Pyramids, etc.

Hello!

Sorry it’s been a while.

The rest of last week was fairly non descript. Thursday after school we went to a restaurant called Lucille’s, which is supposedly home to the best burger in the world. I would probably say it’s the best burger in Egypt.

Lucilles with Dan, Ryne, Tim, Keenan, Hannah, and David

Afterwards we went to an “ahawa” or “coffee shop” where you can get Turkish coffee, Middle Eastern tea (1 part Lipton tea, 3-4 parts sugar), freshly squeezed juice (mango, lemon, guava, etc.), and of course Shisha. Also, we were able to play backgammon, which was a lot of fun, if my memory serves me right then backgammon was invented in the Middle East.

Friday, Clare, Hannah, Kirsten and I went to the Pyramids with our Egyptian friends Tamer, Omar, and Ahmed. We rented horses and took them around the pyramids and towards the Sphinx (fun fact: Sphinx means “Strangler” in Greek). Some people galloped with their horses, I didn’t because my horse had really seen better days and didn’t need any more whippings. It was kind of a pathetic sad animal.

After the Pyramids, we went back to Zamalek to get Pizza Hut. Going to Pizza Hut in Cairo is a much grander affair than going to Pizza Hut in the states, I felt kind of embarrassed to be smelling of depressed horse.

The Group

Pyramids

Clare and I at the Sphinx

The guys decided to take us to a popular ahawa in Khan el-Khalili, where they smoke shisha and introduced us to a magical drink called “Sahlab.” This wonderful concoction is made up of something like milk and rice ground together with mass quantities of sugar so it’s a thick consistency but still very fluid. It is heated up and shredded coconut, golden raisins, and peanuts are sprinkled on top.  It is extremely delicious. Our whole time at this ahawa was crazy, these street sellers would come in and walk through the place trying to get us to buy there wares (small sheepskin carpets, necklaces, small packets of Kleenex, beaded hats, chunks of animal fur with quranic verses sewn into them, and my favorite, strands of Jasmine blossoms). These sellers were of both genders and of various ages, and for some reason the younger girls kept beating on Omar, who was sitting near the door. They would smack him in the arm or try to push him of his chair, etc without being provoked at all. It was strange, funny, and not exactly a great sales tactic.

Saturday was mostly a homework day, as per day before school again. Tuesday, a couple of us girls went to Café Noir to get some coffee, tea, or Apple Cider (!) and do homework. Believe it or not we actually didn’t get that much homework done but we had a great talk about all we are learning here and applied it to some of our observations, interactions, etc. that we have had so far. Later that night, Clare, who is the new RA on our floor, had organized a floor meeting. So that afternoon we got a couple of cakes (Double chocolate fudge and Cinnamon) from a shop called Pumpkin that has the most delicious slices of cake, and a wide variety of flavors. Very creative. Though I had only bought cake there once, I had been in 3 other times to get menus and what not and the head worker there recognized me, which is kind of embarrassing. We all exchanged names so now Khaled and I are on first name basis.

The floor meeting was a lot of fun but mostly it was study abroad students who showed up, as well as Hannah’s sweet roommate Bassant. Everyone enjoyed the cake J

The rest of the week was uneventful and now I am killing time in the Library before the 7pm get together of the Egyptology Club where we are going to watch an episode of Chasing Mummies and then make fun of it after. I’m excited.

Dyeing, Dancing, and some other word that starts with the letter D

Hello!
Sorry it's been a week since my last post.
I'll do my best to remember the week's events accurately...
First things first: The hair dying was more of a success than I had expected.

Dying Kirsten's hair!

My hair was pretty orange the first day but now it's more subtle. I miss my normal hair color though.

Later that night, Kirsten and I had a real hankering for Indian food (go figure) and we found one 3 blocks from our dorm... and sooooo good! Much better than any indian food in South Bend (no offence, India Garden!) It was much needed. Very delicious.

mmmmmmmmmmmm...

(side note for my family: we got chenna masala, palak paneer, and samosas. We are going here when you come)

After wonderful Tuesday Mid-Week end, we had class again for two more days before the weekend. 

