Vaccinations in Egypt

I figured that since I am spending a semester in the African continent, I would be disappointed if I didn't make my way over to the sub-Saharan part. To fulfill this quest, I'm spending Spring Break '09 on a safari in Kenya, with a quick border crossing into Tanzania. Egypt will not admit into the country anyone who has traveled to sub-Saharan Africa without a Yellow Fever vaccine. This vaccine was not required to enter Egypt, so I hadn't gotten it. I figured I could always get it if I needed it. Egypt is a pretty advanced country, right? They must administer Yellow Fever vaccines somewhere.

Last week I met with the campus physician to figure out how to get this vaccine, and she directed me to a place called Opera Square, near the Gardens of Something-or-Other, inside the Continental Hotel. They only offered vaccinations on Sunday and Wednesday from 10am - 2pm, and they only administerd 10 Yellow Fever vaccinations per day. Last Monday I skipped class to go get my vaccine. I found the square on a map, and it was not too far past St. Andrew's, a straight shot down 26th July Street. I walked half way and then grabbed a cab the rest of the way to ensure that I got there right at 10am. He dropped me off in what I could only guess was Midan Opera, and I saw what appeared to be gardens. I was in the right place, now I only had to find the Continental. I began walking the block surrounding the square and found the sign for the Continental on a strip bordering the west side of the square.

I walked inside the Continental and saw what could have only been a hotel long, long ago. I had stepped into a spacial lobby, dimly lit and dusty, which continued on into what was once the great hall. I asked one of the two people sitting at what used to be the check-in desk, "Tetakelem Ingleezi?" He said yes. I asked him if this was the place where they gave vaccinations. There was no way this could possibly be it, and I feared I would have to waste more time trying to find the real Continental Hotel and worried that I might not get one of the ten daily Yellow Fever vaccinations. He said yes, this is the place, and told me to walk straight down the hall and take a right.

I walked straight from the lobby into the great hall, lit only by what natural light filtered in from the sun. The ceilings were high, at least two stories, probably three. On my left was a closed room with tall glass doors labeled "Pharonic Hall." The floor and walls were covered in a thick layer of dust, and on the walls I could see faded murals in the style of the ancient Egyptians. It must have been a conference room or banquet hall back before the hotel had closed. On the right, directly across from the Pharonic Hall was the Continental Bar, another boarded up room with glass doors and a carpet of dust. I continued down the hall and took a right. Inside I found a well-lit, wood panelled room with a desk, a Chili's wall clock, and two plump old nurses dressed in white.

The room which housed the clinic must have served as a changing room for the hotel's former bell-hops, as it was barley ten feet by ten feet. There was only one guy ahead of me, an Egyptian, and then it was my turn. I explained that I needed a Yellow Fever shot and they asked me where I was travelling (She asked me in English first, but I could not at all understand her pronunciation. It was not until I heard safir, the Arabic word for travel, that I understood the question) and I answered Kenya. She then told me that this required three vaccinations: Yellow Fever, Cholera, and Menengitis. I had already gotten vaccinated for Menengitis before I began college, and I was not sure about Cholera. I tried to explain that I did not need the Menengitis shot, but all the nurse said was "Kenya need three shots." So I agreed. Why not get the extra protection? The nurse swabbed my arm and took out three individually wrapped syringes and drew the necessary vaccinations out of vials stored in a Coleman cooler which sat in the corner. She administered the vaccines in the back of the triceps, like she did with the Egyptian before me and unlike the shots in the deltoid we get in the States. She told me to come back at 10:30 when the doctor would be in and I could get the official goverment papers and the international Yellow Fever certificate. The total charge for the three vaccines was 135 LE. I walked out of the Continental high on the fact that I had just gotten vaccinated for three different diseases inside an abandoned hotel. For $24. Next time you get three vaccines for only $24 you let me know.

I took a walk around the block to kill the 15 minutes I had before the doctor would be in. It was very enjoyable. I am very rarely out in Cairo during the day because I'm at school during the weekdays and travelling or doing homework on the weekends. The area was busy and the day was beautiful. The sun was out and the the city was bustling. At 10:30 I returned to the clinic. They same guy who was there before me getting injections was walking out with his offical paperwork as I walked in. The doctor was already in, working on the paper work, and when she finished I picked up my passport, complete with all the official papers giving me international recognition as having received the Yellow Fever vaccine. I am now free to travel to Kenya.

