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.