Fool on the road

Sleeping late is not good, especially when your whole dorm goes on a field trip to Old Cairo without you. So I explored our area…there’s a small gym and cafeteria on the bottom floor. You know you’re in Egypt when a LE 3 bottle of water seems ridiculously overpriced.

We went downstairs to have lunch (which had gotten postponed from 3 to 4 thanks to EST, Egyptian Standard Time). I went with Amr and some others to break fast in a cafe near the dorm. upscale place. We ordered and waited for our food.

This turned out to be quite a while. Amr kept complaining in 3amiya, which was completely understandable. I asked him in Arabic “Do you want me to talk to them and tell them to make it faster?” He said, “Of course,” and I walked downstairs. This made for a very awkward moment because as soon as I came back upstairs, he explained that he’d thought I said “Can we please speak in Arabic fast?” and when I walked away everyone was confused.

Since Thursday night is like Friday night in America, we drove to Nasr City, a suburb of Cairo, home to many shopping malls. The mall we went to is actually like a lot of American malls, but multi-tiered and busy until well past midnight. 2/3 of Egypt's population is under the age of 30, but it seemed like every single one of them was there. PDA and dress code are also sort of more relaxed at the mall, and there was obvious hand-holding. Nothing more though.

Let me just say that night driving in Cairo is not for the faint of heart. Ihsaam and I were squashed in the front passenger seat, with half of me hanging over the edge onto the stick shift. Amr drives a manual so I’d have to move every time he wanted to change gears, which was alarmingly often as the highway alternated between stop=and-go traffic and open road (where he accelerated to 60 km/h in a few seconds).



On the way back we ate FOOL from in front of the grocery store. Fool is a concoction sort of like refried beans, but with copious amounts of olive oil and spices mixed in. It's more like a dip than a soup and you eat it with pita. Amr is usually crazy about fool, but he didn’t like it. I told him he should tell people “You’re a fool if you like this fool.”