from Cairo). The long trip itself was interesting--we were driving along the Red Sea coastline for most of the time, which we expected to have vegetation, but actually the Egyptian desert extends right up to the water. (Claire noticed about halfway through the weekend that there were no seagulls or birds of any kind at the resort--that's why.) For the most part the coastline is pretty deserted, with just the occasional town, resort, military checkpoint, or abandoned mining operation.

The resort we were at was the Akassia Swiss Resort, which was huge, luxurious, and full of vacationing Europeans. (Claire will post pictures later, but for now check out their website.) We stayed in an enormous room with a large domed ceiling and a balcony overlooking one of the dozen or so pools the resort had. We spent most of our time sleeping, reading, lounging by the pools, and snorkeling. The resort's beach was actually very small, but that was because there was a large reef only a few yards into the water. The resort sponsored (very expensive) diving trips along the reef, but we opted for the much cheaper option of snorkeling, and it was great. For less than $10 a day, we rented gear and were able to swim along this an underwater cliff full of coral and teeming with brightly colored tropical fish. We made sure to go each day.

We both thought the resort was great, I have to admit it had a rather strange atmosphere. Akassia advertises itself as a 5-star resort, but it had a lot of features that you would never expect to see at a really luxury place. For instance, the showers had almost no hot water, and while breakfast and dinner buffets were provided free of charge, it was almost impossible to find food in the middle of the day. Also, there was no wifi despite advertisements to the contrary, and several of the buildings, including an entire waterpark (also referenced heavily in advertisements) were still under construction. It's not like these things were really a problem for us--it's just that when you go to a resort like that, part of what you are buying is an experience of a complete and perfect illusion, except this illusion had a bunch of holes in it. Judging from the rest of the guests, probably what was going on was that the resort was catering not to the really rich but rather to solidly middle-class Europeans who
would not be able to afford a vacation at a beach resort on the Mediterranean, say. That marketing strategy requires lower prices, and I guess the costs have to come from somewhere.

Anyway, it was a wonderfully relaxing weekend--really the first time that both of us have felt utterly and completely at ease since we arrived. The jaunt out of Cairo recharged us, and we liked it so much that we've resolved to do it again again and go to Alexandria as soon as possible, probably next weekend. Excitingly, Sherifa, our ameya teacher, out of the blue expressed an interest in possibly going with us (along with some of the other students in our class) to Alexandria sometime, which would be awesome beyond words. She has clearly taken more than a usual liking to our class, and it's hard to imagine someone it would be more fun to travel with here. However, her father--whom we met briefly at the iftar at her house--has been sick for the past few days, so we'll see whether that works out or not. Cross your fingers.

Iftar Chez Sherifa

Well, I didn't take any pictures at Sherifa's iftar because my camera battery had died, but I shall do my best to describe. First off, Sherifa is awesome and her iftar was awesome. For those of you just tuning in, Sherifa is our Egyptian Colloquial teacher and she is pretty much everyone's favorite teacher. She is very small and very feisty and an excellent teacher. Our beginner Ameya (colloquial, although I'm unsure about the transliteration) is the only class she teaches for our program because she focuses mainly on teaching the advanced students in the super intense program called CASA (I don't remember what that stands for, but they can't speak any English while they are on AUC's campus). I feel a little bit as though we are more of an ideological statement on her part than anything else, but it's a lot of fun and we are learning more than I ever would have thought possible.

Anywho, on Friday night we all (the six of us in the class) went over to her apartment for iftar, a word which litterally means breakfast and is used to mean the meal in the morning and the meal at sundown during Ramadan which breaks the daily fast. So far we had mainly experienced iftar as an errie hour or so in which the streets of Cairo are empty (something which doesn't ever happen at any other time, including three or four in the morning). This time we got to be a part of the meal!

We had more food than I think I had ever eaten in one sitting before. First there was an apricot drink made from dried apricots which is apparently a traditional Egyptian way for breaking the fast. Then there was delicious lentil soup, stuffed vegetables (eggplant, peppers, squash, and tomatoes stuffed with rice and herbs), koftah (very Egyptian meat dish), another kind of meat (veal seems to be very big here), a rice dish made with caramelized sugar, nut and rasins, and babaganoush, yogurt, and a green salad or cucumbers and tomatoes. Sherifa and her sister had made everything and it was all (well, I didn't eat the meat) absolutely delicious. It is the first time I've had home-cooked Egyptian food and, it may sound cliched, but it made me feel so much more comfortable than I have generally felt while here. There is something about sharing food that creates an extremely strong sense of inclusion.

After all of this, there was an enormous array of desserts. There were several that were homemade and then there were the pastry shop desserts that we had all brought with us. We lingered over tea and dessert for well over two hours, just talking about Egypt, Arabic, and each other. Sherifa told us all about her family and about how she became an Arabic teacher (it is hard to place her age exactly, but I think she is in her early forties). She has an opinion about everything and is one of the few people who have openly discussed politics with us thus far. It was extremely interesting to here her thoughts about the government, religion, language and about how things have changed in the course of her life time. I think that is was probably the best six hours I have spent in Cairo.

Our plan now is to invite her to our apartment for a thanksgiving dinner, but we shall have to see how traditional it can really be. I don't have the slightest clue as to how one would procure a turkey, let alone attempt to cook it in our oven!

More pictures

We went to the Khan, yet again. Here are some pictures and tomorrow I will tell you all about our great iftar with Sherifa!

Here is a groovey picture of a lamp shop.

