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.
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.
posted by Dana at 5:23 PM
2 Comments:
can you refer to this other clone katie as katie jr please? or perhaps "cairo" katie? or just regularly spell her name wrong like, katy or perhaps even caty or like catey? thanks that would be super.
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