Early October

Hello!

This past weekend was a lot of fun. On Thursday David and I stayed late after school to watch Chasing Mummies with the Egyptology Club which was a good time. I really like Sabine, Dr. Ikram’s assistant, who is the head of the club. She’s German, dresses in all black (typically) and has some cool Egyptian tattoos and a great sense of humor. Her husband Matt also works at the university in the Technology Assistance department so we had no problems getting the show set up. It was a potluck and I had the first home cooked food since leaving the states.

Friday we went to a pool party in 6^th of October City, a suburb of Cairo. Our host’s name is Ragah, he’s a guy we have hung out with a couple times with our friend Tim and he goes to our school as well. He lives in a beautiful terra cotta colored mansion and has a perfect little swimming pool in the back, just big enough for lots of fun J. After the pool party we went to the Indian Restaurant I described in an earlier post. We went with or friends Tamer, Omar, Ahmed, and met some new friends named Gary and Dina. Omar had never been to an Indian Restaurant before and he thought the food was delicious. Clearly, the boy has good taste!

Saturday morning we got up and went to campus to do homework and go swimming in the beautiful campus swimming pool. We were supposed to be doing laps but I just swam and bobbed around enjoying the cool water. Saturday was very very hot. Apparently we are having a heat wave, which I personally could do without.

Sunday and Monday pretty uneventfully except for the fact that most of my friends here left on Monday night to go on a trip to Luxor and Aswan.

Tuesday Clare and I went and got some bagels at Munch & Bagel and went to the clothes store because some of my clothes got ruined in the laundry and Clare wanted a light jacket to go over some sleeveless shirts she brought. I got 2 shirts for 8 dollars a piece. I was pretty happy. We went to our favorite Café Noir to do homework for a bit then I had to return to the room to get ready for a field trip to the Cairo Museum!

Obviously this field trip was for my Egyptian Art and Architecture course. Unfortunately, there were huge crowds at the museum and it was hard to hear our professor and sometimes see, as she is a little on the short side. Afterwards I wandered around the museum a bit then walked back to my dorm. This was kind of an adventure, cause I had only done that walk one other time, which was the first day I was in the country. Three things happened that gave me a little boost of confidance: I successfully crossed two 6-lane highways in Cairo during heavy traffic (successful here means I didn’t die), got a little lost but asked for directions in Arabic (I understood it too, since I came out at the right place!), and I met up with Clare at a main thoroughfare on the island, 26^th of July Street.

Clare and I got some fresh juice- this was probably highly unsanitary because the man who served us poured already squeezed juice from old water bottles into glass cups that may or may not have been washed with clean water. Oh well! The juice was delicious- I had guava juice and Clare had melon. Next we got some falafels next door but they were the worst falafels ever. We kept walking and bought some salty nuts from a street vender who in hind sight we probably shouldn’t have bought anything from since immediately prior to our purchase she was sweeping the dirty street with a dirty broom. However, the nuts were excellent, if a tad on the salty side. There was a fruit seller on the next block so we went there and I got a big pear and a beautiful pomegranate for only $2.40.  Later that night we (Clare, Jessie, Brent, Ryne and I) went to Goal, a shisha bar really close to our dorm and met up with Clare’s German friend Max who lives in Maadi. We had a lot of fun just laughing and visiting.

Wednesday, Clare left early for an RA retreat and at 12 I met up with Ben and Ryne in order to go to the Giza zoo. When we got there, they wanted to charge us 20 L.E. instead of the 2 L.E. that Egyptians pay and since it is ranked one of the ten worst zoos in the world (I guess they have dogs as one of the exibits?), we decided to leave. We wandered around for a while, saw the Cairo University Campus from a far, then decided to take a cab to Khan el Khalili.

Cairo University Campus

In Khan, we got really lost as I tried to take the guys back to the place where we got Sahlab with Tamer and the gang after the pyramids. 

One of the many entrances to Khan el Khalili

However, I did manage to purchase what I was hoping was a quarter kilo of dates but turned out to be a lot. I don’t know much about weight but I think there are way more than a quarter kilo despite my best attempts to use different variations of the Arabic word for four and what I assumed was fourth to explain what I wanted.

Dates!

Eventually, after an hour or so we ended up at the Sahlab place, a little tucked away place in the inside of a building- it reminds me of the Old City of Jerusalem, one of my very favorite places.

Ryne and Ben

Thursday I had class again, only two however. Afterwards, I met up with Ryne and Ben and we had dinner at Pizza Hut. Along the way we bumped into our friend Jessie who invited us to a Bedouin wedding today, which is very exciting, we are all going. All we know is that we were told to bring cameras, so hopefully I’ll have some better pictures for my next post!