bechamel sauce makes life better

i just ate a crepe here at the french cultural center with ham, cheese, mushrooms, and bechamel. so delicious. katie and i tried to go down to this area near our house over by the nearest metro stop that she saw has a few restaurants (there really aren't very many restaurants in our neighborhood, so far we've found just one koshari place) to eat lunch about two hours ago, but when we got there it was right during the friday prayer and there was a huge crowd outside listening because i think there was a mosque particularly close by (which doesn't mean much because mosques are always close by). but it doesn't matter because the crepe was delicious.

before people stop reading because they have to scroll down, i wanted to tell everyone that i did end up getting a webshots account to upload photos to at http://community.webshots.com/user/chidiaqian. i'm just going to throw all of my photos up on there, even the ones that suck or are unnecessary, so it might not be the most convenient thing ever, but i'll put up direct links to the good photos in my blog so that might make it easier. sorry, the internet is just slow here and blogger is not the best thing in the entire world for uploading photos. the good thing though is that apparently webshots also lets you upload videos, so when i have time to sit down here for four hours waiting for the video to finish loading, it can put that up too. right now i don't have all the photos up there, but i have started loading them and will do more and more each time i come downstairs, it just takes forever.

homework is trying to kill me, so i'm avoiding it, but i need to stop soon because there really is a lot of it.

last night after classes i just laid around and took a nap, which was wonderful and so necessary, then we headed out to this party at on of the other casa people's apartment. he lives downton, about a 20-25 minute walk from us, about 5 or 10 minutes past auc, so it was a nice little walk over there until we actually got on his street which was unbelievably crowded. we bought supercheap wine at drinkie's, which is the classily and aptly named liquor store chain here in egypt, for 37 pounds (about $7) and headed up to the party, which was really fun. on our way home though, almost as soon as we left the apartment, this guy started following us, which was really scary and i was kind of freaked out and about to hail a cab when all of a sudden this guy that we had met at the party who was in casa last year showed up next to katie. he wound up yelling at the guy in all of the great arabic swear words that he has picked up over the course of his year here, then walked us all the way home because turns out he lives really close by. so that was kind of great.

it was just really unsettling that even though i told that guy to stop following us he just didn't listen. people just don't pay attention when women say stop. we got really lucky that the other guy was there, but otherwise i guess we have learned that walking home super late at night (i mean it was like 2 am, probably it wasn't a good idea to walk home anyway but we didn't want to have to deal with a cab) is not really a viable option.

okay, time to go do homework now. party party.

barack hussein obama

first of all, there was an interesting (and long time coming) article in the new york times today:

Muslim Voters Detect a Snub From Obama

there also happened to show up on my google reader today (or probably several days ago, i haven't been keeping up with it since turns out i have a real life now) an article from the guardian about whether rumors about celebrities being gay still matter (i didn't read all of it but it's here: 'We're still not a very tolerant society'.

these are both such delicate issues but i don't really understand why it's so hard for people (especially like the obama campaign) to figure out how to deal with them. you just say "no, he's not muslim, but he respects islam just like he respects any other religion (or culture or race or ethnicity or nationality or whatever)." it's not difficult. i'm not sure if it's true, but i'm going go ahead and take keith ellison's word that muslims are "still waiting for him to say that there's nothing wrong with being a muslim, by the way."

i'm a little bit disturbed, actually, by the fact that some aide didn't allow the two muslim women wearing hijab to stand behind obama at a campaign rally in detroit. especially in detroit, where the muslim population is so large, i feel like you can't have truly representative diversity without including some muslims in the picture. it's not okay that all it takes is for obama to call the women and apologize to them - apologies like that are nothing but political tools. i know he can't oversee the selection of the people standing behind him at rallies, but i think that while he and his campaign do have to make a conscious effort to right the rumors about his being a muslim (because while there isn't anything wrong with being muslim, the fact is that he isn't one), they also need to make a conscious effort to show that they appreciate the support of muslims for their campaign.