A Few Conversations

I had a number of things that I wanted to write about, but I had to keep putting it off because posting always takes at least an hour and I havn't been able to sit down and write non-school things in a while. Unfortunately, at the moment I can't remember all of them.


One of my teachers had a few interesting things to say about the majority of students at AUC. Somehow we had gotten on the topic of monthly salaries in Egypt. In America, one would associated the professions of doctor, lawyer, or engineer with high salaries or a comfortable lifestyle. In Egypt, this is not the case. A doctor employed at a goverment hospital might make 500 LE a month, whereas a doctor employed in private practice could make a couple thousand pounds per month. Whether one gets work in a goverment institution or in private practice depends on one's connections. This brought our conversation around to the Egyptian students at AUC. AUC costs around 10,000 USD per semester, a pretty average tution by American private university standards, but extremely steep by Egyptian standards. Obviously, the Egyptians attending AUC are the wealthiest of the wealthy. My teacher nearly went so far as to say that they weren't actually Egyptians. According to her, they had all been raised abroad or lived in westernized enclaves such that they may as well have been raised abroad anyway. They did not live the lives every-day Egyptians. Moreover, this elite class has the connections necessary to obtain the best jobs in Egypt. Hard work and success in school does not ensure financial stability; one needs the connections that accompany the wealthy and the socially elite, and thus the reason everyone wants to come to America. I hate sounding like and uber-patriot, blindly extolling the virtures of America, but at the end of the day it is one of the few countries in the world where dedication and hard work can result in success; where success is not a matter of connections and the having the means to bribe the right people.

***

My philosophy teacher is routinely 10-15 mintues late for class, so some of the students in my class have begun to sit and talk in the sun near the benches outside the classroom door so that we don't have to waste time sitting inside the classroom waiting. Last time, our pre-class conversation took an intersting turn when one my classmates, an aspriring documentarian, began discussing a documentary he was trying to make on Islam. He had a simple premise: he would interview people at Al-Azhar, the epicenter of Sunni Islamic learning, and ask "what is jihad?" The problem was that conducting interviews was a major was no simple process. The government made him jump through hoops in order to obtain the interviews; he had to file forms, submit his interview questions in advance, and encountered other such inconveniences. But the most interesting part was that once he was able to pose this question, he never got the same answer. He said there was not supposed to be room for varying personal interpretations of this concept, and yet no one could define it the same way.

Another of his observations dealt with the state of Islam in Egypt today. He felt that it was growing ever more into a cult of personality around Muhammed, turning towards worship of the prophet and not of God. He cited the prohibition ofnrepresentations of Muhammed as a rule that was supposed to prevent the ulama from worshiping the prophet.

***

We have many interesting conversation at St. Andrew's, especially with Dambik and Madit. They are from the Dinka tribe of southern Sudan, and they are 19 and 18 years old, respectively. It was interesting to learn that many sub-Saharan Africans do not consider Egyptians to be African. Rather, they are Middle Eastern or Arab. This makes Sudan an especially interesting country since it has sizeable populations of both black Africans and Arabs. This same point was brought out again during last night's African League football match between Egypt and Zambia. Many sub-Saharan countries root against Egypt, no matter who is playing them, and Algeria receives even more boos than Egypt.

Streaming Video

So its getting close to Tournament time and ND has already played one NIT game, and I'm still running into the same problem I had with the Superbowl: ESPN 360 does not work with IP addresses located outside the United States. Oh well. I guess I'm just going to have to check the scores in the morning before I got to school, just as these games are finishing. Thankfully though, sites illegally streaming Hollywood movies have no such national restrictions.

I had intended to watch American Gangster tonight, which I bought from a booth on AUC's campus no less, but the pirated DVD would not work on my computer. Having been dead-set already on watching a movie tonight, I for the first time turned to the internet to stream one. So for the past 5 hours I've been trying to stream the 70 minute version of Blood Diamond from some Japanese site. It was taking forever to load, so I decided to blog to kill some time.

I will most likely be headed back up to Alexandria on Friday to scuba dive. They have some limited areas you can dive even without certification. I've heard that you can see ruins of the ancient city and a downed WWII airplane, complete with pilots facemask. If you're certified, you can dive on the ruins of the Pharos Lighthouse. Tomorrow is some brand new holiday that was just announced last week having to do with celebrating the liberation of some border town from Israel. I'll most likely spend the day catching up on school work since I will be skipping Wednesday and Thursday next week to take a long weekend in Luxor. Mark has an Egyptologist friend who know heirolglyphics, or however you spell it, and he will be showing us around. In addition to homework, I'm supposed to make our reservations at the Bob Marley hostel. This sounds like a most intersting place.

