Ya Salaam!

It's been a while so I think its time I report on the happenings of the past couple days. I guess the first thing of note was when we went to Cafeteria Houria. It was a large, dingy bar in Downtown that attracted us with its 9 LE Stellas. Getting there was an adventurer however since the cabbie didn't know where it was and neither did we. We knew we were in the vascinity of Tahrir Square, but he drove past that and started driving down an alley. At that point we shouted "Henna henna!" ("here here!") and decided to hoof it the rest of the way. I knew it was neart the old AUC campus in downtown so we walked the block around the old campus until we recognized some landmarks given to us by some friends who had already been in the cafe for a few hours.

Last night we decided it was time to check out some belly dancing. Now apparently you really get what you pay for with belly dancing. There are a few skilled dancers and they perform in the expensive luxury hotels in Downtown and Garden City. Cover for those shows was around 250 LE, which no one was willing to spend. Instead we decided to go to the 35 LE place, about which a guidebook said, "if you go after 2:00am, you might be lucky to see a girl who actually has rhythm." Another described the cheaper shows as having "all the style and grace of amateur wrestling." And they were right. The show was absolutely unnoteworthy. Jim said the show was "awful, amazing, and awfully amazing." The dancer invited some of the people in attendance up to the stage to dance, and I'm pretty sure every one of them was a better dancer than she was. We won't be going back.

Our Survival Arabic class had a field trip to Downtown on the last day of class, which was fun. I really liked my class and we all liked our teacher Hala. For lunch we all went to a very classy resaurant called Felafa. Now Egypt is known for its koshery and its stuffed pigeon. I was feeling adventurous and decided the time was right to try the pigeon. Like belly dancing, its something I'm happy I tried once but am not going to do again. The pigeon still had the gizzard, feet, and a few organs left inside allong with the rice stuffing. Apparently Egyptians eat the whole thing. I didn't.

I've discovered that I love drinking guava.

Tonight we met some Egyptian AUC students along the Nile near Garden City and took a sailboat out at dusk. It was a little different from the experience Ali and I had the night before with the faluka boat. We were walking back to the dorm, looking at all the clubs and boats along the West Bank of the Nile, and paid a little too much attention to a guy talking to passers-by about his boat. We were curious to see what it was like, one thing led to another, and before we knew it we were taking a half-hour cruise down the Nile. The boat had flashing lights, blaring Arabic dance music, and a very loud motor. It was a pretty random happening and ended up being fun for the sheer goofiness of the whole situation. Tonight we had a very calm, relaxing, leisurely drift down the Nile just south of Gazeera and Garden City, the leafiest parts of Cairo.

After spending all of yesterday walking about Cairo for seven hours, I decided to take it easy tonight and study up on some Arabic. It's hard to believe I've been here for over a week already and school starts tomorrow. There are still so many places to see and things to do and school hasn't even started yet. Hopefully the next fifteen weeks can live up to and excede the first.

Looking for Food

So one of the goals everyone seems to have is to go as long as possible without eating American food. Pizza Hut, Hardee's, KFC, and Cinnabon are pretty prevalent here. Every night so far we have wandered about looking for hole-in-the-wall restaurants or anything really that looks interesting. Besides allowing us to continue our Egyptan-only food kick, it also gives us a chance to practice our Arabic. As it turns out, the Arabic we learn in school, Modern Standard Arabic, isn't really spoken anywhere except for important government business. It's much like learning to speak Latin and trying to get around Italy, or learning to speak Elizabethan English and trying to get around Mobile, Alabama. So basically when I first got here, not only had I been out of Arabic practice since last semester ended, but what little I did remember was fairly useless. After three days of survival Arabic, where we practice the local Egyptian dialect for three hours a day, its gotten easier to make simple conversation with street vendors. It's always a rush attempting to speak only Arabic when ordering food and it's always exciting when the vendor hears you and continues with your order without looking at you twice.

