Hello! I hope everyone had a good Halloween and welcome to November! It has been an eventful couple of days, definitely. Thursday night the girls for the group I usually hang out with all went to a Halloween party on a yacht on the nile that our friends Omar and Gary had arranged. This was such a fun time and we all dressed as pirates. Unfortunately, a bunch of other people had the same idea but we all still looked fairly uniform in our Ali Baba pants.
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| The Girls |
The next morning, Clare, Ryne, Kirsten and I headed out on a weekend trip to the Black and White desert through AUC. We rode on a bus for four hours and then met up with our fleet of Land Cruisers and their drivers. Our driver (I was in a car with Kirsten, Clare, and another RA named Mahmoud) was named Ahmed and let me tell you, he was a pro driver.
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| Girls in the Back |
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| Ahmed the driver |
We had lunch in this really cool “springs” area where there was a little stream running through the building and everywhere outside was desert. Next we piled in the Land Cruisers and drove for a while through the Black Desert and into the White Desert. The Black desert, according to Ahmed the driver, is black due to a volcano that eruped approximately 17,000 years before present and the ash is what has turned the rocks on the surface of the sand so dark. The White Desert was underwater and that is why it looks the way it does I guess. Anyway, the White Desert is beautiful with all sorts of strange formations of rock- yet the rock there is the softest, most lovely stone that when you touch it, it feels like you have just rubbed baby power on your skin. At least I think so. We first saw the huge great big formations before driving to our campsite.
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| The White Desert |
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| Sunset over the White Desert |
Some of the formations looked like giant eggs from which could emerge either dinosaurs or aliens. It was pretty strange, but cool. Our campsite was actually in the midst of such strange formations. When we got there, the drivers all pitched together and parked the Land Cruisers in kind of a half-rectangle (the long way) and lined the inner part of it with a wall of pretty cloth with designs on it that are very typical to Egypt. Then they prepared a delicious dinner for us of rice, potatoes, chicken, and chopped up tomatoes and cucumbers. We listened to some of the drivers play traditional instruments and sing for a little bit after then Clare, Kirsten and I put some tiny mattresses together and had all our warm clothes on and huddled together under opened sleeping bags but were still kind of cold. It is easy to underestimate the chilliness of a desert night. We fell asleep under the stars and woke up with the light of dawn with the moon still above us.
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| A cold Morning |
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| Camp |
We had a little breakfast then packed up camp. We headed back through the White Desert and ended up at the Crystal Mountain- a little rock formation that had it been underwater 20 years longer (according to Ahmed the driver), all the crystals inside would have been diamonds. Next we went to The Black Mountain (creative name, huh?) in the Black Desert and climbed to the top and got a sweeping view of the Black Desert- very interesting.
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| The Black Desert |
After this hike, we returned to the place where we swapped from the bus to the Land Cruisers and did the opposite. We got lunch then started the long drive back. We were 20 minutes form Zamalek when our bus broke down- something with the fan belt. We waited for an hour for them to fix it and when they didn’t, we took a cab back to the dorm where we showered, had dinner, and went to bed.
Sunday was normal class, however, after school Clare and I rode in Max’s car to his apartment in Maadi so he could change and so we could assess his kitchen situation for future cooking endeavors. After that we took the Metro to Zamalek and went to Church at St. Joe’s- we thought mass was going to be in Italian but it was in French, which was an interesting twist. Then we went to Alex-Top, the favorite Koshary spot on Zamalek.
Monday was pretty basic and at night we went to a Halloween party at Tim’s apartment. This was a ton of fun- some costumes were as follows: A tourist (Clare), Billie Mays (Ryne), Notre Dame Students (Carly and Mary), A Doorman (David), A lion/cat (Hannah), And I was Alan from the Hangover.
We had a grand time.
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| Clare and I |
This morning (Tuesday) I went to campus in order to meet with my Arabic teacher (who didn’t show up, sad to say) , but ran into someone I hadn't seen in over 10 years, Merrit Kennedy, childhood friend who I knew in Jerusalem. It was fun to see her and we reminisced for a while before agreeing to get together perhaps this coming weekend.
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