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.