Woke up, got out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, i noticed i was late. . .
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
--The Beatles, and my life in general
So many of my most recent entries lately have been about traveling and sightseeing, so I decided to bring the Third and Final Continent back to earth as I also bring it up to date. It’s been a really tough week here, because midterm exams in any country are simply an enormous pain in my academic bum. I had a midterm on Monday for my Modern Movements class in the form of the class dramatization of “The Trial of Sayyid Qutb.” Sayyid Qutb is one of the major thinkers behind Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which I don’t have the time, the space or the knowledge to explain satisfactorily myself. It’s hard to find a balanced report, but I’ll just refer you to Wikipedia for the bare bones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Muslim_Brotherhood_in_EgyptI spent most of the weekend preparing for that and writing a paper for my literature class, which
involved several late nights, which, combined with 8 AM class resulted in some serious exhaustion, but I lived. It can only make me stronger, right?
Anyway, on Wednesday April 2nd, I tried to take pictures of my everyday activities, and I’ll give you a brief narration of one of my days of school, so you know a little about Egypt beyond traveling and tourism. I wake up at about 7:00 every morning, brush my teeth, wash my face, throw on clothes, check my e-mail and run downstairs to catch the University-provided shuttle by 7:30 that goes between my dorm in Zamalek and the campus in downtown Cairo, close to the main square Midan Tahrir. This involves crossing half of the Nile on any given day, which is really cool even if we start to take it for granted after a while. Based on how much Cairo traffic there is and how aggressive our driver is at any given time, it can take anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes.
On this particular day, coffee is a must. It’s instant coffee produced in bulk and absolutely
terrible, but it costs 1.25 pounds and is a means to an end, with my primary end being staying awake enough in class to learn Arabic. The weather was gorgeous on this particular morning, so I sat in the sun, drank my coffee and then climbed 4 flights of stairs to Arabic, part 1. We did 1 hour and 20 minutes of grammar, vocabulary, culture, and self-awakening exercises on my part. Then, at 9:20, we picked up and move to a different classroom on a different campus known as Greek Campus (AUC has 3 separate campuses within a couple blocks of each other. An hour and a half
more of Arabic, and then we were done, finally, at 11 AM. Then I had to finish a novel before my 12 PM class, so I camped out on “the Plat,” a big platform on Greek Campus that is kind of the “see and be seen” locale of campus. I spent my free hour finishing the book (Wild Thorns, an excellent Palestinian novel that I have to write a presentation for this weekend), grabbed a 60-piaster falafel sandwich at the "Magic Window," recognized by its blue and yellow tiling, and then moved to campus #3, known as Falaki for
my Gender and Arabic Lit in Translation class. There are only about 12 of us in the class, and the discussions are usually quite intense and stimulating, since we’re dealing with controversial and important issues: men, women, colonialism, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and on top of that, most of our authors are some combination of feminists, Marxists, radical thinkers, nationalists and other random ideologies. We had a good discussion, and by this point I was pretty hungry.
I decided to go on an all-out favorite Egyptian foods binge, so I started with a shawarma sandwich from a take-out restaurant across from Greek
campus. Then I stopped by the fateer place and grabbed some Fateer b’asl, or with honey for a glorious 75 piasters, and then, realizing I had some small change in my pocket, I snagged some Boreos, my other favorite Egyptian snack food. They’re essentially fake Oreos, except a small pack is 50 piasters, so much cheaper and absolutely delicious. And then I sat out in the sun with my friend Kyle by AUC’s lone fountain, chatting and homeworking for the hour and a half until my last class of the day, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, or ‘Ammiya.
‘Ammiya is kind of a drag because it’s the last class in a long day, because
it’s the 4th of Arabic language in one day, but on the other hand it’s a lot of fun because 1) I am actually able to communicate with real people on the street thanks to the class 2) ‘Ammiya, unlike formal Arabic, is taught a lot more like a 6th grade Spanish class, with games and role-playing and other stuff that makes the late-afternoon class a lot more bearable than it otherwise might be. My professor is a very enthusiastic young Egyptian woman named Fatima, and we’re all rather fond of her. I think the lesson was reading restaurant menus and talking about names of places, so it was quite fun. Not to mention, so many of the words are borrowed from English, that it’s not too big of a deal to learn words like “siinima” and “muul,” (guess those, please, min
fadliku) although “mustashfa” and “mathaf” are a little trickier (hospital and museum for any of you following along at home).
After ‘Ammiya I get the 4:30 bus home to Zamalek, come back and do homework for a while. Then a friend of mine is in the hospital with a stomach bug, so we went to visit her. I took Bad Bat the Bedouin Benguin to keep her company, and I think he was a hit Then it was back to the dorm (the hospital is right across the river in the up-and-coming neighborhood of Mohandiseen, so it’s not a long haul) to do more homework and get my life together for the next day, the last day of a very long week!!! Here’s to the weekend.
Thanks for skimming, more exciting new soon. There's going to be a general strike tomorrow!
Laura
Main Campus:
Greek Campus, and the road I cross daily to get there (and frequently almost get hit)
Falaki Campus
