Jun 08 2011
Leave a comment
Egypt, Two minute read

Transportation Nation!

Since my post yesterday on crossing the street was such a hoot, I decided to do another quick postie-wostie on how I get to school everyday. Just imagine if instead I were writing about how I got to school everyday at  Boston University and you’ll see how banal this is. And yet I continue.

Roomies and I take the Metro to school…it’s about a ten minute walk from our apartment and in the trek, we walk up a street in which 90 percent of our fellow pedestrians are going the other direction, so if feels a bit like we are the proverbial salmon heading up the proverbial stream. We go down the stairs into the metro (Doqqi stop), which is by all accounts incredibly clean and efficient and big and well decorated. After purchasing a ticket, we head through the (hopefully correct) turnstiles and down the stairs. I love the tiling on the side of the walls down in the metro…the designs are big rounded shapes in pastel colors and so the place feels vaguely like a videogame, a nursery, or a knick knack shop.

Here’s where it differs slightly from Amreeka: if I’m with my g-friends, then we seek out the place to stand which will grant us entry to the women’s only car. There’s a sign above the platform that says “Women” and it has a picture of someone wearing a dress, so we go there, obviously. The word for women in Arabic (one of them) is Seyidat, and every time we enter I think to myself, chuckling: “Where’s my seyidat at?” After only a short wait (so efficient! 80 times better than Boston) we push our way onto the car and enter an atmosphere not unlike a sauna. Everyone else is sweating as well, so the smell is particularly lovely and only enhanced by the additional vapor of various perfumes.

We get off 2 stops later right at Tahrir Square. There are about 20 possible ways to exit the metro, but only one of them is the appropriate one for the university. So far we’ve found it one time, and that was yesterday. We might end up in Sudan tomorrow if we’re not careful.

I look forward one day to writing something of meaning, about Egyptian politics, society, religion, culture, etc. Until that day comes, you’ll have to put up with my ramblings: I bought some nuts today—1.5 pounds for about 4 bucks. Electronic music festival tomorrow. I’m speaking only Arabic with fellow fellows and it’s  little strange and a little hard. At least I have my blog.

Tagged , , , ,
Jun 07 2011
2 Comments
Anecdotes, Modern Life, Two minute read

This is how we cross the street

Crosswalks exist in Cairo. I have seen the lines painted on the ground in crosswalk shape and  a sign indicating that the area was appropriated for pedestrians to cross the street. The electric signs are a bit ominous, however, since the green figure moving across the triangle looks like he is sprinting frantically.

No one uses these crosswalks. Most of the time they don’t exist, especially at major intersections.

Allow me to paint you a picture: it’s 8:30 in the morning and you need to cross a busy street lined with Cairo life: shops, kiosks, carts, and people. It’s already hot outside and you’ve begun sweating. You can see your destination through the polluted haze on the other side of the road, and you know that you must take your life into your hands before you reach it. You approach the highway. Cars, motorbikes, and busses zoom past you. If you’re lucky, there is another poor soul taking the same route; strength lies in numbers. Too often, however, you must go it alone. The cars will not stop of their own initiative, and the only traffic light you’ve seen in Cairo was broken. You see a gap…someone had to turn. You rush forward through the first “lane.”  Suddenly you’re trapped in the middle of the street, vehicles whirling around you. Another gap…you hurry to the safety of the median and forget to look to see if there are cars coming from the other direction. Out into the street you step with over-confidence and notice row of three cars rushing towards you, but one of them quickly slows down to let you by. You give them a deft wave of the hand as if to say, “That’s right. You best slow down.” Suddenly you’re almost hit by a motorbike that came out of nowhere…your hair swooshes in the air from its draft and you’ve lost your breath and need a new pair of pants.

And that’s how you cross the street. Is it dangerous, yes. Is it fun, sometimes. It helps if you scream silently to yourself. I don’t think the cars will actually hit anyone, but traffic statistics tell me otherwise.

Towards the end of the year, I want to start a competition to see who can get the fastest car to stop for them. There will be no surviving losers.

Tagged , , , ,
Jun 06 2011
Leave a comment
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.

Tagged , , , ,
Jun 05 2011
Leave a comment
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.

Tagged , , , , ,
Jun 04 2011
2 Comments
Best blog posts, Humorous, Lists, Modern Life, One minute read

Me no workie well in coffee shop

My life has recently consisted largely of spending time in Cilantro, an upscale coffee shop/café/place to get wi-fi. Despite the large number of pounds I have spent here, I feel my time has not been well served for the following reasons, in addition to the basic fact that I don’t work well in coffee shops.

1. I order a latte and get hopped up on caffeine which makes me jittery, nervous, paranoid, and prone to distraction.

2. I am surrounded by people that I want to stare at and/or talk to.

3. There is a window that I want to stare at.

4. Cars are honking and the wind is blowing and these things are distracting

5. I drink my latte too quickly and then it feels like I’ve done everything I want to do, resulting in restlessness and procrastination of everything I’ve remembered I have to do

6. I forget to check my to-do list because I’m distracted.

7. I feel continually underdressed. I will never fit in clothing-wise anywhere except for gas stations in the south or christian potlucks hosted at apartments.

8. I go with people I know and have conversations with them. After each conversation I’ve completely forgotten what I was doing, where I am, and what my name is.

9. I feel guilty because I’m not speaking Arabic/doing anything with Arabic. The weight of the guilt makes it impossible to get anything done.

10. The internet doesn’t work.

A good part of coming here is partaking in the wisdom of previous Cilantro customers, some of which is written on the wall in faux-graffiti style. One lovely patron said the following gem: Sometimes you love someone somewhere in sometime; which you can’t do anything 2 stop it….but it exists.

But what do you do if that person is not “real?” Or if he’s Conan O’Brien? I NEED TO KNOW MORE!

Tagged , , , ,
← Older posts
Newer posts →
Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started