For whatever reason (because it's Cairo) they were doing serious "roadwork" at 10 pm in the middle of a very crowded street....interesting.

Isn't this chandelier cool? It was in a great little antique shop that made me think of Mom and Morgen.


This is just plain cool.

I'm back!

Hello all! After many long days away I am returned to the blogosphere. To make up for my complete failure as a blogger I am going to try to add some pictures to this one. I don't know what exactly Bill has written about. but two weekends ago we went to the Khan ElKhalidi, the biggest market/souk/craziness in Cairo. It was really cool and completely overwhelming in the best kind of way. It is located in Islamic Cairo (which is just a term signifying when that piece of the giant jigsaw puzzle that is Cairo was founded/built) an absolutely beautiful part of the city, retaining a fair amount of medieval architecture that makes for a welcome change from the rather modernist and utilitarian architecture that dominates downtown and the neighborhoods west of the Nile. The Khan is basically a huge labyrinth of alleyways and unpaved streets (this doesn't stop giant whales of tour buses from pushing their way through it) filled with shops selling everything under the sun. Everything from local spices to mass produced clothing from china or somesuch. In some ways it is very touristy in that it is quite a spectacle, but it is actually a real market when tons of Cairenes love to do their shopping. It is apparently always packed, but is particularly impressive during Ramadan. At the center of the Khan is a tea shop called Fishawi's that claims to have been open everyday for over 200 years. It was predictably crowded, so we went to the edge of the Khan and got "Egyptian pancakes," which are somewhere between a funnel cake and a crepe and are incredibly delicious.

Anywho, this weekend the government apparently decided to make a new holiday, or move a holiday, or something, and so we have an unexpected long weekend this weekend. This a really exciting for a number of reasons. We had originally planned to go to Alexandria this weekend, but then we had sort of canceled that because our amazing and wonderful Egyptian Colloquial teacher invited our class over to her house for a real live Egyptian Iftar on Friday. Now that we have Sunday off, however, we are thinking of going up Saturday morning and coming back Sunday evening. We will see what happens. Iftar is, as well as being the word for normal "breakfast" is also what they call the breaking of the Ramadan fast after the sun goes down. It's a big exciting deal--if you walk down the street just before sundown you see tons of tables set up along the streets filled with yummy looking food and surrounded by very hungry looking people. It's a big social event, but since we don't really have any Egyptian friends yet we haven't been able to experience it. I will be sure to write all about that. Until then....

Remember Us?

Wow, it's been a really long time since our last post. Classes are now in full swing, and between homework, Claire's studying for the LSAT, and the surprisingly large amounts of time it seems to take to do basic chores like run errands and cook dinner, we haven't had much time to go to internet cafes. The good news, though, is that we now have internet in our apartment, so regular posting should resume now. I don't think I realized how addicted I am to the internet until it became so hard to get access to it.

Classes are going quite well. Our MSA classes are moving at a brisk but reasonable pace. So far we have mostly been learning and practicing the alphabet, primarily by learning a very eclectic set of vocab words. The words were chosen not for usefulness but in order to show us how each letter looks and sounds when it appears at the beginning, middle, and end of a word. As a result, we don't yet know some really basic stuff like "excuse me" and "sorry," but we do know the words for elephant, rope, and--I kid you not--Pharaohnic aerator. Like a tool that was used to aerate the soil back when the Pharaohs ran Egypt. Yeah. Anyway, we are now finishing up this introductory section, and will soon be learning some more pertinent vocab and grammar.

Our ECA classes tend to be quite intense. Our teacher, Sherifa, is quite a character--a very short woman with a loud voice, a strong personality, and an imposing classroom presence. We are mostly learning a seemingly random set of grammatical structures, verb forms, and vocab words, a lot of it just as it comes up. Things seem to be getting a little bit more systematic this week--we're learning adjective pairs and how to form simple nominal sentences. However, it still feels somewhat scattered, and it seems to be part of her teaching strategy to overwhelm her students with material and then try to consolidate it later. Her class never ceases to be entertaining.

Oh, in other news, Ramadan started last Thursday. In terms of our day-to-day lives, that doesn't change a whole lot for us, except that the class schedule has changed to make the periods a little shorter. (We also bought a small Ramadan lamp for our apartment, which we are really enjoying). Most Egyptians are fasting between dawn and sunset, which means that it is extremely rude to eat or drink in public during those hours. That means we have mostly gone to cafes to eat lunch instead of eating our in the AUC courtyard, which is a minor inconvenience. (Some foreign students are fasting for Ramadan, but we aren't.) However, it is really interesting to see everyone congregated around outdoor tables at around 6:15 right before the fast is broken, with everyone staring at their food and dying to start eating. It has made me wonder, however, how people in the restaurant business survive in this country, since there is a whole month in which they have next to no customers at all. More musings about Ramadan will be forthcoming.

In other exciting news, we have bought a new spring mattress to replace the completely structureless pack-mattress we had been sleeping on, and, man, is it nice. Waking up without back pain is really wonderful. It's amazing how something like that can really improve your quality of life. We've also bought a small houseplant, which is beginning to make our apartment feel a little bit more like a home. We still need a side table, a small bookshelf, and some things to put on our extremely stark white walls, but we're getting there.

