A castle in the desert

It’s been a long day.
Yesterday was great, meeting neighbors from a far-off land and eating non-street food for the first time in a week. On the patio of the hotel:



I just can’t seem to find the words to tell you how gorgeous the AUC campus is…so, forget it. Here, instead:







The only thing I’ve found stressful here is the lack of organization and bloated bureaucracy that is AUC and Zamalek dorm planning. Getting a student visa here involves going to the office and being told that you need at least 2 forms and a copy of your passport to turn into another office before they can submit your application. You will then proceed to the other office, papers in hand, only to find that your financial situation needs official documentation from yet another office. After waiting in line patiently, your documentation request is approved—but now there is a line by the second office and you must wait. Finally you enter the room and turn in all your forms. But wait—you must return in a week to begin the actual application process, and surrender your passport for an unspecified amount of time. What fun!
Good news: I was able to make it to the cruise on the Nile after I was told by phone that I had a good five minutes to board the bus in Zamalek (meeting time: TBA on all the boards). I was then in al-Azhar park, a beautiful park in eastern Cairo…unfortunately, at least 45 minutes from the dorm. Undaunted, my friends and I took a cab to Ma’adi and met the bus there just as the other students were boarding. The food, qamar-ad-din, (“moon of the religion,” a very sweet apricot drink) and deep red setting sun made it all worthwhile.







On a lighter note, I’ve learned a lot from cabs here. I prefer the black unmetered ones as they involve more interaction with the driver. If you’re not so good with Arabic or the Egyptian dialect, this interaction involves waving your hands as you enter the cab and saying لالالا, no no no, to the absurd price the driver is offering for his ride less than a mile across the river. Don’t be a silly tourist and pay 50 pounds for a 5-minute cab ride. That only happens in New York.
Speaking of pounds, the fast-food restaurant Gad has changed me significantly.

(insert obese picture here)

No…not in that way. At Gad, you can buy a falafel sandwich for about a pound. I’m talking about how every time I think of how much something costs, I think of it in falafels.

One large bottle of water: 3 falafels.

A meal at Prince: between 4 and 10 falafels.

A five-day, five-star-hotel trip to Luxor and Aswan with the group: 3,500 falafels!
You decide which is more worthwhile. What would you do with 3,500 falafels? If you’re American, maybe a better question is…what would you do with 300,000 falafels?

Send me your suggestions. Some examples include:
• Give them out for free to the poor
• Let them loose in America as a (much more functional) stimulus package that delivers vast amounts of…you guessed it, carbs and essential oils.
• Far upstream, build a dam on the Nile (supplemented with something less biodegradable, like plastic) and blackmail countries that depend on its water into respecting human rights

…Like I said, it’s been a long day, and now I need some food.

Fantastic Feluccas! (Fela’iq)

After exploring more of Zamalek’s endless grid of embassies and haute couture restaurants, we went out to ride a felucca. No, they’re not whales. They’re sailboats. They’ve actually been used in Egypt for hundreds of years and work well on the Nile; the Nile current flows north toward the Mediterranean, but if you want to go back upstream the winds are on your side.



Returning to a familiar restaurant, Prince, we all had shawarma and discussed the finer points of 3amiya. One important word:

English = Fusha (Standard Arabic) = 3amiya (Egyptian)
Cat = Qitta = ‘Utta

You can say this if you want to call a girl beautiful or perfect. Another word is muzza. Don’t mess up like I did and call her mazza, which means a salad or appetizer.

For you guys learning Arabic…also be careful with kelb and qelb. Why?

Example 1: Lestu 3ndi kelb! (I don’t have a dog!)
Example 2: Lestu 3ndi qelb! (I don’t have a heart!)

You thought yesterday was a good car ride? Try it in a convertible. Downtown to the dorm in 10 minutes flat.



So it’s 2:40 AM, and Cairo is just going to sleep. Getting the 7:30 bus to AUC tomorrow morning for orientation!

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.”

Bridges, bridges, and more bridges

Woke up around 9:30 (what I later learned was 8:30*) to a great breakfast of bread, cucumbers, tomatoes, cheese, hard-boiled eggs and apricot jam, with a side of strong tea and a fig/almond cookie. We talked with Muhammad, the worker who always wore capris, in 3amiya. Then around 10:30 Miriam and I went out to get a phone.

Something I've noticed: time is so different here. In Mobinil, the wonderfully air-conditioned telephone outlet, they give you a number and you wait sitting either on one of 4 chairs or standing until the sign above the computers reads your number. This can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour depending on how fast the employees feel like working or how much trouble their customers are giving them. Today it was about average, we only waited for about 20 minutes.