Two weekends from this one we are taking a relaxing vacation in Sharm el Sheikh. We will be renting a hut on the beach, and hopefully doing a one-day training course on scuba so we can dive some simple local reefs. I've heard the diving in the Red Sea is gorgeous.

Speaking of the liberation and Sinai, I had an intersting conversation with a professor I know at another university in Cairo. He took us out to dinner and then to some quiet suburb for a walk via microbus a couple nights ago, and the conversation turned to Israel. It seems the sentiment here is that, in his analogy, Israel is an elelphant and Egypt is a mouse. Israel can crush Egypt at any time it chooses. This clashes with the Israeli Jewish sentiment of victimhood and vulnerbility, and probably a little bit of paranoia. While the Egyptians, and presumably the rest of the Arab world, sees Israel as capable of inflicting its military will upon anyone, Israel sees itelf as a small vulnerable country in a hositle neighborhood in which any concession of power is a sign of weakness that could be exploited by its enemies. It really is true that perception matters more than reality.

We also turned to solutions to the problem, and I think we all agreed that a two-state solution was best. Israel needs to rescind its settlers, actually build its wall on the green line and not overstep its boudaries as it has been, and the Palestinian territories need to prevent terrorist attacks. What this particular professor could not agree on was Jerusalem. We had suggested placing Jerusalem under international jurisdication as a fair (or at least the fairest possible) solution, but there could be no compromise. Palestine must have Israel. To him it was a Muslim city, too important to give up even to international rule. This is obviously a problem, since Israel feels it has just as much claim to Jerusalen and has much older religious ties to the city. That there could be no comporomise on this issue struck me, for this is a fair, level-headed man, and I would not be surprised if this sentiment was shared throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

What to do? The idealist would want each side to recognize their common humanity, see through perceptions and recognize the reality of the situation and the sources of each sides' feelings of victimhood and vulnerability and come to a mutually agreeable compromise. It will be interesting to see how the new adminstration handles this problem, or even if it can address it at all, considereing the economic state the country.

My movie is almost done downloading. Time to finish it and go to bed. I don't proofread these things so if you see any typos, please call me out on them so I can fix them.

The Gucci Corner

The American University in Cairo attracts many of Cairo's elite -- especially westernized elite. It's actually quite comical to see how attempts at appearing Western are manifested around campus. I've seen not a few guys wearing t-shirts from places like bustedtees.com, and they inevitably have some sort of sexually-oriented joke that is obviously lost on the Egyptian wearing the shirt. When walking around Downtown I also see plenty of t-shirts that have nonsensical phrases in English written on them. Among many of the young, wealthy, and educated, appearing Western is a big deal. While working in the study lounge I once even overheard a girl sarcastically making fun of one of her friendsts: "Ooh my name is Mustafa and I don't listen to any Arabic music and I only speak English."


On a related note, AUC has an area known as the Gucci Corner. This literally refers to an area on campus, currently located between the engineering and social sciences buildings, where masses of people congregate between classes, but it mostly refers to a sort of stylish, westernized clique of students. I've noticed the proliferation of D&G jackets and huge Ray-Ban sunglasses before, but never thought of those wearing these luxury brands as belonging to a divisive clique of students until an article appeared in the student newspaper The Caravan.

Many look at the Gucci Corner and think that it has to do with wearing name-brand clothes to class, but what it is really about is the ability to express cultural Westerness. For example, when in the Gucci Corner, students feel freer to hug members of the opposite sex. Wearing European clothes is not only a way of expressing one's wealth, but also a way of expressing one's westerness. The phenomenon began on the Old Campus, and has apparently been around for a while. In an article about it in the newspaper, an anthropology professor even mentioned that some students had written papers about the group in the past.

It's hard to make a sweeping statement about any group, but this phenomenon seems to demonstrate the difficulty that many young people, especially those that are wealthy and educated, have in trying to express their acceptance of western ideas, styles of dress, and styles of behavior, while trying to remain Egyptian.