A little comment on Thursday and my awesome yet still intimidating professor of Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, Dr. Selima Ikram: At the end of class Dr. Ikram decided to take us on a little field trip to explore the Rare Books section of the library (side side note: I went to the rare books section with Mary the previous week to scope it out and all I knew was that it was the top floor of the library. Come from my school where we have 13 floors in our library, I obviously went straight to the elevator. However, only custodians can use elevators at school and the library is only 4 stories high, which was pointed out to me by some Egyptian kids who obviously though I was the laziest person in the history of people. cool.). Dr. Ikram prefaced this little trip with a comment about her being old and us being young and how we have to keep up with her and it shouldn't be a problem for us because of that. How deceptive.

As soon as Dr. Ikram was out of the door she took off like she was on rocket powered roller skates. That lady sure can speed walk. She should really consider entering and winning some speed walking races. We almost had to run to keep up with her. This is foreboding given the fact that we have about 8 fieldtrips this semester. 

Alright, the weekend. 

Thursday night Clare, Ryne, Carly, Jessie, Nav, and I walked to this street food vender that our friend Joe had been raving about and had gone to every night since his discovery of it. The restaurant is called Baraka and serves shawarma, which is slices of meat skewered on a huge metal stake and is rotated slowly around with one side exposed to the air and the other sides slowly cooked by a red hot fire wall (there's probably some technical terms that would be good to use here) here is a picture of the Shawarma but it doesn't look appetizing. It's yummy though. We had ours on hotdog buns with pickles and tomato mixed in. Then we wandered around until we found a gelato shop. Yum.

The next day most of the group I hang out with went to Alexandria, but Clare, Kirsten, and I stayed in Zamalek in order to pace our spending and traveling. Friday morning Clare and I took the metro to Coptic Cairo. This was our first time on the Metro (much cleaner than expected, it was really nice) and we rode in the Women's car of the subway. This was a cool experience because the women were much louder in this car without men than I have ever heard them to be on the streets. Especially the women with the Hijab. Some school girls were giggling about us and we got many a stare but we had a great time.

Coptic Cairo was pretty cool, it's mostly just a bunch of old churches, artifacts, and ruins. It was interesting to see the Egyptian Christians out and about in a larger concentration than normal too.

Monastery of St. George

We looked around, lit some candles, took some pictures, and ambled off to another sight.

The Museum of Coptic Cairo is only 2 years old I believe, so it was beautiful and really well maintained. This museum was much better taken care of an run than the entire Egyptian Museum. But they didn't allow pictures either.

We went home, got some more Shawarma and Baraka and did some homework. Later that night Clare, Kirsten and I met up with Clare's friend Tamer (Tamer studied abroad at Clare's home university last year and they became friends) and some of his friends and we went to a club on the Nile. We had such a fun time just hanging out and dancing, it was nice to just let our hair down and laugh loudly (the music in the club was deafening so we could laugh as loud as we wanted an no one could really hear. I'm pretty sure we all incurred some hearing damage).

In the Club

The next day was Saturday and we basically just did homework all day. Sunday and Monday we had class and last night (Monday night) we celebrated Matt's 21st birthday (which is today). We went to a rooftop bar we went to a while back that was very hard for taxi drivers to find, I don't know why we keep going there. 

Matt (the birthday boy) and Tyler

We had a lot of fun though and later went to our friend Tim's apartment to talk, laugh, and celebrate.

Now today is tuesday and all we have really done is homework and working out. I got a big Mango yesterday that I am going to now peel!