my favorite part is that closing line about endorsing the candidate that muslims least want to win. maybe i shouldn't mention too often that i found that obama 08 sticker in the perfume shop here in cairo? although when i asked about it the guy didn't seem to have any idea what or who obama was.


okay, that's my two cents for the day, since i am now sitting the computer lab at auc and have a bit of a chance to use the internet before going home to do the massive amount of homework i have tonight.

but in other news, last night we had our new cleaning lady come to the apartment for the first time. she is amazing, her name is zeinab, and she's the sweetest lady ever. she is taking care of her young son plus the five children of a friend who died recently in a car accident. and i chatted with her for awhile, which was really fun and probably very good practice. she made sure to talk kind of slowly so i could actually understand her.

katie and i also had one other small linguistic victory yesterday. we have this bawwab (doorman) kind of guy near our building who we can never understand because he always talks really fast and has a bit of a speech impediment. yesterday as we were walking home we stopped at a little shop to buy diet cokes (obvi) and as i was paying this random guy started talking to katie so we just told him we had to go and left, but he followed us almost all the way to our apartment (it was only about a block away). finally he tried to talk to us again and he was like oh maybe we can be friends now (now that i've just met you randomly once and kind of stalked you all the way home!), but we were like no, we have an appointment, goodbye, and walked away. but later as we were leaving we saw the bawwab and he was like "oh that guy who was talking to you before, you don't know him right? because he was standing around here waiting for you for awhile, but i told him to go away and leave you alone." now, it's rather an important victory that we had someone there who kind of was watching out for us, but i'm most excited about the fact that we actually understood everything he said!

i'm a little bit sick today, but not too bad. i don't think i've eaten anything off color or even out of the ordinary, last night for dinner we had koshari at this place really close to our house that i've eaten at several times and never gotten sick. so today for lunch i took it easy and just had some rice pudding. delicious.

okay, that's all for now, time to attack the homework. this week we are reading a bunch of articles about the hijab in egypt. it's a lot of reading, but at least i actually care what it says.

Okay, here we go, blog post number 2! I have been here in cairo for about three weeks now, so I’m thinking that’s not a super great average and I better work on it.

But anyway I don’t remember what I actually talked about last time, but I think it was mostly apartment and neighborhood stuff. Today I took a video of the apartment. It includes some really intelligent narration by me and a Disney character cameo, so everyone should watch.



Also, here are some pictures of the apartment, in case the video doesn’t work (which it didn't but hopefully I'll be able to add it later).

Lies. It's taking forever to load the damn pictures because this internet is kind of slow here but I'm just going to post this as-is even with the captioniness and then try to edit it later to add the pictures. Sorry!


The top picture is a view of the apartment from the front door, then the second is just the living room. In the first one, you can see the little dining room table and a couch in the foreground, and then we have a living room and something like an office with a ginormous desk that would be more useful if I didn’t like studying on my bed so much. Also, the window has a pretty cool view of the neighborhood which you can see in the video.


These two are pictures of my room, the first obviously featuring my bed and the lovely collection of photographs of people from home that I put up on my wall. The second just shows the rest of my room with the armoir/closet (with shelves!).

And here is a picture of the view from the little balcony off of my room (both bedrooms in the apartment have balconies):


Okay, so the concludes most of the tour of my apartment, but I swear the video is way better. Obviously.

Today we had “mishwar wa dardasha” which basically just means that we go somewhere with some Egyptians from the university and have a little chat just to practice Arabic. We went to this restaurant in a neighborhood pretty close my apartment called Sayyeda Zeinab with cartoon characters painted all over the walls, God only knows why. And we ate ful (pronounced like fool, not foul), which is basically this bean stuff that I’m not a huge fan of, and taamiya, which is like falafel only it’s made out of the same beans as ful instead of chick peas. I think ful is made out of fava beans or something but I’m really not sure, maybe someone knows better than I do? The taamiya was really delicious though, that was exciting. The depressing thing is that I’m a little afraid to eat stuff like fresh tomatoes in restaurants, especially in places like that that mostly cater to actual Egyptians rather than foreigners, because they might just not be washed properly or something, but the tomatoes looked so good so it was a struggle. Here is a picture of the whole group in the most beautifully and tastefully decorated restaurant in all of Cairo:


The guy in the yellow is Joseph, and then going clockwise from there we have Lisa, Henry, Alyssa, Tim A. (there are three Tims in the program, it’s not at all confusing), Sameh (one of our Egyptian guide type people), Mariam (with her head turned away, she’s the other Egyptian), Dimitry, and Ramon (Dimitry and Ramon are from U of M too).