Mount Sinai

We left at 1:30 Friday afternoon for our excursion to Mount Sinai. It had been a crazy week making plans; a number of us were going for sure but a couple people were on the fence about it until very late in the game. The major issue was transportation. The drive is six hours, and that is a long way on a public bus. Besides, the public buses have a history with security issues, so we decided to pony up the extra cash and get a private 15-passenger van. Not knowing the exact number of people made figuring costs a little more difficult, but in the end seven of us decided to go. Paying for the extra seats wasn't too bad since it gave us all plenty of room to stretch out for the ride.

We made it out of Cairo pretty quickly and before we knew it we were driving south along the western coast of the Sinai Peninsula. The sun was setting the whole way, and we had excellent views as the sun slowly sank behind the mountains on the opposite side of the Suez Canal. The haze from blown sand and pollution made it easy to look directly at the sun and we all took some great pictures.

We all slept (or tried to) for most of the ride. I gave up once it got dark and stared out the window and the mountainous terrain bathed in moonlight. We would need our sleep, because the plan was to arrive at the Monastery of St. Katherine at the base of the mountain around 9:00 pm, make the 2 to 2.5 hour climb up the Stairs of Repentance, and camp out until sunrise. Just as we reached the southern tip of the peninsula, we turned inland and headed north for the monastery. Along the way we had past several checkpoints. At each one our drivers would speak Arabic to guards, and all I could make out was saba' imreeky taaliba, from which I gathered that they were being asked to identify their passengers and probably what our business was, to which they would respond "seven American students," among other things. At the last couple checkpoints we had to produce our passports. The official would leaf through them, hand them back, and send us on our way.

The final checkpoint was also the ticket office for St. Katherine's. One of us had a student visa, so we were able to get tickets for the resident Egyptian rate. These tickets were for entering the monastery. Climbing the mountain is technically free, but the guides expect and deserve a tip. Our drivers dropped us off in the parking lot for the monastery and we collaborated in Arabic to establish a pickup time for the next morning. We fully intended to take the shorter, but much more difficult, Stairs of Repentance to the top of the mountain, as opposed to the longer but easier camel path. I don't think the anyone's decision to take the Stairs was ever based on making good time. Firstly, we were all excited by the challenge. I also think we felt that the trip itself would have more personal meaning if we took the most difficult path possible.

Taking the Stairs, however, was a problem. You are technically not allowed to take them at night. After much laborous insistence (and remember: these guys don't speak English and we don't speak Arabic well enough to express the slightest of abstract ideas), the officials at the base let us take the stairs. While they sent for a guide, Mark and I began to play with our cameras. The sunset was followed by one of the brightest moons I have seen. We both slowed our shutter speeds way down and opened our aperatures to see if we could capture these beautifully moon-lit landscapes. We both achieved amazing results. Mark has a brand-new Canon digital camera, one step below an SLR I believe. He was able to get some incredibly shots. They nearly reflected what we were actually seeing. I have a Minolta that is at least 4 years old. Its old enough that along with its 10x optical zoom (impressive), it also advertises its 3.2 mega pixels (not so impressive anymore). Despite this, my pictures turned out much better than I expected.

Our guide finally arrived around sometime between 10 and 11pm. He seemed a little groggy and we learned not too much later that he had just made the hike up the Stairs the night before and that his knee was bothering him. We felt bad for him and offered him our water and Advil, but he declined. He joked a little and handled it all well considering he had not gotten much rest. The hike up was amazing. As mentioned earlier, the moon was bright and clear, and we were able to make the entire climb by moonlight. Coming back down the next morning, we decided that in addition to being beautiful at night, it was also a good thing that we made the hike in the relative darkness of the moonlight because that way we couldn't see the challenge we had ahead of us. The Stairs of Repentance are so named for a reason. For the majority of the hike, espeically at the beginning, they are really only stairs in the loosest possible sense of the word. For the most part, its just a number of flat (relatively), narrow, stone footspaces, one right after the other. During the ascent, they often curved in such ways that getting on all-fours was necessary, and getting from one step to the next required some precarious foot and handwork. No one complained about this though, since we expected there to be at least some climbing involved. If not, then I think we all would have been a little disppointed. All told, the official count on the number of steps is 3,750. They are so uneven in places that it is hard to understand how they arrived at this number, but I'll just let it be.