Finally, as an addendum to my post awhile back about getting scammed at the Pyramids, I actually went back there on an AUC-led tour on Saturday (Claire stayed home to study for the LSAT.) It was cool, but I have to say, I think a lot of the thrill of seeing the pyramids comes from the initial shock of seeing these enormous, 4,000-year-old structures in the middle of a modern city. Once that first moment of wonder passes, they are still very cool, but not to the same extent. Who knows, maybe the third time I go (I'll certainly go at least once more when my parents come) will be even more thrilling. I didn't get a chance to go inside any of the three largest pyramids, so I'll have to try that.

Alright, I have to go study now. Claire plans to write a post very soon. Most likely from here posts will stop being quite so much a play-by-play of what we're doing, and more thoughts about interesting things we observe. Like, for example, the fact that it seems to be impossible to get small bills here. Very few vendors have change for anything, and no one accepts large bills. I have no idea how a modern economy functions in a place where the hard currency is so illiquid. Anyway...

Oh, last thing. We have started enabling comments on all our new posts, so if you want to talk to us but don't want to go through the arduous process of emailing us, you can do that. Just click on the comments link at the bottom of any post.

Thoughts about Cairo and History

Pretty much every weekend ALI has some sort of tour set up for us and this morning was the first one. We went on a three and a half hour bus tour through most of the major districts of Cairo—somewhat overwhelming, but over all really cool. It is absolutely mind boggling how complex and intricate the city is, with monuments dating back four thousand years and new development constantly taking place. The city has gone through many incarnations, with even the Nile, probably the most constant element in the area’s history, shifting its position radically.

The impression I got today is that the city is this dynamic entity pulling between the Nile River, on the one hand, and the vast dessert that surrounds it, on the other. The Nile provides the city with the water that enabled its existence while the dessert provides the “check” or frontier. However, it seems that with the giant population boom of the twentieth century that both of these natural features are struggling to maintain their grip—we have seen only a handful of green farmland left in the city and it seems that modern development is pushing further and further into the once uninhabitable dessert. Both the Nile and the surrounding dessert are filled with trash and waste, and while if you stand at the Giza pyramids and look back towards the city you can see the towers of the giant international hotels that crowd downtown, try looking in the other direction and you will see nothing but buildings as far as the air pollution will let you see. (The professor leading our tour told us that when she was a child she remembers being able to see the pyramids all the way from the center of the city).

All that being said, it’s not as if Cairo is a giant trash heap—on the contrary, it is in many ways extremely beautiful (although the yearly sand storms are apparently to blame for the fact that very few of the buildings are anything but a worn grayish-sand color). It’s just that is isn’t like any place I have ever seen before. For example, we live in Zamalek, the northern half of an island in the middle of the Nile, which is supposed to be one of the “posh-est” parts of town. Yesterday, when we walked out our door to go to the store, there we two men herding goats down the street—right past the swath of embassies that populate the island. Or, today, as our bus pulled onto one of the main arteries leading to the eastern edge of the city, we followed an enormous roman aqueduct leading to the city’s citadel, which is a roman fortress with a giant Ottoman mosque crowning it. As we passed the sprawling “City of the Dead,” we saw contemporary burial sites and contemporary houses mingling with Fatimid and Mongol funerary domes. As we ordered our lunches at the Fafela fast food restaurant, we looked behind us to see the two largest pyramids not more than a half a mile away. It’s hard to tell where and when you are standing exactly when you stand on the street in Cairo.

School, Day Two

Today is our second day of classes and while 6.30 continues to be an entirely unreasonable time to get up everyday, things seem pretty good. Yesterday was a bit of a roller coaster ride. Our morning classes (what will eventually be MSA vocab and grammar, but which are now jointly teaching us the alphabet) are both wonderful. I am sure the pace will get even faster, but for now it is a lot but manageable, and the teachers are both really nice and really really into what they do. So after our first two classes yesterday, we were on a bit of an "oh everything is going to be fine after all" high when our Egyptian Colloquial class brought us crashing down.

I cannot remember the last time I felt so utterly lost and panicked in a classroom. The teacher walks in, starts speaking Arabic really , really, really fast and then starts writing really fast in arabic all over the board. Finally after about forty five minutes of Bill, my self and two or three other students looking totally lost/distressed she stops and asks us how many people don't know the alphabet. After five people raise their hands, she switched to numbers, which were slightly better. As you can imagine, this was rather upsetting (it was clear that at least have the class spoke at least intermediate MSA and were much, much more clear about what was going on) and put me in a bit of a tizzy, as it were.

However, it looks like today will be better (we're going to the ECA class in about 40 minutes) because it seems that she split the class into two-those who know something and those who know nothing at all. We'll have to see, but I have high hopes.

Despite my earlier comments, the early classes are not that bad, and I'm sure we'll get more used to them as times progresses. In fact, Cairo is actually half-tolerable (weather wise) at 7.30 in the morning as we make our way over to campus. The hottest hours here are actually from about 1.30/2 to about 5.30/6. When the sun isn't directly above the city, things are much cooler and you can even find a breeze sometimes. I haven't been checking because i feel it would be worse to actually know what temperature it is outside, but my estimate is that it is generally in the mid hundreds during the day. It's amazing though, because at night it drops a solid twenty degrees, making 85 feel cool and 83 refreshing.

The biggest disappointment has been that it turns out the school's gym facilities are a total wash up. They do't have any ellipticals at all and only one bike, so it's not entirely clear what i am going to do about my back. We've been talking to other people in our program and it seems like the average rate for gyms outside of the university is about 100 us dollars a month (one hotel actually charges 70,000 LE, which is about 15,000 dollars, for one yearlong membership), so this probably isn't an option really. Sigh. Just another thing that seems like it should be easy but is actually unbelievably complicated and frustrating. We are finding that it is very important to shift all of our expectations about predictability and reliability, because if you expect things to work, you're only going to be upset by the fact that they invariably don't.

