Two interesting points for the day:Sara and I hopped off of the bus early today on the way back from AUC. A quick aside: I'm not sure if I have explained this yet, but we attend school at the AUC New Campus, located about twenty miles south of the city in an area that is mostly desert at this point. Each morning we walk two blocks to the bus stop on the west side of the island and must take a 45 minute bus ride to school. The ride back from shcool usually takes between one hour and an hour fifteen. Anyway, Sara caught me on the bus and asked if I would walk with her to St. Andrews on 26 July St. in Downtown. Women are not supposed to make eye contact with male strangers, and it is dangerous for girls to walk around Cairo without male accompaniment. Verbal harassment is a given, and on rarer occasions women are physically harassed. So I agreed to walk with Sara to St. Andrews having no idea really what it was or why we were going there. As it turns out, St. Andrews is a mostly Suadanese christian church which, among other courses, offers English language classes. Sara was interested in volunteering to tutor English once a week, and I ended up signing up as well. It is a pretty laid back program, and our shifts consist of hanging out in the library so that English students can have a chance to practice conversing with English speakers. She and I are very excited about starting. I will be going in on Tuesdays and tomorrow is my first day.
Secondly, our plans for the weekend of the 26th went from ruined to saved in a matter of one day. We had planned to fly to Luxor and Aswan to see the wealth of Pharonic ruins located there, but flights for that weekend were heavily booked and our tickets would have been outrageously expensive (by Egyptian standards at least. They are usually around 500LE but for that weekend they cost nearly 1000LE. Now this only translates to $200, but why spend $200 when you could spend $100?). But shortly after learning this disappointing news we heard something even more exciting: Akon will be performing at the Cairo Opera House in Zamalek, our island, on February 26th. I don't own a single Akon song but the opportunity to see somebody as goofy as him perform in Egypt is too good to pass up. I am SO stoked to see this concert.
2 comments:
A quick tip for you-- make sure you know what kind of English they want you to speak to those people. I thought I spoke English my entire life until I came down here and apparently have been doing it all wrong. Who knew?
haha thats pretty funny. actually a lot of the students seem most interested in learning the american dialect. they say it flows better and that we speak faster than the british.
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