A Dash to Dahab

Hello!
Here is the rundown from Eid Break.
Wednesday night we took the 12:15 bus to Dahab, approximately a 9-10 hour drive. We were already frazzled getting on the bus as one of the taxis full of people from our 16 person group was extremely late due to the taxi driver getting lost and only arrived at the bus station at 12:02. Fortunately, this bus was running on Cairo Time so we didn't leave until about 12:30. We all promptly tried to fall asleep on the bus, however we kept being woken up 3 or 4 times about once an hour in the wee hours of the morning for passport checks, ticket checks, and rest stops. When we finally got to Dahab we quickly got return tickets for Sunday morning. We were worried we wouldn't be able to get tickets back because pretty much every study abroad student from AUC went to Dahab for Eid Break and some were on charter buses and were planning on just getting return tickets there the day of. Also, since Eid is a national holiday many people from Arab nations around the Middle East were also in Dahab. Dahab is kind of like the Mexico of the Middle East. In some places it has the golden sand and it's really cheap. Anyway after we got tickets, we went about procuring a ride from the bus station to our hotel. We got kind of ripped off and it turns out our taxi ride was really just six people sitting in the bed of a truck with Egyptian driving. Cool.

Taxi Ride

We arrived at our hotel, the Seven Heaven Hotel, aptly named. We got rooms on the roof of the hotel with beautiful views of the Red Sea out of one window and the mountains out of the other.

Our Room

 

View from our Window

We were greeted at Seven Heaven Hotel by a waiter by the name of Nate who it turns out is the waiter, cook, and general man of all work at Seven Heaven Hotel. He served us up some free drinks of tea (Shay), turkish coffee (ahawa) or lemon juice (aseer). A jolly guy named Mohammed gathered up our passports and ran off to photocopy them for kind of a long time. Once we got them back, we changed into our suits and rented snorkel gear for $2. We all tooled around a nearby reef for a bit and marveled at the sights both under and above the water but mostly I marveled at the water itself. The water in the Red Sea is the bluest water I have ever seen and crystal clear.

The Red Sea

Dahab is right across from Saudi Arabia and you can see it pretty well from the shore. So that's pretty cool.  When we got out of the water we lounged around on some lounging chairs right by the water, there were lots of little cafe type places along the water where you could just lay on lounging chairs and sip on some strawberry juice or what have you and relax the day away. And we did. 

Kayleigh and David relaxing at our favorite spot

Later that night we went to a little place called Budda and smoked some shisha and laughed. It was a fun time. The next day we mostly did the same thing, some of us went to snorkel at a different place and some of us went shopping for some "Ali Baba pants" I have no idea why we call them that. Absolutely not one. They are pretty cool though, once I wear mine I'll throw a picture up here. I also bought some arabic CDs of my favorite egyptian pop star Amr Diab with a friend, some henna hair dye, and I got a scarf that reminds me of the one my mom got when she spent a semester in the Middle East when she was in college :) It's my new favorite. I wore it to... Mount Sinai... which is where we ventured off to that night. (what a good transition :) )

We left for Mount Sinai with bulging backpacks packed with (well I brought a blanket) warm clothes, lots of water, snacks, band-aids, and all of our valuables. Also, cameras and flashlights. We were prepared for a long, sleepless night. Our bus driver for some reason drove around town a while and eventually we ended up traveling over to the base of the mountain by midnight. We got there shortly after 2 I think and met up with a guide who said our group name was "Magic". None of us really caught his name so that's also what we called him. Magic really was all about climbing the mountain at top speed. Before we realized this and while we still had air in our lungs (finally, unpolluted, fresh air!) we chatted with him a bit and found out that Magic has been leading people up and down Mount Sinai for seven nights a week for seven years. Pretty impressive. 

We got to the top of the mountain around 4:30 (it took us about an hour and a half) and waited for the sun to rise. There were more stars in the sky than I have seen in a really really long time, or ever. It made me think of what God said to Abraham about his descendants numbering the stars. Good thing God didn't say that to him in present day Cairo. The most stars I have ever counted there is six.

Finally, around 6 the sun started to come up!

Waiting for the sun (those are people)

The sunrise was gorgeous. 

After a while we hiked down to the monastery of Saint Katherine's, which we are pretty sure is Russian Orthodox. This is allegedly where they have a part of the original burning bush that Moses saw. It's debatable, and it looked kind of poorly maintained. 

