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!