an update

It rained on Monday!! Just a light drizzle at most, but still! It was absolutely wonderful. It rains for about five days out of the year here, and I got to experience one of them. My Fusha (modern standard Arabic) grammer teacher, Inas, said that people in Egypt all start to pray when it rains. It's like a direct link to God opening up, so this is the time to ask God for whatever it is you want.

Things are definitely setting into a routine here. I wake up early, go to class, come home, take a nap, study, go to sleep. Some days, if I don't have too much work, I'll go downtown or to Rehab for shisha and mint tea. Over the weekends I spend as little time on campus as possible, usually in shisha cafes downtown. Some friends introduced me to a great little place that has Stella (the Egyptian beer) for only 10 LE ($1 = 5.5 LE). At first glance, it looks like someplace that would be frequented only by gruff old Egyptian men. It's smoky and crowded, the lights are a little too bright, and the occasional chess board is set up in a corner. It took me a moment upon first entering to realize that next to the older Egyptian men trying to watch a soccer game were tons of international AUC students, mostly Americans living in the Zamalek dorms. Ah, cheap beer bringing people together. It's beautiful.

After the shock of how much I spent on food in September, I'm slowly figuring out how to lower my food costs. There's a place called El-Omda on campus that has pita sandwiches and koshary. Koshary is pasta and lentils with tomato sauce and some sort of dried onions or something on top, and it only costs 7 LE. The pita sandwiches you can get with falafel or ful (beans) for 3 LE, or my favorite, the magnum, which is falafel, ful, boiled eggs, french fries and lettuce stuffed into a pita pocket. It is so good and so filling, and only costs 6 LE. These are much better prices than the 25 LE I was spending on pizza from Tabasco or the 20 LE I would spend at McDonalds. I've also been stocking up on Cup of Noodles from the Quick 24 on campus. I'm still looking forward to my off-campus apartment. In just one month's time I will be able to cook for myself!

Not much else is new. I have my first midterm exam tomorrow for my Arabic media class. I like my media class because I'm reading news articles in Arabic, which makes me feel like the vocabulary is useful and relevant in understanding what's going on in the world. I can begin to have intelligent conversations in Arabic and move beyond talking about myself, my family, and the weather. It's strange to hear my classmates worry about what grade they'll get on the exam. I forget that most students in the ALI program are also students elsewhere, and that their home institutions have things like grades and GPAs that students are supposed to care about. Personally, I want to do well on this midterm in order to judge my own personal progress in the class and to see how much of the material is actually staying with me. But that's just me. Grades aren't something that mean a whole lot to me.

This weekend! Ein Sukhna (the Hot Eye) by the Red Sea to visit Sherif. Also, Halloween parties in the desert? We shall see!

Next weekend! Beyonce by the Red Sea!