Monday and Tuesday

Monday and Tuesday were mostly spent on campus (the new one). I had to sort out my schedule, which won’t actually be sorted out for a few more days. It is a bit chaotic. The new campus is in New Cairo which is a suburb southeast of the city. The idea for the suburb was conceived only a few years ago, so New Cairo consists of a lot of construction projects and desert. It is only 22-miles away from Zamalek, but with the traffic, the bus ride takes about an hour to an hour-and-a-half. That is not as bad as it sounds (so far, at least). There is a lot to see between the dorms and the campus:

It is a HUGE Coptic cemetery
Luxury Apartments

Desert!

Luxury Apartments?

Construction!

The front of the campus!

The new campus is very nice. It is designed like a fortress with only a handful of gates for entrance. The buildings are all connected, creating the walls. The only thing missing is moat and a drawbridge [there are actually some drawbridge-esque ramps inside the fortress]. This is the campus:





Monday night, we went to the bar where we had gone Saturday night, Versailles Palace. We seemed to be getting skipped when it came to getting new coals on the hookah. We finally asked for more and the coal-bearing guy gave us just a little bit of coal. My heart was broken. I did get to try Stella, the Egyptian beer, though. I am not much of a beer connoisseur, but I liked it. It had an interesting aftertaste. Leave it to Versailles Palace, however, to ruin it that night by charging more than two times what everyone else charges for it. Never. Going. Back. (at least for a few weeks)

Stole this picture..

Tuesday night, we went to Khan al-Kahlili, the biggest market in Egypt. It is also up there with the pyramids as hot spots for tourist activity. This is where people yell at you in broken English, Spanish, or Italian to buy their stuff. You also have to barter. There were a lot of interesting items, but I just did not like the atmosphere. We went to a restaurant and were looking at a menu in Arabic, as the waiter came in and took it from us, replacing it with an English menu. The English menu’s items were a bit more expensive. There are other markets in Cairo that should be less targeted at tourists- I will go to those.

Fun! (I stole this picture)

Tourists!

This is Midaq Alley, the alley that Naguib Mahfouz wrote about in the book Midaq Alley and won the Nobel Prize for. I It was an incredibly random alley that involved going through a sketchy alley, then a sketchy stairwell, and when we go to the top, a sketchy man just pointed in the right direction. He didn't even say anything. This is also me being a tourist.

At some point, we came up with the idea of going to Upper Egypt until school starts on Sunday. We schemed and plotted and looked through our Egypt-guides. We ended up scratching that idea and now we are going to the Sinai. I believe we are staying in Dahab one night, but will be making the trip over to St. Catherine’s Monastery and Mt. Sinai at some point. [I am leaving in a few minutes from me writing this!] I will let you know how that goes when I get back on Saturday!

Sunday! Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!

Recap of Sunday:

We went to downtown Cairo. The traffic is intense. Crossing the street in said-traffic is insane. It is a lot like Frogger. Seriously, you just walk out in moving traffic. The trick is to look confident. If you do not look confident, the drivers will not stop or slow down for you. That means once you start to go, you go. There is no stepping back- hesitation shows fear and Caironese drivers do not have time for that. At least they drive like they don’t… I do not have any good pictures of the traffic (taking pictures of the traffic would alert the drivers of my touristy-ness which could only imply that I would be likely to hesitate), but imagine four lanes of moving, bumper-to-bumper traffic in a three-lane road- the little space is left between the cars is used as a lane for motorcyclists. Now walk out into it. Frogger.

We picked up some Kushari (according to Wikipedia, Kushari “is a popular traditional Egyptian national dish… It consists of a base of rice, brown lentils, chickpeas, macaroni, and a topping of Egyptian garlic and vinegar and spicy tomato sauce [salsa]”) and went to the American University’s old campus which is near Tahrir Square. We ate in the courtyard. Kushari is delicious (and super cheap!) and the old campus is beautiful. It is now used as administrative offices for the university.

Lemon Schweppes! Cat!

(This is not my picture- I stole it from my friend, Jessica)

I had some more pictures of the campus, but the camera did that thing again where it cannot open up the files... I think I have figured out how to prevent it, I just do not know how to recover them. You are going to have trust me on the campus’s beauty.

We then went to Garden City, which is directly south of downtown. It is home to a lot of the government buildings, including the Parliament and the Ministry of Interior. The security in this area is very high. Everywhere you look there is a security outpost or trucks full of young guards. There are guards and outposts throughout the city, but it is much more intense in this area. Garden City is also home to a lot of the embassies, including the American Embassy. You cannot take pictures of government buildings in Egypt so again, I have nothing to show. When I took a picture of a street in the area, a police officer waved at me and told me not to take pictures. That is why it is important to wear sunglasses- you can pretend to not see the officer until after you take the picture and they will have no idea. Here are some of the pictures I took in Garden City:

We walked back to the dorms:

This is the sqaure-sort-of-thing on the west side of the October 6th Bridge. This one should be viewed larger (click on it). The bridge commemorates the first day of the 1973 Yom Kippur/October/Ramadan War. I assume the statute is of Sadat, but I do not know for sure.