After going to the restaurant we wanted to walk back to the Sayyeda Zeinab metro stop but turns out we got a little lost and wound up at Saad Zaghloul, which is one metro stop closer to AUC than Sayyeda Zeinab and happens to be the metro stop closest to my apartment (my apartment is between Sayyeda Zeinab and Saad Zaghloul, the neighborhood is called Mounira). So I saved the 1 pound (18 cents ish) it would have cost me to take the metro, which translates into half a diet coke for me!

Other than going to the restaurant today, this weekend has been pretty uneventful. I have massive amounts of homework – we had to read three short stories by Baha Tahir (I don’t know how to spell the name in English) which added up to about 40 pages, which is super intense – so I didn’t really get to go out and do anything much. On Thursday night Katie and I did go to our friend Tim’s (different Tim from the one in the picture, although he does live with Henry and Joseph from the picture) apartment in Doqqi to watch the Top Chef season finale online, which turned into a whole mess because we couldn’t get it to download, but eventually we watched and got SUPER EXCITED but I won’t spoil it if people care and haven’t watched it, although I guess it was on like a week ago now so if you haven’t watched it then you lose and you deserve to be spoiled. Also, Katie baked us a carrot cake, which we all had one piece of and it was delicious. Our oven doesn’t work in our apartment, so the baking was a bit of an Event as well. We also ordered Thai food online, but it was not even close to being like Sy Thai and I can’t wait to come home and eat Sy Thai.

Speaking of food, here is a picture of the first koshari I ever ate:



Since then there have been innumerable koshari experiences, some better than others. Koshari is pasta, rice, lentils, chick peas, little pieces of fried onion, and tomato sauce all thrown together in a bowl. It’s the most filling thing ever and is actually pretty delicious I think. I’m getting a little bit sick of Egyptian food though, already, which is probably not a good omen for the next 11 months of my life. It’s pretty much shawarma or koshari or taamiya every day for lunch which really gets a bit tiresome. The bad thing is that they don’t even put other stuff in their sandwiches (like in Lebanon if you ordered a shish tawook sandwich it would have pickles and tomatoes and garlic sauce and probably French fries in it in addition to the chicken, whereas here if you order shawarma it’s pretty much just shawarma with a little bit of peppers or onions or something mixed in, and then sauce and stuff is extra at most places I think), and unless you specifically ask (and pay two pounds more) they don’t put it on pita bread, instead they use these gross buns that remind me of Philly cheese steaks. I miss Bliss Street food like Zaatar w Zeit and that shawarma place and crepes and Bliss House… mmm fruit cup. I even almost miss the gross turkey sandwiches from that one place that stayed open.

Okay, other important items from life in Cairo! The most important thing is how ridiculous the traffic is here. Basically people just don’t stop in the street if someone wants to cross, which wouldn’t seem like such a huge problem until you realized that even when pedestrians should have the right of way (like if there is a stop light or something), they still don’t. Like people won’t stop when they’re turning onto another road until they are almost in that road, so there is no such thing as a crosswalk or a safe place to cross the street. You have to sort of develop the art of weaving through the traffic – an art which I have yet to perfect.