We made good time up the stairs, pausing every now and then to take in the view behind us. We took a couple breaks, and only had one long delay when I had set down my prayer beads at one of our break points and forgot about them. I went back down to get them, and Mark gave me a 50 piaster (under 10 cents) incentive to sprint back up to where everyone was waiting. Not much longer after this we reached the Gate of Fogiveness, and just passed that was a flatter area. We rested here before starting the final 750 stairs. This area had a tree that was over 1,000 years old, and it was sillouetted by the moonlight. Mark and I snapped a few pictures (as much as you can snap a camera set for a 15 second exposure) and we headed on our way. Just below the top was a shack where we rented pads and blankets and got some tea. Here we hit midnight, meaning it was now Sara's 21st birthday. Someone had brought along an orange and stuck two candles in it while we sang Happy Birthday to Sara. I can't imagine a more unique 21st birthday.

Our guide led us to the prime sleeping spot: an approximately 8x20 foot roof of a mud hut built for pilrimaging monks. He we set up camp and watched as the clouds slowly melted away and the sky opened up to thousands of stars. We braced ourselves for a cold windy night. Not many of us slept much, but it didn't matter. When first light hit four hours later at 5:30 am we were all wide awake to take in the gorgeous sunrise. I'm not sure that words can really describe spending the night on Mount Sinai and then watching the sunrise over the valley below, so I'm not going to try. All I can say is that it was beautiful and was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

However, detracting from any amount of spiritual reflectiveness one might try to experience was the amount of tourists. Our schedule for climbing the mountain seemd to be fairly unique, at least for this night. We were literally the only people on the mountain during our climb, and we had the summimt all to ourselves until first light. But starting around 4:30, we began to the intermittant cheering of groups as the summited the mountain. Most of the tourists on this day had decided to stay most of the night at St. Katherines and then time their ascent to coincide with sunirse, rather than get there early and spend the night on the top of the mountain. These groups stayed out of sight until sunrise began. Then things got a little strange. Our group filled up most of the roof we were sleeping on. Once sunrise began, two people peeked over the ladder that led to our roof. We expected them to head back down once they saw that it was pretty much entirely occupied, but instead they went and sat down on the three feet of space left between the last of our row of pads and the edge of the roof. Now the only space left was the three feet of space running horizontally between the long edge of the roof our row of feet. Shortly there after, another couple of people poked their heads over the ladder and looked around. They decided to sit down right in front of us, in front of us being between us and the sunrise. And the people just kept coming, not just on our roof, but throughout the entire top of the mountain. There had to be at least 70. I was not going to stand for having people show up late and then sit right in front of me. We had been expecting, and for 15 minutes were able to, lie in our sleeping bags and watch the sunrise. This couldn't exactly be done with people sitting in front of you and jockeying for camera angles. Being where I was, I did not want to come off as selfish or cause a scene, so I just climbed on top of a rock. Mark followed, and the rest of us decided that it was finally time to stand up and just go with it. The people who joined us on the roof turned out to be Swedes, and we thought they were pretty nice once we got over the fact that they were there in the first place. We got them to sing the Swedish birthday song to Sara, which was very entertaining.

The hike down was interesting enough. It was great to see by daylight all the places we had passed in the night. But whereas on the way up we were the only people climbing the mountain, we were a group of 7 among hundreds of people all trying to descend at the same time down the same narrow stairs. We saw one women walking down the stairs in heels and were slightly apalled. And this wasn't even the worst case of a poorly-dressed foreigner. Many Europeans (the offending parties seemd to mostly be Eastern European) were dressed inappropriately. One girl was stopped at the entrance to the monestary because she was wearing a miniskirt. Once we finished the hike, we toured the limited areas of the monestary that tourists were allowed to see.

We met up with our drivers and returned to Cairo. The ride back mostly involved sleeping, but we did make a pit stop at the Red Sea. We were trying to get to a hot spring listed in one of our guide books. We found it, but it was inside a tiny cave and was crowded with old men. Instead, we dipped our feet in the water at the nearby beach and ran in the sand for a little while. We also had a memorable break at a rest stop just at the edge of the Sinai, before we crossed back into the main part of Egypt. Here at the rest stop lives a stray kitten which we named Dirty Kitty. We enjoyed feeding and petting her, and teased the girls in our group who us for playing with a most likely diseased animal.

On our return we showered and then went donwtown for kosharie, shisha, coffee, tea, and taola (backgammon), and then headed back to the dorm. All but one of my classes for Sunday were cancelled, and in the one class I had the professor was showing movie. I slept a good night's sleep, showed up for the movie, did some homework in the libarary, and went to bed. Monday is off for the Prophet's birthday. We were planning on going to Dahsur, which we missed on our original trip to Saqqara, but I think that many of us will just sleep in and do homework.