Ramadan means there are very few restaurants open during the day. After Miriam got her phone we walked around northwest of the hostel in search of MANGO JUICE. (Nothing says “I’m a foreigner” more than carting around your lunch and a huge bottle of water during Ramadan, so we opted to eat in a café.)
After an hour of walking block after block, we landed in Talaat Harb Square, which is really a circle (but the maps don’t tell you that—more on maps later). We were in luck; Groppi, the pastry café, was open. Two sandwiches, two bottles of water, two enormous bowls of strawberry/mango/anise-flavored ice cream, and about LE 50 later (about $9 altogether), we continued on to Zamalek.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3OfvPwEpF4

(I later found out this was actually 6 October Bridge and not 26 July, which might have saved us a few hours of time.)

Here’s where the real fun began. Zamalek is an island (gezira in Egyptian Arabic) in the middle of the Nile and it’s home to most of Cairo’s embassies and expatriate communities. As a result, prices are a bit higher, the roads are quieter, and you might even see blond people. Starting off in the middle of the island, we trekked along the massive wall that separates the vast Gezira Sporting Club from the rest of the community. We were headed toward my dorm to check in, but unfortunately I’d lost the address and only knew it was on the northern third of the island.
The best part was when some guy came up to us and asked if we wanted to see something by the Nile, We politely said no thanks and walked past. He yelled “Go to hell!” but with a smile on his face. We figured it was probably one of the more clever English phrases he knew and he was trying to show off.

Here’s a typical exchange we had with some officers.
Us: بتعرف فين بيت الطلاب للجامعة الأمريكية ؟ Do you know where the AUC dorm is?
Policeman: Ah, شسهببت تبشب ثصنت خر بيبش حخ نتب نرىب ! (something referring to left, right, straight ahead, or a combination)
Us: شكراً شكراً! (Thanks!)
(We get lost again)

…and repeat as necessary. Ok, we may have been fairly incompetent at reading the map I had or understanding 3amiya, but the biggest reason we kept getting off track was that these officers will never tell you they don’t know something. And if they have to make things up, they will.
I guess that would explain all the mysterious laughing when a group of them told us where the dorm was and we started walking…
After we finally found the dorm and I checked in, we started the journey back to the hostel to get our bags. As we know, Egypt does strange things to maps. The lack of street signs renders them completely useless even for major roads. So it should come as no surprise that we got lost again…except this time it was a lot more fun. To get back, we had to take a bridge back over the Nile.
Remember 26th of July Bridge? Yes, this one. (Our quest to set foot on all the bridges to Zamalek is now complete.) Alarmingly, though, there’s no way to get to the bridge except for a few stairways on either end of Zamalek. Even more alarmingly, the bridge is not at all designed for pedestrians.
I took this video at a lull in the traffic pattern so just imagine more cars on the road.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NCsRuDdRJU

I’ve just moved into Zamalek dorms, and am very happy to still have my arms. That’s all for now.


*During Ramadan, Egypt is apparently the only country that shifts its clock back from Daylight Savings in the summer, so fasting is an hour less, and it’s only 6 hours ahead of EST.

Organized Chaos

10PM, Aug 23: So it’s been just a few hours since we got off the plane and inhaled the wondrous scents of Egypt that boldly assaulted our nostrils. I can’t really believe that we’re here. I guess it’s because I’ve been wearing the same clothes since Sunday morning and haven’t slept in a real bed since then.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBi0-iybnQE

After checking into the hostel, we went on a tour of downtown Cairo with one of the hostel workers, Mustafa, an upbeat man who spoke very little English and very much 3amiya (Egyptian Arabic). I understand some of it from the standard Arabic words interspersed, but it’s very frustrating to not know any of the Egyptian dialect. Might be a good thing to learn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNX-wQzDFLQ





Everything is cheap here, from the falafel pitas (LE 1.50 each, equivalent to roughly 30 cents) and 3.50 for gelato (about 70 cents). So far there haven’t been any unsettling consequences. Even better, you can order food online and have it delivered right to your door. Yes, even cookies.

10 AM, Aug 25: We spent the day yesterday in Old Cairo, which includes many old Coptic churches and is a few short Metro stops (LE 1 to go anywhere) from the city center. Ben Ezra synagogue, currently in disuse owing to Egypt’s current population of 201 Jews, is tucked away in the walled portion of the city and was built on the site of a church that had previously replaced an older synagogue. (This type of incident is a time-honored tradition in the Middle East.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIwY3jwiy1Y





Yesterday night we walked from the hostel to Tahrir Square, which is basically the largest superhighway east of the Nile packed into the smallest amount of space possible. 8 lanes of traffic plus a traffic circle that puts roundabouts in Britain to shame. Navigating it without a car just takes boldness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BafmRaQCbNY

My friend Amr took me on a tour of southern downtown, near the old AUC campus and the US embassy. The hotels here are ridiculous even by American standards, one with a mall selling socks for 2000 pounds (divide by 5 to get dollars). And in a glass case in the mall sat a revolving, gleaming Porsche…cell phone.
Yeah, I didn’t know either.

