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.

The first 24 hours

We have now been in Egypt for about 24 hours--already we have gotten massively lost, gotten scammed, and I (Claire) have been hit by a car (ok, more like nudged by a car, but it was scary). I don't know if I really had any idea what the city would be like, but it is definitely different. It's extremely busy/bussling, but not in any familiar kind of way. Everything happens in the streets, and I mean everything--vendors, car repairs, computer repairs, you name it. Also, after seeing the triple and quadruple parking here, I don't think I'll ever complain about double parking again! Also, in terms of traffic patterns, there aren't any--it's like watching people sidle up to a bar, except in cars (in Bill's words). Lane markers, traffic light, etc all mean nothing...the only thing that seems to actually be paid attention to are the traffic police who only appear at the most crowded of intersections and seem to serve the sole purpose of stopping traffic in one direction so that the other direction get move (pedestrians are quite numerous but seem not to figure into the equation at all). For those of you familiar with my anxious and somewhat anal-retentive ways you will gather that this is quite difficult for me to handle. (but Bill says I'm being a "trooper" so I guess it's ok.)

We went to the university today, and it turns out our entire department is on vacation. We poke our heads into the international student affairs office and they were helpful, but unbelievingly disorganized. They gave us a list of apartments to look into, but we think that tomorrow we will go back and ask one of them to come with us, because, in their own words, "most of these people will be smelly and speak no English." (as you can imagine, this did not do much to lift my spirits, but at least now we've made contact with some people, who all seemed very happy and excited and so it must be possible to settle in here and not feel so continually stressed.

We also went to the American consulate, but it appears that they, in what seems to me to be a very unamerican fashion, only operate between the hours of 8am and 11am. We'll go back tomorrow to register with the embassy (which will hopefully get us invited to some swank functions) and we are hoping to encounter some more advice about living in the city.

This afternoon we are going to do some more walking around the city and work on getting our bearings...we are totally on Urban-Safari right now, complete with travel compass. Anywho, I'll stop now and let Bill take over with a description of the hostel, etc.