Transitioning

Now that I’ve been here a week, of the newness has worn off, and we’ve been busier with the logistics taking care of enrolling in a new university, in a new country. You know, visas, classes, helping later arriving-students with classes and logistics, shopping for necessary and not-so-necessary items at Zamalek’s many supermarkets, actually preparing to live here instead of just playing tourist indefinitely. Also, there is a minor issue where we can’t get student visas until AUC realizes that ND has paid our tuition, but hopefully after some angry e-mails that will get worked out before we get deported.
AUC is a huge bureaucracy, which requires, primarily, patience and persuasiveness/persistence, and if you don’t have either or both, you just end up frustrated, when things usually do end up working out. ND team Kairo is so grateful we showed up like 5 days earlier than everyone else, since getting into classes, getting phones and other big things were 10x simpler. It’s only been a week, but it feels like 2 or 3. In a good way.

First of all, the weather. Saturday we had nothing to do and kind of wanted to get out, but I woke up and it was POURING. Not surprisingly, this city doesn’t know how to handle rain and when you combine this with rough/aging/worn-out pavement, this means that the puddles were really deep mini-rivers/lakes on the sidewalks, the streets and everywhere in between. The end of January and February are rainy season in the desert. Delicious. There were guys out there sweeping the water trying to get it to drain, to little avail. Check out pictures which were taken 1-2 days later of a puddle near AUC. And it’s still there. Currently (Tuesday) the city has gotten kinda chilly and very dusty. Yuck, but better than South Bend.

On Sunday we ended up going to a museum like 6 blocks from Campus. It was built in a former palace for the Egyptian Royal family, and very conscientiously Western in its design, almost like a tropical Versailles plus some Roman-esque pavilions. It was pretty. The museum itself was a museum of weaponry, meaning lots of sharp and shiny objects which got old after a while. It was rather surprising to find suits of armor in downtown Cairo, and there was a “penknife” approximately the size and shape of a brick with 96 different tools. The rest of the museum was kind of like a presidential library for Mubarak, with lots of portraits, and then all the diplomatic gifts given to him. It was quite a work of homage. The security was super-tight, since there are still state rooms under serious security, but when we tell the soldiers we’re American they are more inclined to treat us well. As strange and scary as it is, I’m learning that that’s how Egypt works. Baksheesh and an American passport/accent work wonders.

Sunday Night I went to mass with a couple other ND students at a church around the corner. It was in English, and the service itself wasn’t spectacular, but it was really cool, in that it was the most “catholic” church I’ve been to in terms of the nationalities represented. Also, the lady across the aisle form me looked just like Condi Rice. I will definitely go to church at 8:30 AM in Arabic sometime, just to see what it’s like. Then a couple Egyptian girls invited us to the movie theatre to go see Atonement. The strangest thing about it was, except for the Arabic and French subtitles, it was so easy to forget I was in Egypt at all. A movie theatre in a shopping mall was so generically American, but all along we were next to the Nile, which is just so ancient, historic, whatever Alas, welcome to the world. And then we almost got run over by a bus, making MEAN GIRLS all the less amusing. If I can accomplish anything by this blog, it will be getting my readers to understand the insanity of Cairo traffic, because it might very well be the biggest difference between this city and all the other ones I’ve been too.

Some Egyptian students have come back already, and I’ve had some really great conversations about politics, cultural differences, aspirations, and some about. Also we talk about chocolate and accessories, so we’ve covered most essential matters The girls all want to know if we expected tents and camels, so we talk about exaggerations, stereotypes, religion, terrorism and the like. I like to ask them in return if they had the impression that there is poverty in America, and it often comes as a surprise that there is. Yes, the degrees of poverty are different, but the images sent by a constant stream of sitcoms (I’ve thus far seen Frasier, Just Shoot Me and My Name is Earl, plus ads for Desperate Housewives) are far from accurate about the chinks in the American dream. I love our conversations, so I need to be careful not to spend too much time with the other Americans and forget why I was here in the first place: to study and to make really cool friends across all kinds of barriers that will really challenge me.

Salaam,
Laura