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!