Last night we took a walk over to Downtown Cairo, where the Rameses Hilton and the Sheradon are located. It also has the famous Tahrir Square. This required crossing over bridge from the island of Zamalek into central Cairo. As I've mentioned earlier, the traffic is insane compared to American standards. There's a whole language of beeping horns and flashing lights that allows traffic and pedestrians to communicate. Lanes mostly aren't used and cars go wherever there's space. The bridge we took, the 26th of July bridge, is very busy and sidewalks are non-existent on the on-ramps for the bridge. Once we crossed, we had to "frogger" our way across a main road as packed as a rush hour highway with cars going about 40-50 mph. Crossing the street is an adventure in itself.

On a corner somwhere over in Downtown we asked a guy for directions to a restaurant. He knew English fairly well and said he had lived in the States for a while. He gave Jim some advice about speaking 'ameea (the Egyptian dialect) and led us to a restaurant. We decided it was too expensive (even though it was a deal in American dollars) and continued our search on our own. They guy seemed genuine but its hard not to be cynical in your approach to people being overly helpful to Americans; plus Jim thought he might have been chewing cod.

On the 26th of July bridge

We eventually found a great sit-down restaurant (I forget the name) with good deals. The seven of us got food for the equivalent of 25 USD total. The majority of us ordered kosherie, a kind of pasta-ish dish which Egypt is famous for. It's baked with tomato sauce on top with noodles, rice, onions, and some other carb-ish and fiber-ish things on the inside. The others had kofta, which is spiced, grilled meat, usually either lamb or beef. Breakfast and lunch usually consist of tamayya or fool sandwiches. Tamayya is the same as fewalfel, and fool is like refried flava beans. They are served on the inside of a split grilled pita.

After dinner we sometimes stop by Versaille Palace, a fairly upscale place where people order drinks, shisha, and play backgammon. Stella (unaffilitated with Stella-Artois) is Egypt's native beer and isn't too bad. Other than that alcohol is pretty scarce except around areas that might cater to Westerners or Western liftstyles. The Palace has good "cocktails," which are similar to fruit smoothies, are flavored with things like hazelnut syrup, and are non-alcoholic.

School starts February 1st, so its good to get out and walk around before we have any work to do. I'm sure it won't be long before we eventually break down and pick up some American fast food, but searching for food is a good way to practic Arabic, immerse ourselves in Cairo's culture, and explore the surrouding areas.

Pyramids

Yesterday we (the international students at AUC) took a trip to the Pyramids of Giza. Honestly, they left me very disappointed. They're size was incredible, especially considering the time in which we were built. Unfortunately no one is stationed at the Pyramids to give information of answer questions. We had a guided tour but the guide told us very little that isn't already common knowledge. I supposed the informative expereience depends on how knowledgable of a tour guide you have. The only people stationed at the pyramids permanently are vendors peddling cheap souvenirs.

They whole thing felt cheapend. On the one hand you have the incredible wonder that goes along with something so huge, something whose construction scientists can't even explain, and then you have swarms of locals trying to scam or guilt you into buying their tacky goods. One guy came up to me and said "American?" and as soon as I paid him attention he said "Barak Obama!" He tried to give me an alleged bedouin headress which I attempted to refuse, but he shoved it in my hands as I began climbing Kufu so I put it in my bag. The bottom line is that I wasn't interested, and so he tried to give it to me "for free." I knew he was going to want it back since I had no plans to pay him for anything and I tried to give it back as soon as I got down. He tried to act all offended for a while that I was refusing his free gift of good will, but as soon as he understood I was completley willing to walk away without paying, he demanded it back. It's like this a lot of places. I remember this same kind of thing in the touristy parts of Tijuana, but people there understood when they were being ignored.

The lax attitude the locals took towards the Pyramids did have its high points. Behind the three big pyramids are two smaller step pyramids and the guards will let you climb right to the top. I had a hard time believing the un-uniformed guy who told us this. He also claimed he was part of the secret security and not a tour guide and was baffled that we did not jump right away at the chance to climb the small pyramids. It's hard not to take a cynical attitude towards people, especially when they are very friendly in a place frequented by tourists.

Today we made our first trip out to the brand new AUC campus in New Cairo. New Cairo is a HUGE artificially constructed suburb of Cairo (think Newtown, St. Charles), except its only half finished. It looks like they decided to begin building these thousands of houses and developments all at once and ran out of money halfway through, leaving hundreds of square miles of half-finished buildings.

