So Claire kind of stole my thunder by mentioning the race I ran last weekend, so...yeah, I ran a race last weekend! A couple of our friends here are running/fitness freaks, and they invited me to come down to Luxor with them to run in the Luxor marathon. (Just to give you a taste, a few of them ran a 100 km relay race back in November--5 people to a team, each running 20 km. But one friend, Curtis, was his own team--he ran all 100 km himself!) Needless to say, since I had never run more than about 4 or 5 miles at a time in my entire life, I wasn't really ready to run a full marathon, so I can the 12.3 km "Ramses Run," which is about a quarter of a marathon. The whole experience was a lot of fun. The course was beautiful, starting and ending at Hatshepsut's Temple on the West Bank of the Nile, winding through a couple small villages and a lot of banana and sugarcane fields. I managed to make my target time of 1 hour, 5 minutes almost exactly--not bad for a whole 3 weeks of training (although I have been running regularly, though not hard, for several months now).
One of the best parts of the experience, though, was being a part of this group of people who are really, really excited about distance running. Our group of people (there were seven of us who went down together) talked about running and training constantly, and we met and talked with lots of people who run marathons on a pretty regular basis. All in all, it was enough to make me feel excited about running too. I really enjoyed running the race itself, and now a friend and I are thinking about doing a half marathon (roughly 21 km) in Jerusalem at the end of March. I'll start training in the next couple of days and see how it goes for a week or two before making a decision, but we'll probably end up doing it. I've got the time and the will to do it now, so why not?
By the way, we promise to post some Tanzania pictures at some point...
Friday, February 22, 2008
Friday Mornings Around Our house
So, I don't know if I have written about this before, but as it is going on right now, I feel like talking about it. Friday mornings/early afternoons (remember that Friday is our Saturday) around our apartment are much like those of any young couple or family. We get up, we make a yummy weekend type breakfast of eggs or pancakes or both, we do our copious amounts of laundry, read the internet news, and listen to the extremely loud and extremely fiery preaching being blasted at full volume from the Mosque next door - oh wait, I guess that's unique.
There is a little hole-in-the-wall mosque two buildings down from our apartment building which ,I think, tries to make up for the fact it is really just a substitute for an actual mosque -- frequented by people who work around our neighborhood or who are not fortunate enough to be able to get to a full fledged free-standing mosque with an actual preacher -- by blasting the Friday sermon so loud as to be heard all around the island (I'm pretty sure this is just a sermon broadcast from somewhere else). As I am not yet advanced enough to understand classical Arabic being shouted and sent through a loudspeaker system, I have no idea what he is says, but it sure as heck sounds like "death to the infidels." I defy any pentecostal preacher to produce a more terrifying rant than this guy. It goes on for about 45 minutes and is simply inescapable. It is a very strange contrast to the beautiful calls to prayer that generally structure the aural landscape around our neighborhood.
The other mystery of Fridays for me is this bizarre fishy smell that permeates the air around our building every Friday morning. By late afternoon it's gone, and I never smell it any other day of the week. I refuse to open any windows while it's out there, because it takes forever to air out the apartment once it's gotten in. Very strange.
In a completely unrelated note, as Bill has not yet gotten around to writing a post about it, I feel compelled to tell everyone that last weekend he ran in is first organized race down in Luxor. He went with a small group of people, mostly from the higher levels of our program , and seems to have a had a great time. The race had three divisions, a 12k, a half marathon, and a marathon. Bill ran in the 12k and did quite well, making his target time. He is now thinking about running a half marathon in Jerusalem at the end of March. All this from the same guy who told me this time last year that he just didn't see the appeal in running :-) Anywho, I'm quite proud of him and rather jealous that I can't run myself.
Until next time...
There is a little hole-in-the-wall mosque two buildings down from our apartment building which ,I think, tries to make up for the fact it is really just a substitute for an actual mosque -- frequented by people who work around our neighborhood or who are not fortunate enough to be able to get to a full fledged free-standing mosque with an actual preacher -- by blasting the Friday sermon so loud as to be heard all around the island (I'm pretty sure this is just a sermon broadcast from somewhere else). As I am not yet advanced enough to understand classical Arabic being shouted and sent through a loudspeaker system, I have no idea what he is says, but it sure as heck sounds like "death to the infidels." I defy any pentecostal preacher to produce a more terrifying rant than this guy. It goes on for about 45 minutes and is simply inescapable. It is a very strange contrast to the beautiful calls to prayer that generally structure the aural landscape around our neighborhood.
The other mystery of Fridays for me is this bizarre fishy smell that permeates the air around our building every Friday morning. By late afternoon it's gone, and I never smell it any other day of the week. I refuse to open any windows while it's out there, because it takes forever to air out the apartment once it's gotten in. Very strange.
In a completely unrelated note, as Bill has not yet gotten around to writing a post about it, I feel compelled to tell everyone that last weekend he ran in is first organized race down in Luxor. He went with a small group of people, mostly from the higher levels of our program , and seems to have a had a great time. The race had three divisions, a 12k, a half marathon, and a marathon. Bill ran in the 12k and did quite well, making his target time. He is now thinking about running a half marathon in Jerusalem at the end of March. All this from the same guy who told me this time last year that he just didn't see the appeal in running :-) Anywho, I'm quite proud of him and rather jealous that I can't run myself.
Until next time...