Feel free to let me know about any typos you find by commenting. And feel free to comment about other things, too.

Additional Photos:

1. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2011321&id=1304580298&l=8a096

2. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2011322&id=1304580298&l=dcb6b

3. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2011323&id=1304580298&l=4af95

Khan al-Khalili and My Birthday

I only had one class today, and since we went out late last night for a friends birthday, I decided to take the day off and go to the famous Khan al-Khalili bazaar instead. Really, it would have been a waste to get up at 7 to make the 8 o'clock bus to get to campus in time for one class from 9:30 to 10:20, and then have to wait around to take the first bus back to campus at 12:45. I would have spent more time on the bus than in class.


Mark, Sonja, and I took a cab out there and it dropped us off near the Hosayn Mosque. Khan al-Khalili is in Islamic Cairo, which has many famous Mosques. Our cab was surprisingly nice; it had leather seats, air conditioning, and an actual meter (although we payed more than the metered price anyway. The cabbie was nice enough to help us with our Arabic during the ride). We began near the Hosayn and Al-Azhar mosques. The bazaar fills the surrounding streets and narrow alleys. It is open air, but people have built makeshift rooves over the alleys throughout the years. The area used to be a major thouroughfare in Cairo, which led to the setting up of shops. Its growth over time led to the bazaar that it is today. Now it mostly sells tacky touristy items, like sphynx busts, bellydancing outfits, papyrus, and t-shirts, but in the heart of the bazaar you can still find spices and well crafted hand made goods. The bazaar is usually pretty clausraphobic, but crowds were light this afternoon. Perhaps the minor bombing outside of Hosayn mosque last week had something to do with it. Just for convnience's sake, we now respond to mineen (where are you from) with Ana Irlaandee (I am Irish), which isn't technically a lie for those of us who go to ND.



I was primarily there to price backgammon sets. Many of them are inlaid with mother of pear. We found quite a few places that sold them among other souveneirs, but we eventually found the origin of many of the sets. This little workshop specialized in woodwork inlaid with mother of pearl. We spent close to a half hour there looking at all they had to offer, and I finally left satisfied with my purchase.

We walked through more of the bazaar and found ourselves three floors up some building where a guy produces some of the silverwork sold at street level stalls. Mark went into the stalls first, but wanted something slightly different than what they were offering. The guy made a phone call, and we wove our way through the bazaar, following him to a small production house three floors up one of the buildings. Mark got his card so he could come back later.

We made the twenty-five minute walk back to dowtown and got koushary for dinner and followed it was shisha, tea, and coffee at a cafe. We have a caffe here in Zamalek right next to the dorm, and we thought the prices there were pretty reasonaby when converted to USD. Tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and shisha are all 10LE each, and right now the USD is worth 5.6 LE and rising. But at this cafe downtown we got two teas, a coffee, and two shisha for a TOTAL of 23LE, or about $4. Total. Today I bought a delicious and filling lunch of two kofta sandwiches for 8LE ($1.50), and koushary costed 6LE ($1). Living here is heartbreakingly cheap. I'm upset with myself when I eat luxuriously for the day and set myself back a whole $10.

Then again, my thriftiness today was offset by last nights cash hemmhorage (I don't fell like cheching the spelling). We had three birthdays this week, so we went to Club Purple, which was located on a big boat on the Nile (it was much like a casino boat in size and layout). Cover was an outrageous 150LE, and alcohol was very expensive. I don't think anyone drank very much. We've adjusted pretty well to viewing things here in their Egyptian prices, relative to the cost of things here in general, and have mostly stopped converting everything to American prices. I think this will make transition back to American life pretty tough, where the cost of getting dinner at Applebee's is euqivalent to an upscale resaurant here.

On my actualy birthday I just met some people at Versaille. I splurged for a Heinekin and got a shisha, but kept it short and simple since I had an exam the next day.

Coptic Cairo and Akon

It's been pretty busy with school, so I havn't had as much time to post. I also had my birthday this week too, and now I finally found some time to get back to some of the things that happened last week.