Anywho, off to class. Fingers crossed that this one's not a total disaster.

The Mysterious Post Concluded

Sorry about the mysterious end to that last post. The main event during the second half of the day on Sunday was that we went to visit the pyramids. We haven't really done any sight-seeing yet, so the thought was that this would get us really pumped before our classes started. And seeing the pyramids was awesome, except for the fact that we got totally scammed doing it. I won't go into the gory details because it will just make me angry all over again, but suffice it to say that we paid far too much for far too little. The pyramids are located in a rather odd patch of desert right in the middle of a very busy Cairo suburb, and what we got was a camel ride around that patch of desert. We could see the pyramids from a distance of a couple hundred feet, as well as downtown Cairo, and we got lots of pictures. However, we didn't get to go up close to the pyramids, and we could only see the sphinx from the side, despite the fact that we were told that all admission tickets would be included in the price we paid. All in all, it was very cool to see the last of the seven wonders of the world, but we had very mixed feelings afterwards because we felt like we got totally gipped--if we'd just gone in the main entrance, we could have seen everything close up for a lot less money Really, it was my fault--I read the warnings in the guidebook, but I just completely turned my BS sniffer off, and we ended up walking straight into what should have obviously been a scam. I really can't think of a way to tell the story in a way that doesn't make it sound ridiculous that we didn't know better. Oh, well, it's only money (about $80 between us). In any case, we'll probably go back to the pyramids either on an AUC trip or when my parents come visit (or both!). However, that terrible feeling of complete victimization stuck with us for awhile, and we went to bed on Sunday feeling pretty frustrated.

Monday was also frustrating. Since we were feeling pretty sore and sun-stroked from the previous day, we decided that after running a few errands around the university, we would try to go swimming. We had heard that at some of the nice hotels around downtown you can pay a nominal fee to use the pool, even if you're not a guest. Being completely submerged in water sounded like exactly the thing we needed. After checking at about 4 or 5 hotels, however, it was clear that wasn't going to happen. Non-guests are either not allowed to use the pool, or it costs at least $20 a person a day. Given what happened the day before, we didn't feel like spending that much money. So, somewhat demoralized we went home. That night, however, we hung out with Carl, Leigh, and her roommate Tippy (yes, that's her name), which was a lot of fun. There's no therapy like bad beer and good pizza enjoyed with good people.

Bringing things up to date, yesterday was the orientation for ALI, and today was our first day of classes. We really didn't learn much that we didn't already know at orientation, but we met a couple of very interesting people in our program, heard about all the tours and trips that are organized for us, and finally got our course schedules. So far today we've had two classes in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), mostly dealing with the arabic alphabet. The courses, the professors, and the students all seem fantastic. The teachers are extremely nice, clearly very good at their jobs, and quite demanding. It's clear that the courses are going to move quickly--in the first day, we learned about half of the alphabet, with promises that we'll learn the rest tomorrow. In a few minutes, we'll have our first class in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic.

So that's where we are now, with our morale on the upswing after a tough weekend. Oh, someone pointed out in an email that we haven't mentioned anything about the weather here. For the most part, it has been pretty unbearably hot. I haven't seen what the precise temperature has been, but certainly over a hundred pretty much everyday. Our alarm clock has a thermometer on it, and it's usually around 83 in there with the a/c on when we go to bed, and that feels quite cool. Cairo is also extremely polluted, so the air quality is really, really bad. Oh, and the only moisture around is the condensation that falls from window-unit air conditioners onto the sidewalks. The weather is supposed to improve a lot by October, but for now it's pretty wretched, although we're sort of getting used to it.

Up, Down, and On the Way Up

The last few days since our last post have been very up and down. Although rather tired, we were feeling pretty good about having gotten a roommate and having done a big chunk of our remaining apartment shopping. Saturday, which was September 1, marked the one year anniversary of Claire and my first date, so we had planned to go see the pyramids and then go out to a nice dinner. However, instead we spent most of the day dealing with the landlord trying to get some doors in our apartment painted and, more importantly, get the bathroom drain to work properly. We made some progress, but it wasn't until earlier today that we finally got a fully functional bathroom and washing machine. (This is very exciting!). Other than that, we relaxed, I practiced cello a little bit, Claire studied for the LSAT, and then we got dressed up and went out to dinner. The place we went, Justine's, was described by Lonely Planet as a perfect place for a romantic meal, but it ended up being a rather strange interpretation of an upscale French restaurant. The waitstaff was well dressed and polite, and the windows had a view of the Gezira Sporting Club and some of the taller buildings downtown. However, despite the fact that we were literally one of two couples to eat in the restaurant all night, we didn't get a seat by the windows. If this restaurant had been in the US, we would have been pretty disappointed by the food, but it was palatable. Overall, the place was quite odd, but it was nice enough that we felt we could celebrate. All in all, Saturday was a very good day.

Sunday, on the other hand, was not so great. We both found it very hard to wake up and get going in the morning, alhough I managed to go to church for the first time. I went to the Anglican All Saints Cathedral in Zamalek, which had a rather bizarre feel. The architecture of the church is impossible to describe--it's very American 1960's modernism in style, and has a kind of central vertical chamber that makes the acoustics extremely boomy. The service had a strangely international feel--the bishop who officiated had an Aussie accent, a Dane read one of the lessons, a Cairene priest preached, and a singing group of Sudanese refugees sung at one point. The congregation was small and consisted mostly of Sudanese refugees, some Cairenes, and a smattering of elderly ex-pat types. The liturgical language had clearly been simplified to lowest-common-denominator English. I was glad I wen--it felt very good to be back in church--but the whole experience was just very strange. I'll definitely want to look for other churches before I start going there regularly.

