Category Archives: Anecdotes

Jun 06 2011
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Anecdotes, Egypt, Modern Life, Two minute read

Post apocalyptic mall from the desert future

American University in Cairo: new campus

Classes start tomorrow. Thus ends my brief stint of living like a posh Cairene, going out to cafes all the time and wastin’ my stipend like I’m Cleopatra. I went to a place called Mosaic tonight and enjoyed a lovely grape sheesha with a plate of hummus on the side and hibiscus tea to drink. There was enough left over for lunch tomorrow. SHABAM.

My roommate and I got semi-lost on the way back from said cafe, but it wasn’t for too long and we got to see the other side of Doqqi: poorly-lit streets, slightly less well off neighborhoods, cats crawling on garbage piles, kids zooming by on scooters, clotheslines, dark stairwells…. Not too shabby.

We had our orientation out at the new campus of the American University in Cairo today, which is probably the most bizarre place in the world. First of all, it is surrounded by a sea of half built buildings in the desert, part of the “New Cairo” everyone is talking about (I think). The two workers I saw out there will be hard pressed to finish this century, but at least they’re a team: one to hand the bricks, and the other to carry.

AUC’s campus is also massive, most of it consisting of long marbled courtyards beneath gaudy eastern style arches. The campus was nearly empty except for us and the employees of random Western-style food outlets scattered in nooks of the eerie flat-faced buildings shimmering in the heat. The sound of the fountains and the wind in the gardens only accentuated the emptiness of the place. I got the feeling I was on a campus designed and implemented according to what the future might be like if everything was based on faux-eastern mall architecture right before there had been a huge climate shift. Spooky. Alternately, it felt like the campus had been discovered well preserved in some sort of dome in the middle of the desert as a relic of a by-gone era of aliens more advanced than us.

The ride out there took about an hour and 15 minutes both ways in over air conditioned buses outfitted with wifi so you can fulfill your dream of forgetting you are actually in Cairo/that you are one of the miserable beings who is in thrall to the commute to a campus designed for a world that does not exist and almost vomit inducing in the level of its opulence.

Thank goodness we’re at the Tahrir campus.

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Jun 05 2011
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Anecdotes, Egypt, Two minute read

Oh great, more introductions

this is an icebreaker

We had part one of our orientation today, and for the first time almost all of us assembled and together we

attempted to absorb the mundane details of  the CASA program. To my great dissatisfaction, there was no formal introduction process. I was like “Come on, throw us an icebreaker or two.” Just because the majority of the people in the program are over 25 doesn’t mean we can’t get to know each other through excessively awkward games where we have to sit on each others’ laps and crawl through each others’ arms while introducing ourselves. I’ll suggest some games for tomorrow. My current line, “So you study Arabic?” isn’t as great as it could be.

Because of the lack of icebreakers, we left at around 4:00 after an incoherently planned orientation still unknowing of who exactly we are going to be dealing with for the rest of the year. They could be ax murders and I wouldn’t have the chance to get to them first.

The lunch was okay…I enjoyed the sweets and drank some kind of white juice. It wasn’t milk, and it wasn’t coconut. It may have been pear…more on this later.

On a different note: when walking through the market, one often happens upon cages filled with rabbits or chickens or pigeons. These are not pets, they are dinner. Sometimes when I see a bunny I want to yell “WHY FLUFFY WHY!” But I restrain myself and instead think about what a scene it would be if I brought one of those home and slaughtered it as a gift for my roommates. It’s a religious thing.

More o-tation tomorrow, but at the new campus out in the middle of the desert, about an hour commute outside of Cairo depending on the traffic. Apparently there’s a pool party afterwards, but I’m not going to it unless Pizza Hut is catering.

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Jun 04 2011
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Egypt, Two minute read

At least we had the stuffed parrots

I’ll be honest. I’ve done nothing interesting for the past 48 hours, unless you count cooking dinner and going to a hotel bar interesting, in which case both you and I need to get out more.

The roomies and I made #lentilsoup last night and the tomatoes we used tasted like they came from the fields of heaven. It was like I had never tasted a tomato before. Every tomato will now turn to ash in my mouth as I remember the sweetness of the day my eyes were opened. But really, they were pretty good.

Afterwards, we went to the CASA fellow get together at the Happy City hotel rooftop lounge. They had done a fair job of wrapping the entire place in strands of lights, however, I only counted three that were actually functional. This slight fault was made up for by the strategically placed stuffed parrots hanging from the ceiling. There were also things that looked eerily similar to precious moments figurines, but alas, they were of a different make.