Burning Bush in the lower right

Finally we went back to Seven Heaven Hotel. The bus ride back was weird, we were all sleep deprived and drifting in and out of consciousness the whole trip and at certain points the wind blowing in our windows was burning hot- weird as it sounds i was ready to go back to the coolness of Cairo. Normally that statement would be oxymoronic. We got back and some of us took a nap after lunch but my Dahab roommate Kirsten and I went on a quest for postcards. Which we found. We went and got juice at our favorite juice cafe and wrote post cards for a while before we took a dip in the sea. We dressed up a little and walked around Dahab meeting up with various people from our group who had woken up. Finally we had dinner at this place where we got a crazy good deal, we just kind of stumbled upon this guy trying to lure us into his restaurant and I wasn't even trying to play hard to get I was just explaining that we were going to peruse all the restaurants and see where we wanted to go most but he gave us free appetizers (an egyptian mezza), half price main dishes, free fruit for dessert, and free bedouin tea after it all. We made out like bandits. 

The next morning we hopped on the 9AM bus back to Cairo and home sweet home our dorm on Zamalek. 

The next day was school and then after we went to the Marriott with our friend Mary to celebrate her birthday which was the previous day. We didn't know where to find chocolate cake other than the western oasis that is the Marriott of Zamalek. We didn't really fit in here- it's super expensive and famous and classy and I was wearing a thriftstore homemade skirt and a vneck but the cake was delicious. Then we hopped on a felluca boat to celebrate our new friend Tim's birthday from two days before and ate falafels and shawarma. We made some Egyptian friends! They are very nice guys who also go to AUC and I hope we can hang out with them more this year. 

Today is Tuesday which is the best day of the week in my opinion, no class. Sooooo my friends and I got kushary for lunch and now two of us are dying our hair with henna :)

Mosques, Minarets, and Mayhem

Were Robert Frost to visit Cairo, he would have a hard time traveling around the city because there is no such thing as a road less traveled in Cairo. Today I learned that there are more people who live in Cairo than in New York City, which to me has always sounded like the biggest city in the world next to maybe Hong Kong or Beijing. Anyway, there are lots of people here.
Ok now Monday. Monday was my second day of school, first day of Monday/Thursday classes. I had class with Sophie again (the metallic shoes were back! I guess they make everyday special :) )  then I had Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt. This class felt like a first date- I was so so excited but my teacher is a force to be reckoned with. She is soooo smart and will be extremely tough. Word on the street is that my professor has been on either the history channel or National Geographic or something several time, she's a pretty smart cookie. Here is a link to some info on her: Dr. Salima Ikram
I'm very excited about her class but I'm worried about how tough it will be. Next class was Creative Writing (which I recently got approved for some ND credit!). My professor is actually 3 professors- it will be a creative writing lab and the teaching is split up between 3 teachers teaching 3 different types of creative writing (poetry, fiction, and film scripts). I'm excited about that class, it looks very enjoyable. Then I had classical arabic then went home.
The next day was a day off- we have every tuesday off here which will be excellent.  Many of us signed up to go on the AUC sponsored tour of Islamic Cairo. This was impressive. So many beautiful mosques in this part of the city, the area around Khan El Khalili (the market we went to a while back).

A Mosque

This was a lot of fun and we saw beautiful sights.

Decorations in the steets

Beautiful Glass Bottles

Later I did homework making flashcards for Arabic class. Then Clare, Ryne, and I met with Ahmed, a friend of Clare's father's co-worker who is my age. He was a lot of fun to meet and it was nice to get to talk with him. 

Today we had class which was tiresome. I had salad for lunch- its more expensive than I would like -$2.70 whereas typically i could get a lunch of a falafel sandwich for as cheap as $.50. However I really don't get to eat as many vegetables as I normally would like.

Then Keenan and I raced out of our last class, running through campus to make an earlier bus. Which we did :) 

Tonight, we are leaving Cairo to go to Dahab for 4 days. We're going to be there spending time on the beach and at some point we are going to climb Mt. Sinai and see St. Catherine's monastery, where the "flaming bush of fire" is. I'm excited!

We have all these days off because it is the long awaited end of Ramadan which ends with a holiday called Eid El Fetr!

Eid Mubarak!

1st day of school!

These past few days have not been too exciting, mostly relaxing, trying (but failing) to go to visit the pyramids (we showed up an hour after they closed, they have different hours for Ramadan), reading books,  smoking a little shisha (a national pastime), and hanging out.