Anyway, the church service was not so bad, but the rest of the day was pretty awful..Oh, looks like I've got to run now, but I'll write about it soon. Just so you know, though, we're doing better today (thus the title of this post). More in the near future.

Bill and Claire go to the Mall

The plumbing in our new apartment is what a New York real estate agent would call “eccentric.” In real terms what this means is that it doesn’t work. Right now there is a handyman who the landlord sent over in our bathroom attempting to remedy the fact that any use of the plumbing results in a back up or water all over the floor. We learned this the hard way when we attempted to do laundry yesterday—now we have a load of completely soapy clothes hanging off our balcony, filling the air with the sweet scent of detergent. Sigh.

Anyway, after determining that we can’t use any of our plumbing, yesterday afternoon we decided to make a big shopping trip in order to acquire kitchenware. We have this guide published by the AUC press that is in some ways helpful but in other ways decidedly not. Basically, the guide assures me that the things I want to do are possible, it just give me no hint as to how to actually do them. Exhibit A: apparently there is a Carrefour (a giant French store, rather like CostCo plus WalMart times twenty, or like the British Tesco) in Maadi (the newest part of Cairo, much, much more like a suburb than anything else we had seen), but an address? Out of the question. So, off we go, armed with the knowledge that our chosen destination is out there, but with no clue as to the path. We think, ok, this place is in Maadi, we’ll just take the Metro out to Maadi and get a taxi to Carrefour. We go the 8 stops on the Metro, get off onto “Road 9,” which according to the guide offers “interesting utilitarian shopping” (whatever that is supposed to mean) and get into a cab.

Twenty minutes later we are out of sight of anything that looks like Cairo and in view of one of the weirdest sights I have seen yet. To the East of the city there is a natural barrier of sorts (basically a long ridge/cliff) that has for hundreds of years kept the city from expanding too far eastward. The barrier is apparently a barrier no more (it is my understanding, although I could be wrong, that what we saw yesterday was what the Egyptian government has spent all of their structural adjustment loans on) and now what you have is a whole crop of mega apartment complexes jutting up out of the desert, like so many parched Potomac villas and Kentlands townhouses. This is “New Maadi,” and our destination turned out to be the “City Center Mall.” The name displays an (unwarranted, in my opinion) optimism that is mirrored in the mall’s slogan, “Getting Better.” Decidedly not.

Carrefour was a nightmare, but we bore it admirably well. I had been to a Carrefour in Grenoble before, and had been shocked then by its size and product range, but nothing really could have prepared me for this. Take your average size Target and put about 4,000 people in it, and maybe then you will have some sense of how crazy this place was. It took us nigh on 40 minutes just to find a cart. Anyway, as I said, we bore it well and managed to get just about everything we needed for the kitchen, as well as some hangers, a tape measure and some pens. We loaded ourselves and headed for the taxi hangout, where we were told we could get to the Metro for 30 pounds. This was how much we had paid the first driver because it was a twenty minute ride and we had clearly take him off his beat; however, after five minutes in this second cab, we get to the Metro, a stop only four away from downtown. So, with the bitter taste of having been screwed by the taxi driver and having spent way too long in transit the first time, we loaded our purchases onto the Metro and headed home, where we proceeded to collapse.

P.S. We found a new roommate! His name is Carl and he's an anthro major at Pitt. He seems very nice and very interesting and he speaks Arabic quite well. We are very happy to be living with him.

Moving In

So yesterday, Monday, we got up, ready for the next step in the apartment adventure—moving in. In the morning, we decided that we couldn’t even begin to face this before lunch, so we over to the AUC to see if maybe anyone from our department was there yet. They were, but they looked totally confused as to why students would be showing up at their office. They just sort of pointed at the piece of paper saying where registration would be held today, and told us we would have to sit for oral exams (which, of course, we don’t).

Finding that unsurprisingly unfruitful, we decided that the single most important thing we needed upon arrival at the apartment would be decent sheets (We had noted the “sheets” that were on the beds at the time of our lease signing and figured that it would probably just be best to provide our own). But how to obtain such items? After receiving blank stares from several people in the International Students Office (our old nemesis) we finally found someone who understood what we wanted and was, gasp, willing to tell us how to get it (all my sarcasm aside, she was actually extremely nice and helpful and gave us very detailed instructions about how to find them). She directed us to what I gather is an old, almost extinct, Egyptian department store. Now, this is now a department store like we are used to—rather it kind of reminds me of a slightly bigger and shabbier version of Varner’s General Store in The Long Hot Summer. We managed to find the linens section and, to make a long story short, ended up after a series of exchanges buying two fairly decent pillows (as with most places, Egyptian pillows are not like American pillows, they are more like lumpy rocks), and two Easter egg colored towels (yellow and aqua because Bill wouldn’t let me get pink). We got the sheets from a place a little down the road (and probably paid way too much for them, but oh well). Sheet sets here seem to come in sets of two normal pillow cases, one really long pillow case, and only one sheet. So now we have four pillow cases too many, but we have a top sheet and a bottom sheet.