One of our critical mistakes of the evening was not eating the #lentilsoup we had made, since we thought there were going to be free appetizers which could easily turn into #freedinner. The free appetizers turned out to be a lone bowl of beans and so we simply drank dinner (beer)/starved until we got some late night Egyptian t-bell before going to bed. It was fun. We talked a little about jelly beans.

There will be more adventures later on, I think. I suggested going to the pyramids last night for an illicit after-curfew excursion but there was hesitation for some reason. I was like, “I’ll bring my saber so it’s not like safety will be an issue.” But there were no takers. And then I screamed, “No really, I have a freakin’ saber right here,” and I whipped it out of my purse but everyone got all weirded out. People can be strange.

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Jun 03 2011
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Anecdotes, Egypt, Two minute read

What’s that silver vat for?

The first grocery shopping trips in foreign lands are always mini-adventures, as are many otherwise ordinary activities. I wanted to get milk so I could make my Nescafe properly and savor its delicate taste every morning and tea time as I have for the past year. Half milk, half water, one teaspoon of Nescafe, and a packet of Splenda. Curses upon anyone who comes between me and my Nescafe reverie.

We went to a dairy place (I forgot the name for it in Arabic), a little store where one would purchase all milk, yogurt, egg, and cheese needs, and after we had gotten our dozen eggs and apricot jam, we asked for a kilo of milk as well. I was expecting one of those boxes of ultra-pasteurized milk that I remembered from my time in Morocco, but even as I was picturing them in my head, I turned around and a gigantic silver vat  had appeared in the center of the room out of nowhere.

I don’t know how I missed it beforehand or why I didn’t think about how odd it looked to me, but there it was, the veritable vat in the room, the china in the bull-closet. And then as I watched, a young man took a measuring cup and dunked his arm down into an opening in the vaguely pyramidical vat cover and out the cup came full of (fresh?) milk. He poured it into a bag, tied it up, tossed it into our shopping bag, and we were on our way.

Huh, I thought. That’s not what I was expecting.

Tonight we’re having a little get together with the other CASA fellows at Happy City hotel. I imagine it is staffed by muppets.

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Jun 02 2011
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Anecdotes, Egypt, Two minute read

The pajama-d strong lady

We finally moved out of the Mayfair hotel today, after eating our last delicious breakfast of bread and egg and cheese and coffee or tea and enjoying our last morsels of internet on the peaceful balcony amongst the trees (so we thought/hoped—more on this later. Cliffhanger!).

It was fairly simple for me to get out of my room….I just shoved my laptop into my backpack and neatly gathered my trash  into a plastic bag and that was that. For my future roommate Shawna, however, things were a bit more complicated since she’d not had the luxury of losing most of her luggage. She was burdened with a gigantic black bag that had originally been over packed by about 30 pounds, giving you a hint of its size, and a smaller bag that was probably filled with rocks.

However, we rose to the challenge of hauling these things down the stairs, down the sidewalk full of booby traps and curbs, and to the street in order to get a taxi,  accomplishing it with minimal complications and only the beginnings of major sweat stains.

The taxi we had hailed pulled over to the curb, breaking away from the street full of typical traffic, and out popped this bespectacled gentleman of perhaps sixty years. He hobbled around the car to the curb and took a look at the enormous black bag and realized it would not fit into his trunk (we understood this moment later on). It then appeared that he was indicating to the back seat of the car, which we knew wouldn’t fit the bag, and was also speaking to us in perfectly clear Egyptian Arabic, which we of course could not understand.

As we remained befuddled as to what he was trying to do, this sturdy Egyptian woman wearing an abaya (robe-like thing) over her pajamas strode over to us looking like she had just come out of her kitchen. Her face was friendly and familiar like a gingerbread house, and her eyes were all crinkly as she looked at us with a mixture of pity, mirth, and the desire to help naive foreign girls. She and the taxi driver stooped down, grasping and then heaving the suitcase onto the top of the car with the same ease as if she were kicking one of her kids away from the stove. I have a feeling she was actually held back by the help of the taxi driver.

Finally understanding what had transpired, I and Shawna thanked the pajama-d strong lady and our grandfather-like taxi driver profusely. She brushed it off lightly and walked away with a knowing smile. We got into the taxi, our lives changed forever.

I have been incredibly impressed by how genuinely friendly and helpful some people have been here in Egypt, and to complete strangers no less. I look forward to more of these experiences.

My baggage came today.

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