Saturday, February 9, 2008
First Week Back at School
...But before that, an aside: when I think of line-dried clothes my mind tends to conjure up images from Downey commercials of white sheets blowing in the country air and little kids and teddy bears inhaling the scent of freshness and cleanliness. Well, this may in fact be what it is like if you are able to line-dry your clothes in "fresh country air," but when you dry them in Cairo air they smell like Cairo -- that is to say, bad. All of our clothes have this acrid smoky smell to them and always come off the line with a slight brown tinge to them. It may not be environmentally friendly, but I miss my drier.
...Now back to our regularly scheduled program. We finished our first week of classes, and while there was some amount of hectic class changing, we're finally settled in all of our classes. Our Fusat class (Fusat, I recently learned, is the Arabic work for elegant) is full of great people...it seems like they split the returning students into a "studious" and a "non-studious" class, so this means that there are pretty much no duds in our class...all very motivated people (Bill is, of course, still the best). The classes are pretty much the same as last semester, except this time we have a class called "media" which is basically a class for learning how to read the news paper and watch TV. We're learning how to say "Minister of defense and arms production," as well as how to understand the connotative meaning of words in the context of a news article. I really really like this class. In the US there's no way you would take a class like this until you were pretty far advanced in the language, so I feel like it's really something special, and very important, that ALI offers. Our grammar teacher is fine. She's not as amazing as our grammar teacher from last semester, who had an uncanny ability to make Arabic grammar seem easy and straightforward, but she seems to know her stuff. Our Vocab teach is absolutely amazing. She's probably in her early seventies, very short and round with copious amounts of eye makeup. She can't remember anyone's name, talks very loudly, and wants us to all come over to her house of breakfast, and afterwards she has lots of beds so we can sleep :-) She's a character, but she's also clearly very experienced and a good teacher.
Finding the right colloquial class was something of a challenge because our teacher from last semester, the wonderful and fabulous Sherifa, is not teaching this semester. She had wanted us to skip a level and so had put us in an intermediate class that she was supposed to teach, but then she got sick over the break and won't be teaching it after all. We went to the first class and it was just terrible - the teacher basically just read the book out loud - and so we spent a few frantic days trying to figure out the right class for us. In the end I think we found the perfect class. It's us and two other people who were at the top of their aameya class last term and who are really motivated, then two people who have had tons of fusat and so are picking up aameya very quickly. There are also two guys who I think should really be in a lower class, but the teacher does not seem inclined to slow the class down for them, so I'm not worried. The teacher, Abdel Fattah, is really great and we like him a lot. He's very upbeat and energetic, but very demanding and clearly expects a lot from us. He also encourages a lot of talking in the class and create an environment where even I don't feel too scared to try to talk (yes, I know I talk a lot in English, but in Arabic I get really nervous when I'm put on the spot and freeze up).
Anywho, all in all, pretty positive feeling after our first week. Also, it seems like everyone and their brother has moved to Zamalek this semester, making socializing much easier. Ok, now off to my massive amounts of grammar homework and smelly clothes :-)
...Now back to our regularly scheduled program. We finished our first week of classes, and while there was some amount of hectic class changing, we're finally settled in all of our classes. Our Fusat class (Fusat, I recently learned, is the Arabic work for elegant) is full of great people...it seems like they split the returning students into a "studious" and a "non-studious" class, so this means that there are pretty much no duds in our class...all very motivated people (Bill is, of course, still the best). The classes are pretty much the same as last semester, except this time we have a class called "media" which is basically a class for learning how to read the news paper and watch TV. We're learning how to say "Minister of defense and arms production," as well as how to understand the connotative meaning of words in the context of a news article. I really really like this class. In the US there's no way you would take a class like this until you were pretty far advanced in the language, so I feel like it's really something special, and very important, that ALI offers. Our grammar teacher is fine. She's not as amazing as our grammar teacher from last semester, who had an uncanny ability to make Arabic grammar seem easy and straightforward, but she seems to know her stuff. Our Vocab teach is absolutely amazing. She's probably in her early seventies, very short and round with copious amounts of eye makeup. She can't remember anyone's name, talks very loudly, and wants us to all come over to her house of breakfast, and afterwards she has lots of beds so we can sleep :-) She's a character, but she's also clearly very experienced and a good teacher.
Finding the right colloquial class was something of a challenge because our teacher from last semester, the wonderful and fabulous Sherifa, is not teaching this semester. She had wanted us to skip a level and so had put us in an intermediate class that she was supposed to teach, but then she got sick over the break and won't be teaching it after all. We went to the first class and it was just terrible - the teacher basically just read the book out loud - and so we spent a few frantic days trying to figure out the right class for us. In the end I think we found the perfect class. It's us and two other people who were at the top of their aameya class last term and who are really motivated, then two people who have had tons of fusat and so are picking up aameya very quickly. There are also two guys who I think should really be in a lower class, but the teacher does not seem inclined to slow the class down for them, so I'm not worried. The teacher, Abdel Fattah, is really great and we like him a lot. He's very upbeat and energetic, but very demanding and clearly expects a lot from us. He also encourages a lot of talking in the class and create an environment where even I don't feel too scared to try to talk (yes, I know I talk a lot in English, but in Arabic I get really nervous when I'm put on the spot and freeze up).
Anywho, all in all, pretty positive feeling after our first week. Also, it seems like everyone and their brother has moved to Zamalek this semester, making socializing much easier. Ok, now off to my massive amounts of grammar homework and smelly clothes :-)
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