The Pyramids from Afar

Smoking shisha with some of the gang at the Mariott

And of course.... today is.... was... the FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!!! One of my best friends' dad once told her that caps lock is the equivalent of shouting over the internet but i feel like it is completely warranted in this situation, especially since i have been waiting for this day for a long time :) We got up, showered, had a breakfast pow wow of pb and j (rose flavored jam, date jam, and fig jam- not exactly smuckers but it sure is cheap and interesting!) then got on the bus. 

It was fun seeing everyone on campus that actually goes to school there greeting all their friends that they hadn't seen all summer. I had class with Keenan and Anne (2 kids from ND) first. This was colloquial arabic and our teacher, Sophie, is the most adorable little old woman ever. She had on a white polka-dot skirt, a black polka-dot shirt, pearls, and fancy metallic party shoes. When I saw those shoes I knew I should have brought my purple sweater... and I knew that Professor Sophie was going to have an awesome day. 

After this class I went to my next one in the same building. There was a sweet little courtyard right next to my class that i can hang out and read in if Prof. Sophie's class gets out early. This next class was People and Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. This is where I made my first Egyptian friend! At least I hope she still wants to be friends on Wednesday. And I already forgot her name. But she liked how friendly i was! I had this class with David, another kid from ND and though our professor didn't show up, we got the syllabus and ample time to go pick up text books for our first 2 classes.  I also picked up a book that my roommate Clare recommended that is written by an American girl studying abroad for a year at AUC! Here is a link to amazon if you want to read more of it, I started it on the bus ride home and it's already good. The View from Garden City

Everyone buzzing about campus

Courtyard outside of my second classroom

After the bookstore we all grabbed lunch and all the food places were open (finally) and we got to have our first Koushary of the year! Koushary is delicious, I am planning on doing a whole blog post here soon about food (of course) so I'll tell you more about that later).

Lunch time!
(Tyler, Ryne, Clare, Carly, and David)

Koushary with mystery sauces

I had a break next between lunch and my next class so I finished a book i was reading yesterday that was edited or translated by someone in the AUC English department. This book was interesting and sad and I didn't really understand it at the end but it was nice. It was called The Tent.

Then I had classical arabic class to which I got lost. The buildings here all have 2 names and unfortunately the names on our campus maps and on the buildings are not the same as the ones on our schedules. Also, all the buildings have nice maps of the floor plans but don't have a "you are here" dot so they are kind of useless unless you happen to have a compass with you or something. But classical arabic should be fun/challenging/difficult not to mix up with colloquial. Also, the professor looks the way i would imagine Cleopatra would look, without the triangular hair.

So that was my day and in an hour my dorm is having a welcome back to school event of some sort, hopefully with free dinner and then all of the girls we know we are inviting to our friend Anne's room cause she has a beautiful big balcony and we are going to have a juice party. Where we drink juice and talk and listen to music. And look over Cairo :)

Boating, Twirling, and Riding

The night after Khan El- Khalili many of the people I have been hanging out with went on the AUC organized event "Iftar on the Nile." This was pretty fun. There was a beautiful sunset on the nile, delicious food, a whirling dervish, and music by Amr Diab. After dinner, we went back up to the top of the boat to see the lights of cairo. The boat was lit up with strings of lights that reminded me of That boat scene from Charade.

Sunset on the Nile

Whirling Dervish

We went to class the next day and I finally have my ID and a student visa in the works. I have been learning some useful colloquial words that I can't wait to bust out. Also, I finally got stamps today! This has been quite a struggle trying to go to the post office. Later that night, my friends Joe, Ryne and I went horseback riding by the pyramids at night. This was the coolest thing we have done so far! Especially considering how the last time i went horseback riding it was in rural wisconsin. We rode through a small village and a graveyard up to a  big sand dune behind the pyramids, which were lit up by the pyramid sound and light show.  There was a light breeze and it was pretty quiet and mostly all I could hear was drifting sounds of muttered arabic and the jingling of my horse's harness.

It was pretty magical!