Last weekend I was in Alexandria and that was an even more intense adventure with the driving. First we had the first cab driver who ever asked us about religion (which I had been expecting to happen a lot sooner than it did). Tim was sitting in front and all of a sudden the guy was just like “so are you Muslim?” Tim said no, he was Christian, but he respects Islam, which I think is the generally acceptable answer to that question, because the guy responded with a nice little line about how it’s all the same god and people of the book blah blah blah. The driver also asked me, as has almost every other person here, whether I’m Egyptian. But this one, when I said I was Lebanese, asked what was up with Hizbullah! And I was like man, no one knows what’s up with Hizbullah, which I guess worked well too. Then the cab driver on the way back from dinner I swear to God was trying to kill us, I felt like he was going to run someone over along the corniche. The craziest thing about Alexandria was that it’s not just that drivers don’t stop to let pedestrians cross the street – they actually go faster so that they can beat the pedestrians to the spot. It’s a little magnoon.

One super exciting thing is that I did get the first Harry Potter in Arabic so now I am starting to work my way through the whole series in Arabic. I am mega dork. Even MORE exciting is that Tim had al-kitab part 3 (the Arabic textbook that most the Arabic programs in the US use, it comes in the three parts but at Michigan we only do the first two parts in the first three years then for the fourth year you do other readings) so I am now looking through that and there is lots of new stuff in there. I’m actually a little bit mad at Rammuny for stopping concentrating on grammar in fourth year Arabic at Michigan, I feel like I could be much better prepared than I am right now if we had done that instead of just doing random readings.

Tomorrow is going to be a very exciting day because Katie and I are getting a cleaning lady, which turns out is necessary and we can afford like crazy because living here is unbelievably cheap. Like so cheap that when a sandwich costs 6 pounds (a little over a dollar) I think it’s super expensive. So trying to figure plans out with her will be a bit of an adventure I suppose.

Okay, that is all for now, I have been writing this in Word on my computer because there is no internet in my apartment, so I will check and see what I wrote in my first post when I get downstairs to post this and maybe add some more.

the super late first cairo post

so i have been in cairo for two weeks now and have been promising a mass email/blog post pretty much every day since then but i guess it's time to actually do it now. i have now found an apartment, figured out out to grocery shop, come to understand the beauty of dry heat, been taken (slight) advantage of by a shop owner, been terribly lost and told "i love you" by a very strange egyptian man, started classes, been to alexandria, and (maybe) adopted a kitten. it's been eventful. i have not been to the pyramids.

looking for an apartment in cairo was actually not as difficult as i thought it was going to be before i got here. i went around with my roommate katie and a couple of guys, tim and michael, the first day after we got here just looking around, talking to doormen in a neighborhood close to the university. we wound up meeting a simsar, which is like a real estate agent only significantly more shady, who showed us a place in mounira, which is across qasr al-aini from garden city (for those of you who have been to cairo). it's right above the french cultural center, which means free internet and clean/edible salad and delicious crepes downstairs, and about a 10-15 minute walk from the university, which is nice. there's a metro stop close by, which makes it much easier to get places. the metro here is super nice and super cheap (1 pound per ride - the conversion rate is about 5.3 pounds/dollar, so that's less than 20 cents). it's way way cleaner than new york's subway, and there's an all-women car at least during the day. the only problem is that it stops running at midnight, but cabs are not expensive either. we took a cab back from our friends' place (in doqqi, which is on the other side of the nile) for about 7 or 8 pounds really late at night.

the apartment is pretty nice and i really like the neighborhood, but we are going to have to move in the fall because the university is moving way out of cairo. we're not sure where we're going to go yet but hopefully everything will be okay and it will be easy enough to find an apartment again.

the neighborhood around the apartment is pretty cool. we went grocery shopping, but there really aren't any western-style supermarkets in my neighborhood so that meant pretty much going to a bunch of different places to get different things. buying vegetables was kind of a huge adventure which ended in me buying about a kilo of onions, carrots, peppers, and garlic for less than 4 pounds. we went to this stand in the market on the street and practiced arabic and of course in the end the guy wanted to exchange phone numbers because that's how they do here in cairo. i said no, but it was a struggle because he was super cute. perhaps i will eat more vegetables this year.

okay, damn, my computer battery is now dying. i'm going to go finish some homework and then i'll write more and post it in the morning. (there's no internet in my apartment, so i just use the free internet down at the french cultural center.)