That night, the dorm sponsored a program called ‘Bedouin Night’. The place we went to was heavily aimed at tourists. You sit on floor cushions in a big tent, while the employees try to get everyone to dance to techno music. That is how the bedouins live... That being said, we got to ride horses in the desert, near the pyramids, at night. Someone got thrown off the horse and got hurt in the group before us, so we had to leave early and did not get the chance to ride up right next to the pyramids. It was still a lot of fun- we went up to a dune that overlooked the pyramids and all of Cairo.

This is looking down on part of the "bedouin camp" (Pyramids in the back-left)

Inside of the Bedouin encampment

I do not have any pictures from when I was on the horse...sorry.

I am going to post more tomorrow to catch things up, I am tired now.

Welcome to Egypt

We landed in a very hazy Cairo at about 11:30pm. Then, I had my first experience with Cairo’s traffic. Rather than driving in between the lines in a multi-lane road, drivers seem to center their cars on a line. Everyone does this, though, so there is a system. Eventually we made it the dorm. My roommates and I were all on the same flight so there was no awkward moment of barging in the room in the middle of the night.
The dorm is in Zamalek, a more upscale section of the city, directly west of downtown-Cairo:

(The images get bigger if you click on them)

This is the view from my room. There is some sort of celebration going on at the church as I write this:

(I am told it is a Coptic Church)

However there is an artistic-fence-shield contraption on the outside of the window, so the view is slightly obstructed:

I will put up more pictures of the dorm itself later... It is a neat, old building.

Today, I wondered with a couple of guys around the part of the city where our dorm is. I tried speaking in Arabic with a taxi driver. Failed. Miserably. He asked if we wanted a cab and when I said no, he began following us, asking why we didn’t want to take a cab. He was on a mission to get us in the cab, so I felt like I needed to strongly decline. I stopped walking and he asked why I didn’t want the cab. My mind went completely blank. I kept asking him to repeat himself over and over while I thought of a response, a trick I learned in Arabic class. Nothing came to mind. My professors would be disappointed. EDIT: Maybe he was just trying to mess with us? "Oh, they can say 'No' in Arabic, let's see what else they know!"

I took a few pictures of some large mosques (they are everywhere), but for some reason they did not turn out on my camera. I can see the thumbnail of it, but when I open it up, only 1/3 of the picture shows. If anyone has any ideas, tell me. This picture kind of turned out. No mosques in it, though:

(That is the Nile. That may actually be a minaret to the right. Notice the haze- it was noonish when I took this. Also, notice the copious amount of satellite dishes on the rooftops- nearly every building is like that):

Sidenote: The celebration at the church is a wedding. I can see the bride right now.

We stumbled across a street full of embassies- they all have one guard standing outside with either a Cold War-era rifle or an AK-47 slung over their shoulder. One of the guys I was with went to take a picture of the Iraqi embassy and the guard started yelling at him. We quickly walked away. None of us remembered that you cannot take pictures of embassies... We ate chicken shawarma at some random place. I had a pineapple-soda. Converted, the meal cost less than $2. I think I am going to like it here.

I picked up an empty pack of cigarettes off the ground on my way back. Apparently Egypt is in the midst of some hardcore anti-smoking campaign:

(Yes, that man is attached to a respirator.)

Later, I went to a hookah bar that is just down the street from the dorm. It was very nice, we sat outside. The temperature dropped down to about 60 degrees so it was almost chilly. Their hookah is very nice, but very intense. You could feel it immediately. We had an orange flavor and a cantelope flavor. I probably should not go back for awhile with my asthma... I had a delicious lemon juice drink- it is not lemonade, just juice. I did not bring my camera, but everyone else in the group did. I will steal some of their pictures at some point.

The plan for tomorrow is to adventure to Islamic Cairo and Old Cairo... we’ll see what happens.

En Route

I have been waiting for my flight to Cairo in London Heathrow Airport for a few hours now. The original plan was to do some sort of sightseeing during this layover- the British Airways in-flight magazine suggested I go to Windsor Castle or Legoland. Instead, I will be sitting in Terminal 5 for several more hours. When I first landed in London, I was not sure which line to go through- I wanted the one that would allow me to go to Windsor Castle or Legoland. However, I chose the line that took me directly to my departure gate. I did not realize this until it was too late. Windsor Castle and Legoland will have to wait until I fly through London again on my way back to the States.

Before flying to London, I had a seven-and-a-half hour layover in Boston. The first hour was killed by me getting semi-lost in the airport. It was a Spinal Tap moment- my path took me through numerous hallways, offices, escalators, and stairwells- Hello Boston! I was outside at one point. A bus/subway map caught my attention as I finally found my terminal. I decided to take the bus downtown and wonder around Boston. As I made my way to the Bunker Hill Bridge, this narrow, winding road grabbed my attention:

(This is from Google Maps - it does not do the street justice! It looks much more mystifying in person)

I had this unexplainable desire to walk down it. It took me through a residential area complete with people yelling at each other in thick Boston accents. It was wonderful. I kept walking through this area and I stumbled upon the Old North Church (the one of Paul Revere fame). That was a neat surprise.

I land in Cairo at 11:30ish pm. That means I will have to wait another day to actually be in Cairo. I will get off my plane and go straight to my dorm (assuming I manage to not get lost in the airport). By the time I get their, it is bound to be late. I am sure I will make a great first impression with my roommate as I come busting in to the room at 1am.

Just a few more hours of guarding my precious electric-outlet in the airport and I will be off!