The campus itself is beautiful. It's very clean with lots of breezy outdoor walkways, with many classrooms right off of outdoor plazas. Today was the first day of survival colloquial Arabic, which I have all week before classes start for real on February 1. I'm looking forward to developing my Arabic skills not just to get better at the langauge, but also to get better prices on food. Everyone wants to eat authentic by going to hole-in-the-wall street vendors, but these guys spot a sucker when they see one and will significantly up the price when they see a foreigner. Of course, by significantly up the price I mean they might charge you 10LE for a kebab sandwich, which still works out to only two bucks. But if you can speak Arabic with them and get it for 5LE thats just all the better.

We've spent a lot of time wandering around the island the past two days and I'm rapidly adjusting. Everything is still pretty new so there's still a lot to write about, so hopefully for your sake these posts will eventually become shorter. Until then I'm going to keep rambling on here.

There's no turning back

I ran into some of the other Notre Dame kids heading to Cairo at Chicago-O'Hare, which instantly made the rest of the trip easier. During our layover at Frankfurt, we met some other students heading to Cairo as well. One of the first things Mark and I noticed in Frankfurt was the warning signs on cigarettes. It wasn't your standard "The Surgeon General says studies link smoking to increased chances of lung cancer;" they simply said "SMOKING KILLS." In Cairo, there are no warning lables on cigarettes.

I was very optimistic and positive on the plane from Frankfurt to Cairo, but Cairo International quickly killed any idea of this being an easy transition. The place is much dirtier, hotter, and crowded than any place you would find in America. Things don't seem to take their time deteriorating. As we were hearded onto buses by AUC officials we had never met and driven driven to the Zamalek dorm through a city we had never been to, I couldn't help but notice how negatively different Cairo is than any other major city I've been to. Every building facade in run down. For any building built in the last 60 years, architecture appears to have been an afterthought. Most of the apartment complexes are at least fifteen stories tall and are loaded at the top with dusty satellite dishes, giving them the appearance of a communications broadcast tower.

When we arrived at the Zamalek dorm, nothing around me looked like I had expected it to. All the guidebooks said Zamaled was one of the nicest residential areas in Cairo, and that for many years it was reserved for wealthy British officials. Many countries' embassies are still located on the island. But when we walked the surrounding area to buy cell phones and exchange money, Zamalek looked more like the bad side of St. Louis you were always told not to stray into while downtown for a Cardinals game.

Mark was put in contact with Abdel Maged through Notre Dame's campus ministry. He attended grad school at Notre Dame for engineering and is now a professoar at the University of Giza. He offered to take us out to dinner on the night of our arrival. We met him in front of the dorm and we took a taxi to a restaurant in Giza. It was a place in the states you might call a hole in the wall, but here it was very nice. The food they served was much like the food at Elia's, a mediterranean restaurant in South Bend. We had tabouli, babaganouj, beef and lamb kebab, and of course hummus. All and all the food was delicious and we hithced a ride back to Zamalek on one of the many cramped minibuses. Abdel lives in Zamalek, so he walked us around the island for a little while before we headed back to the dorm. One of the things we learned is that we must adjust our scale for what we consider "nice." On the outside, even the expensive residences (condos with owners who make over 500K a year) look run down on the outside. That's just the way it is here. Traffic is a madhouse, with no real traffic lights to speak of. Pedestrians often cross through traffic, and there is an unwritten understanding between cars and people that allows all to flow through the streets at once.

Mostly right now I'm thinking "What they hell did I get myself into," but Abdel showing us around helped a bit. With time maybe I can adjust.

Yesterday I got my bazillianth set of passport photos taken at Costco, which is normally annoying but at this point I'm too excited about leaving to be annoyed. I finally go all my problems settled with the American University in Cairo's (AUC) website, which has been making the submission of paperwork very frustrating. They finally have me registered for classes, housing, and transportation. I will be living in Zamalek, an island residential district at the central point between Old Cairo, Islamic Cairo, and Giza. This weekend I'm heading up to Notre Dame one last time to visit some friends before I leave, and then it's off to Cairo via Chicago and Frankfurt.