Last Thursday we went to the Akon concert. Sara and I finished at St. Andrews around 6:30 and grabbed dinner at a small place that served "pizza." It was really just some cheese and vegetables on top of flakly flat bread. Pizza or not, it still tasted good and lasted us the rest of the night. From here we walked back to the dorm and dropped off our school stuff and then met Mark down at the Opera House for the show. We are used to seeing average Cairenes, but the concert brough in a lot of the wealthy Egyptians. While we were walking a limo passed us with a couple teenage girls dancing and yelling out of the sunroof. It was pretty strange seeing that here. At the concert itself were a lot of teenage Egyptian guys doing their best jobs to look American, or even American gangsta. We saw more than a few nerdy-looking kids wearing Fubu and G-Unit clothes.

The concert itself was a surprise. It wasn't in the indoor theater; instead they blocked off a giant rectangle in a plaza within the Opera House complex and set up couple entrances to it. We bought tickets for the cheapest level of seating, which ended up being a mistake because our standing area was in the back quarter of the rectange on the opposite end from the stage. The next three quarters of the rectangle were the pricier seating areas, and we could barely see because they had set up raised equipment platforms beginning at the back third of the venue which we had to try and see over.

In the end, our view didn't end up so bad. Everyone in our area crammed along the barrier separating us from the next level up, and whenever the security guards that were stationed about every five feet or so turned the backs at the same time, a person or two would hop the barrier and sneak into the next section. Things went along like this for a while before five or six people broke for it all at once. This led another fairly large group to go for it, and then the whole thing snowballed until the entire seating area stormed across the barrier and crammed into the next level.

The concert was great and Akon ran through all of his hits, but the craziest/most exciting part came at the end when he tried to crowd surf from the stage to the back of the venue. The crowd was nuts and he couldn't get anywhere because people were holding him instead of passing him along. He finally made it to one of two platforms between the main stage and the back of the venue, but it started to sway from all of the people pushing up on it was he got on. He made it off safely and struggled to approach the second platform, and it started swaying and rocking, and eventually collapsed before he ever got to it. I don't think anyone was hurt, but there was a bunch of equipment on top of it. So at this point he is on the ground in the middle of the crowd. He tells everyone to back off and take three steps away from him, but no one listens. With the help of his security he finally surfs all the way to the back of the venue. Then he is carried out the gate and back up to the stage, going parallel to the venue. Everyone rushes out to take part in the surf back to the stage, but unbeknownst to us, his security has taken over the carrying duties. Me and Mark ran ahead of his path to join in, but since he security took over we just got shoved out of the way by his bodyguards. We did managed to touch him as he went by though, so that was pretty cool. Only in Egypt.

The next day was Friday and Spencer and I went to Coptic Cairo. Spencer had been there already but I hadn't. It was pretty cool to see a whole Christian district since they're such a minority here. We visited the Hanging Church, which is a Coptic church built over some Roman ruins and is supposedly the place where Moses was found floating down the river among the reeds. Another church we visited had a crypt built on the spot where the Holy Family was supposed to hae stayed during their flight to Egypt. We also saw a Greek Orthdox church and an old synagogue. The Coptic museum contained many icons and artifacts from the first century AD, and we visited a graveyard where there was an Islamic-style dome masouleum that was topped with a cross instead of a crescent.

One of the coolest parts of the day though involved some Egyptian kids, probably around thirteen years old. As we were leaving the Greek church we passed them. They greeted us with the usual "Welcome to Egypt," and then as we were walking away one of them said "m****r f****rs." Well we thought the kid was just pissed because we mostly ignored them, but as we were winding our way through the alleys of the older part of Coptic Cairo we passed them again. They stopped as and one of the kids said, "I'm sorry about my friend, he not know what mean "m****r f****rs." We told him not to worry, but he wouldn't let us go until Spencer forgave him! It was one of the few but very rewarding genuinely nice things people have done for us here.

Update

I haven't posted in a while, but I've been pretty busy. Just letting anyone who's reading this know that I haven't forgotten. On Thursday night I went to the Akon concert. I touched him when he did some big crowd surf thing. On Friday I went to Coptic Cairo, and it was great to see some Christian stuff in a place so dominated by Islam. Saturday I took easy and did some homework. Today is my birthday and it will be pretty uneventful -- I have an exam tomorrow. A bunch of us are planning on going out Wednesday night though to celebrate; four of us have birthdays in early March. Then the plan is to go to Sinai, but the details still need some working out.

Details and pictures from Akon and Coptic Cairo coming in the next couple days.