Once that was over we wound our way back to the hostel, via the bank where we discovered that the “ease” of international money transferring is not all it’s cracked up to be, and finally faced the task of moving. It took about two hours to finally figure it all out, but in the end we got to the guys from the hostel to help us hail a taxi, direct it to the hostel (which is down an alley like street, so no taxis) and pack all of our copious amounts of luggage/musical instruments/pillows into one poor little cab. Getting the bags up into the apartment then involved a lively exchange with our bowaab (doorman) who speaks no English about how we were going to get the bags up, but concluded with the desired result. We also seem now to have made friends with the bowaab, which is most likely a very good thing. Every apartment building has a bowaab who lives at the base of the building and keeps track of the comings and goings of tenants, the collection of trash, and most other minor services one might require. For all this work he receives (at least in our case) 50 Egyptian Pounds (LE) a month, or just under ten dollars. The bowaabs seem to me to be quite emblematic of Cairo—extreme, extreme poverty and preindustrial living stacked right up against what is, in most aspects, an extremely industrialized and very wealthy society. While this is in many ways very disturbing, there is nothing that I can do to change it and at least I know that our bowaab and his family have a place to sleep, unlike the sizable homeless population of the city.

There was a fair amount of action today (Tuesday), but as this post is already extremely long, I’ll try to sum it up quickly. Yesterday our prospective roommate pulled out on us, so we are now in the roommate market. We don’t think this will be too hard because there seem to be a lot of people still looking for places to live, but it’s something for me to be anxious about, and so I am. We spent most of the morning over at the AUC, first with registration and then with logistical stuff. Registration did at lot to put my worries about the program to rest. Everything seems much, much more organized at ALI than with the study abroad program, and we met and talked to a number of really nice and interesting people also enrolled in the program. It seems like a mix of ages, with us probably at about the average—a number of undergrads, a larger amount of grad students, and then a number of older people who are probably professionals or higher up on the academic track. One thing that I was really excited about is that it looks like there is a tour every weekend in the term to different parts of the country. Most are just day trips but there are two possible four day trips, one to the Red Sea and one “Nile Cruise” down to Luxor. Soooo exciting!

We have a week now with nothing to do until next Tuesday’s orientation meeting (classes start next Wednesday) and so we hope to take a little break from running around; get our apartment set up with things like plates, pots, bookshelves, etc; maybe go down to the pyramids; and hopefully make some significant headway on LSAT studying and article writing (me, though Bill can help if he wants). After we post this tonight we plan on curling up for a long, long night’s sleep and we don’t plan on worrying about anything until tomorrow afternoon J

P.S. I didn’t write about our grocery store excursion, but be ready for it tomorrow!

Apartment!

The last couple of days since our last post have been quite busy, so we’ll take these next two posts to try to bring you up to speed. Sunday was a very important day, because late that night we signed the contract on our new apartment, which we are now in the process of getting settled into. I spent Sunday morning and early afternoon looking at apartments in Dokki. I was checking them out mostly as a courtesy to Ahmad, one of the staff at our hostel, who had offered to help us and had found some places for us to see. All of them, however, were extremely large and lavish, probably geared more towards Saudi tourists and upper middle class Egyptians rather than American students. Egyptians apparently have a taste for very loud colors and very ornate baroque furnishings in their homes—I saw lots of intricate chandeliers, huge armchairs with carved legs, big curtains, and mirrors and pictures with huge gilded frames. Dokki would have been an ok neighborhood to live in—there were some trees, and the noise and chaos levels on the side streets were high but manageable. However, it was still crazier than we wanted, and the apartments we saw were just too much, both in terms of décor and price.

By 2pm I managed to meet Claire and Mitchell back over at an apartment we had seen previously in Zamalek. The night before, Claire and I had decided that this was the place we wanted—a very nice two-bedroom place, sparse but clean, a little expensive but reasonable for Zamalek and ultimately within our range. After a lot of haggling with the landlord, we finally reached an agreement, and at 4:30 finally we were able to have a celebratory lunch at Hardees (you never see Hardees around the states anymore, but they are everywhere here).

After crashing at the hostel for a few hours, we got a ride with Mohsen and a friend of his back over to Zamalek to negotiate the lease contract. Our plan was to just stop by an ATM on the way to get the cash for the deposit, but the first one we went to was out of cash, and the second was out of service. We finally got the 3,200 LE for our deposit in 50 LE notes from an ATM in Mohandiseen, making it to our appointment about 45 minutes late. The negotiations themselves took about an hour and a half, but it was extremely entertaining. Our landlord is a professor of Japanese at Cairo University, but he currently is spending his time teaching Arabic at Osaka University in Japan. He is a little crazy, but very nice and reasonable. Like many landlords apparently do here, he told us to trust him on all sorts of aspects of the contract, but as a naturally legalistic American bound for law school, I made sure to get everything in writing. Fortunately, he mostly found this amusing rather than insulting.

We finally signed the contract at about 11:30, but Claire and I were both far too wired with excitement and residual nervousness from the whole apartment search process to go to sleep. Anyway, we hadn’t yet had dinner, so we agreed to go with Mohsen and his friend Muhammad, who had plans to go out with a few other friends. After spending the better part of an hour gradually accumulating more and more people, we finally arrived at a small restaurant in Mohandiseen (a district of Cairo on the west side of the Nile west and north of Zamalek). We were happy to be able to eat something, but we found most of the people in our group to be, shall we say, not really our type of crowd. Mohsen had picked up 5 undergraduate study abroad students, all of whom seemed to have little interest in talking to anyone but each other. They appeared to think that the main point of studying abroad was to have new clubs and bars to go to and to have new venues in which to talk about themselves, which is a bit of a waste in a place as vibrant and interesting as Cairo. After a couple tries we gave up trying to talk to them, and since Mohsen and Muhammad are extremely nice, warm, and very interesting Egyptians, we spent our time talking to them and learning about the Egyptian version of backgammon that they were playing.