Stunned by this new revelation, we were in need of some spirits so we went to a small restaurant by Tahrir where I had the best mango juice in history. Nearby was a restaurant where a few months ago one of my unsuspecting American friends had apparently bought a falafel for 77 LE.

I bought the same thing at Gad for 1 LE. Forget exploitation of foreigners, that’s a crime against humanity.

It begins

August 22, 1:30pm.
Scenario: You’re off to a country you’ve wanted to visit your entire life, and you’ve been preparing to go for six months. The day of your flight arrives. You wake up early, eat a solid breakfast, do some last-minute packing and weigh your suitcases. You eat a quick lunch at 1, figuring if you leave in about 10 minutes you can get to the airport with ample time to spare before your 4pm flight.

Then you get the call. The mechanical female voice on the other end does nothing to calm your nerves as you learn that your flight, a mere 4 hours from its departure, has been canceled! Hooray!

There was a flight available from Baltimore that I could still catch, so my family drove up there. Alright, no problem. Just a minor glitch.

7:30pm: So this is actually turning out to be a lot more like Lost than I expected….
The plane was supposed to leave Baltimore at 5:50, but after a long wait they told us it would leave Baltimore at 9:50 instead. My flight to Cairo leaves JFK at 9:55. يا خبر أسود!
So the ticket counter told us to go to the help phones and get someone to rebook us somewhere else. All you have to do is ask them how to get a flight to JFK and not miss the connection. Easy enough, right?

NOT IF THEY THINK YOUR PLANE IS ALREADY IN THE AIR.

I kid you not. Here’s my conversation with the flight coordinator:
Me: My flight, **** to JFK is delayed to 9:50 and I want to get another flight since I have to be on the plane to Cairo in four hours.
F: Hmm. It says your flight to JFK is on time. You should do your best to catch it.
Me: I am at the gate. They say it’s delayed.
(We discuss options)
Me: Maybe I’ll just take this flight and hope for the best. I have to wait a few hours though. Do you know when the plane will get here?
F: Well, there must be something wrong with the computers…here it says your flight is leaving at 5:50…I think you’re about to miss your flight.
Clearly no help there. So I go to the ticket counter. People behind me are wondering why there’s all this disconnect between the ticket counter and the flight coordinator crew, because they had the exact same problem I just did.
Guy: How do they not know where this plane is?!
Ticket lady: Sir, it’s actually right outside.
(cue Twilight Zone music)

I sense Widmore’s hand in this…



8pm: Waiting in line to get my ticket issues cleared up, I met an Israeli who’s moving back to Israel after 2 years in the US. His mother just happened to be Egyptian, funny. Also helped a Spanish-speaking woman who didn’t speak much English get her ticket. Aside from the strangely large number of passengers going to Vegas, we both decided to take a gamble and try making our connecting flights at JFK.



9:20pm: The plane left BWI in clear, sunny weather. Ran into some unfortunate turbulence, but only half the seats were filled. If only we’d left earlier…I resigned myself to waiting in JFK for a day and getting the next flight out. The flight itself took 30 minutes. While we were taxiing at JFK I learned that my flight to Cairo was delayed until 10:30. Great news! Except when I checked my watch and realized it was 10:25.

10:30: Still taxiing.

10:40: Still taxiing.

10:50: We stopped at the gate. Flight is now boarding at 11:00. I charged through the terminal at top speed. JFK terminals suck. Especially the U-shaped ones when you start out at one end and have to get to the other in about five minutes.

11PM: ON THE PLANE TO CAIRO! What a miracle

14 days

One thing I've noticed about summer is that you spend so much energy trying to pass day after lazy day with a job, internship, sport (or sleep). Week after week, month after month, all your efforts seem in vain as time ticks ever so slowly, each moment blending into the next in a sultry, lethargic haze of scattered memories...

And then, one day, you realize that all your efforts are actually working TOO well, and summer's coming to an end much faster than you'd expected. It's frightening and exciting at the same time.

The two-week mark is what did it for me.

Life is so much more than just counting the days. Don't count the days. Make the days count.

...Yes, I now realize that the titles of my last three posts illustrate this point perfectly.