The day finally ended when we got back to the hostel a little after 2am. We were extremely tired, but fantastically relieved that, after a week of non-stop work, we finally had an apartment!

I promise more details about the apartment, the doorman, and the neighborhood in the next couple of days

Another day on the apartment trail

Today was a looooong day, but it was extremely fruitful. We have a roommate! Randomly, we got a call from him (we had posted on a list serve that we were looking for a roommate/roommates and/or an apartment) in the middle of the afternoon whilst we were out looking at apartments. We met up with him for dinner and he seems to be exactly the kind of roommate we were looking for. He is a few years older than us, American, but has spent the past three years in France studying and teaching, and he is here to do a year long intensive Arabic program through the French Embassy. He’s very, very nice, seems very worldly/well traveled, and loves to cook!

It is hard to describe how good it feels to have joined forces with someone, especially since he seems to have very similar expectations/desires for the coming year. It is like an enormous weight has been lifted off of me, because even thought I logically know that we will meet people and make friends here, right now we feel very isolated. Cairo is like nothing I have ever experienced or even imagined before. It is simply enormous—there simply isn’t another city I have been too that even compares. It’s not simply that there are a lot of people—there are many more populous cities out there—it’s more like it’s unrelenting. It just goes on and on and on and every block is as high-energy as the one before. I feel like the “bigger my team” is, so to speak, the better. There are some situations or environments in which you want to “lose yourself”—this is not one of them.

Anywho, things are looking up apartment wise and hopefully in the next two days we will have a place. Then we can really get down to the business of settling in. I feel like I have learned, or at least taken in, a huge quantity of information in the past week, but I feel like I have not yet been able to process it. Those of you who know me well might have been shocked by the lack of introspection in this blog thus far, but I promise more of it in the future. Our excitement is building everyday as the blinding fear is waning and reason is returning. Until next time!

Progress, Definitely Progress

Well, the last couple of days have been something of a roller-coaster ride, we are definitely making slow but steady progress in our search for an apartment. As Claire put it, each day we seem to wake up with a plan, then nothing goes according to the plan, but it ends up working out and we end up learning something. Here's a quick summary of the last two days—if you don’t want all the gory details, skip to the end. We started out yesterday by heading over to the US Embassy to register--basically to let them know that we are Americans, we’ll be here for awhile, and to see if they could help us out at all. After getting through the extensive security check, we made our way downstairs to the American Citizens Services desk, where we waited for almost an hour. When we finally were able to see someone (whose English, ironically enough, was not very good), she literally gave us a sheet of paper with a website where we could go register online! You’d have thought they could have told us that before having us wait, but…

A little frustrated, we then went over to the university, hoping to find someone who speaks Arabic who could come with us to go apartment hunting. We finally convinced someone to meet us later that evening. Mohsem ended up being very nice, and with him we saw about 4 apartments in Zamalek, but they were all very large two bedroom places that cost more than we’d like to pay. However, at least we’d seen something, so, completely exhausted, we called it a night.

This morning we went back to the university, only to find the office absolutely jam-packed with bewildered study-abroad kids trying to register and get their course schedules approved. As frustrated as Claire and I am that no one from ALI is around yet, we are very glad that we don’t have to deal with the department that runs the study abroad program. They seem rather disorganized and don’t seem to have a lot of empathy for their students—some of the staff are bewildered and impatient when they get asked very basic questions, seemingly assuming that everyone should just already know how everything works. “Was I not clear when I explained that before?” seems to be a frequent refrain, not the sort of response that puts scared foreign undergrads at their ease. Anyway, over the course of the day, we did manage to see one apartment in Manial, and we have plans to see a few more in Zamalek and Doqi tomorrow. The place we saw in Manial was both beautiful and reasonably priced, but our concern is that it is a little far away from the university. It is also somewhat isolated from where most other students are living, and the neighborhood is bereft of green and very loud and noisy. We’ll see what else we can find, but we could see ourselves being happy there.

In any case, we do feel like we are making some headway now. Now that we’ve actually seen a few places, and liked some of them, the whole process is feeling a little less daunting. The city is also beginning to feel a little less intimidating—we now have a little more confidence crossing the larger streets, and we even know our way around the couple of blocks around our hostel But now it’s time for bed. More tomorrow.

PS--even though it says this was posted by Claire, it was posted by Bill.

You think finding an apartment in New York is hard...

So, it's our fifth day here now, and I'm not sure whether or not we're making any progress. We've been pretty much looking for an apartment non-stop and I think we're learning a lot about what doesn't work, but I don't know that we're really any closer to finding an apartment. We're pretty sure that we're going to need a roommate or two, but we're not much closer to finding an apartment. We think Zamalek will probably not work for us because it looks like you can't use the university bus unless you are staying in the dorm and there is now subway and it is too far to walk to and from the university everyday. So now we're going to look into two neighborhoods called Dokki and Garden City.

Today is Friday (Friday is the major religious day of rest, so Friday and Saturday are the weekend, not Saturday and Sunday) so we probably won't be able to find anything today. It is amazing the difference between the city last night (basically like a Friday night) and today. Yesterday the streets were packed with people and the noise was unbelievable, while today car horns are replaced by prayers broadcast from the nearby "Queen Mosque." As I said, this does not bode well for our apartment hunt, but it makes a nice break from the hussle and bustle. of the city....actually, we just got a lead on an apartment so we're heading out to check it out...more later.

Bill and Claire are Sleepy...

Well, today was basically a complete bust. We had made plans to be incredibly productive and on top of things, but then we slept until four. That’s right, four, pm, 14 hours after we had gone to bed. This was mildly embarrassing. We thought that we had set our alarm for 8.30 am, but in fact it was pm. I remember thinking that it was kind of odd that it was so noisy outside and hearing at least two calls to prayer, but for whatever reason I didn’t check the clock until four. Anyway, we don’t have much to say about today, but we were actually quite productive yesterday evening.

After our last posts we went over to the area where we had been told students had previously gotten apartments, Zamalek. Zamalek is basically the upper half of a small island in the middle of the Nile called Gezira, which is comparable in size to Paris’s Isle de la Cite—and equally tightly packed. It was about a 45 minute walk from our hostel, but as soon as we got there I immediately began to feel better. Our hostel is in downtown Cairo, which is full of cars and people and feels pretty inhospitable—the stores seem to carry mostly electronics that fell off of some truck somewhere and packaged cookies. As we walked around Zamalek the streets were much quieter and greener, and almost immediately we spotted several grocers, fruit stands and housewares stores. Before, we felt basically like we had been set down in Time Square and told to find a place to live, but we have now located what is clearly a neighborhood, and somewhere we could see ourselves living. The next hurdle will be actually negotiating an apartment. We had planned on going over to the university to ask for an apartment-hunting escort today, so now we’re just pushing the plan back a day.

The biggest news of the past 36 hours is that we met a girl at our hostel who is also starting at the AUC and also looking for an apartment. Her name is Lee and she is an undergraduate at Syracuse, but she is originally from Hagerstown (for those of you who don’t know, that’s in northern Maryland). She seems really nice and interesting, and as we had totally failed at taking her over to the school and embassy as we had promised the night before, we revised our plans and went over to the Egyptian Museum for a few hours and then out to dinner. We will have to go back to the museum at a later date as it looks like you could spend several weeks in there and not see everything, but for five bucks (25 Egyptian pounds) it was not a bad way to spend an afternoon. Ordering dinner was another adventure, as we had really no clue what we were ordering, but it turned out ok in the end and also only cost us about five bucks (I’d like to see Rachel Ray try to spend forty dollars a day on food here!) We’re already getting better at finding our way around the city, avoiding cars, and not getting scammed.

Anyway, now we’re back at the hostel and getting excited for tomorrow. We’ve double checked our alarm, so hopefully we’ll have more to report after our apartment searching tomorrow. Until then!

Tomorrow we'll figure out how to upload images too :-)

More on the first days

So, I'll just fill in some of the things Claire didn't mention. Also, I want to make sure I understand how this blog thing works. Anyway, so, yes, we're here--alive and well, if a little bit scared and quite jet-lagged and tired. The flights over were relatively comfortable and easy--we had no problems with our connection in Frankfurt or with the 5 checked and 4 carry-on bags that we have between us. A taxi driver hired by our hotel, Muhammad, met us after customs and helped get all of our stuff to his car. We managed to fit everything in his little Hundai (sp?), but the cello took the front seat, so Claire ended up having to sit on my lap in the back. Loading up was interesting, because tons of Egyptians kept coming to help carry everything and get it in the car, but then at the end they all wanted tips. That was definitely a recurring theme the first day--lots of Cairenes offering their help, and then asking for money.

The Sara Inn hostel where we're staying is actually quite nice. It's located on the 7th floor of an otherwise very ratty building right in downtown. Our room actually has three beds, air conditioning, and a private bathroom. The main annoyance is that there is no shower curtain, so the water sprays all over the bathroom. The staff has been quite nice, although we are still having a hard time figuring out who works there, who are guests, and who are just friends of the owner's. Most of the people we've had contact with so far, including the hostel staff, have spoken enough broken English that we can communicate adequately. Even so, the language barrier is real, and walking down the street without being able to understand anything people are saying really makes it feel far from home here.

Between the jet-lag and the culture shock, we were not feeling too adventurous last night, so we ate dinner at a very caricatured Italian restaurant in a Hilton next to the Nile. It was on the way back that we managed to get massively lost, and then scammed by a perfume salesman (he pointed us the way home, then insisted on us stopping into his office for tea, then started showing us his products, and before we knew it we just had to buy something in order to get out of there.)

Today we managed not to get scammed or lost, and we now have a list of apartments to go look at from the university. We'll start working on that later today and tomorrow. Fortunately, we arrived enough in advance of the start of our program that we can take our time finding a place and getting settled. The disadvantage of arriving so early is that the people who staff our program are still on vacation. However, we did find some helpful people in the international student affairs office. At the very least we now feel like we have a place to go and people we can talk to if we have problems or questions. That is probably what was most scary about arriving yesterday--we knew no one, speak no Arabic, the city is loud and crowded, we stuck out as foreigners so much that we were constantly being approached on the streets asking if we needed help or wanted to buy something, and we felt like we were all on our own. But you live and learn, and today we are a little more in control, and feel much better.

We'll keep updating the blog as often as we have time. We'll include pictures in future posts. Also, please email us as you are able. It's really nice to hear from familiar people. Also, if you have skype, let us know, because we will be using that regularly as well. We hope to hear from you soon.