!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i'm going to beirut this weekend!!
yayyyyyy!!!

that's not all i have to say, but i'm pretty jazzed, and i just got my passport back and it's just so beautiful. my fusha (standard arabic) class got cancelled for tomorrow morning, so i'm having a little trouble bringing myself to reread the stories that we have for that class over the weekend, but i'll do it eventually, i swear i will.

and next weekend i will attempt to do homework while sandro and silvio scream at me and the mountains and the sea are RIGHT THERE! i am skipping next monday of classes because i couldn't get a reasonable flight that would get me back to cairo in time for them. i don't think my teacher will care, though; next weekend there is an official trip through the ALI to luxor/upper egypt and that trip doesn't get back until monday evening, so they must be expecting some people to be gone on monday anyway. so whatevs!

ohmygodi'msoexcited!!

IN other news, yesterday was my first actual tourist sojourn into areas of cairo other than tahrir/mounira/sayyida zeinab/doqqi, so that was a party. actually, i've done a lot of discovering this weekend, it's a good thing i didn't have too much homework.

of course thursday nigth was the sequoia party, so that was great, but i've already talked about that quite a bit. it was only the beginning of the ridiculous amount of money i've spent on food this weekend, though.

on friday night katie's friends from texas who are in alexandria for the summer doing the flagship program were in town (apparently texas has an institutional grant like the one that rammuny is trying to get for michigan which means that they get money from the boren people or whoever but they don't have to do any service). they went to the pyramids, which i am boycotting for the summer (so is katie, she did not go with them), and then called katie and invited her (and by extension me) along to dinner at an indian restaurant in mohandiseen. it was named something about kandahar or something, and was absolutely delicious and relatively inexpensive. i mean obviously any restaurant is way more expensive than regular cairo food because regular cairo food is expensive if it costs more than a dollar, and this place was in the 25-30 LE range per meal i think. so that was great and i'm looking forward to going back there.

then on saturday i did homework in the morning/afternoon, then went touristing with henry, henry's girlfriend liz, henry's mom, tim, and tim's friend skye. first five of us, minus henry's mom, piled into a taxi from auc to al-azhar, which is apparently illegal and so cost us an extra five pounds. we met henry's mom outside al-azhar and went inside, where we took off our shoes and the girls put on headscarves and abayas (giant potato sack robes that cover our luscious and irresistible bodies). it was really beautiful on both the outside and the inside. tim, ever sensitive to the cultural importance of ancient religious buildings, pointed out that the arrows painted on the outside of the minaret looked like dance dance revolution (he does not lie, pictures will be posted later). we had an awkward tour guide who mumbled in pretend english (for some reason people think they speak english when they really don't so they just say things like "mosque" over and over for no reason), and henry and tim, being guys and therefore Real People, negotiated with this random dude who apparently wanted a 15 pound baksheesh for no reason.

after that we went into the market and that was pretty awesome. i can't really explain it without the pictures, though, so i'll load the pictures later and stick a link in here. it was just really cool looking. we didn't buy anything really expect for a delcious mango popsicle. i still feel very uncomfortable just throwing trash on the ground, so skye and i both walked around holding the wrappers from the popsicle for like an hour. finally i gave in and just dropped it on the ground, and then literally five steps later found a dumpster. i hate the environment way less here, but i think that's just because i feel so bad for it. miskeen.

speaking of miskeen, the damn cat is still sick. she just cries and cries all day and neither katie nor i knows what to do about it. it's a problem and she makes me really sad.

anyway, more about yesterday. after walking around the market for awhile and seeing cool stuff that i will post photos of later, we decided to take a cab to the al-azhar gardens to watch the sunset. i also took lots of photos of that. the gardens were absolutely beautiful, and it was wonderful just to get away from the crazy noise and everything outside. i want to go back there once a week just to get a chance to calm down for awhile. the gardens used to be a giant trash dump, and then apparently they (i don't know who they is) found this old wall around the trash dump that had been build during the abbasid period or something? i don't know, i think that's what henry said. so they turned the dump into this park. and so it's really high up and you can see a pretty amazing view of the entire city while sitting on top of this former trash dump. cairo is all minarets and satellite dishes. we could see all the way to cairo tower in zamalek, which is really far away from where we were. and when the sun set all of the calls to prayer started going off at once, but from the gardens it was sort of peaceful and nice instead of just another loud thing happening, which is what it feels like on the streets in the city.

after that (yeah, seriously, busy day), i went home and katie and i went online for awhile and i got to talk to dany and jeddo on skype (yay!) and planned my beirut trip for this weekend (triple yay!). then we were going to order food on otlob.com (which is like eatblue or whatever, only for cairo), but we wound up finding out that there is this lebanese restaurant called taboula in garden city pretty close to our house, and it didn't look too expensive, so we decided to just go there. it was sooo delicious, i got an enormous order of chicken fatteh (which is basically rice and bread and pine nuts and chicken and garlic and yogurt all kind of piled on top of each other) which i ate half of last night and half of this morning for breakfast (breakfast food is stupid). turns out also though that when you think about how much a meal is going to cost in cairo, you can't think just in terms of the price of the food, because in addition to the food there was a water charge, a cover, and we ordered diet cokes that wound up being 8 pounds each (ridiculous). so that came out to be more expensive than planned, though still delicious. and the atmosphere was really nice too, it was a lot of cushiony benches and people smoking shisha and it felt kind of cool like a basement nook kind of thing. i want to go back there with a lot of people and just order a lot of mezze and sit for awhile.

this morning i skipped the service learning class because i didn't feel like wasting two hours of my life AGAIN, and just came into campus to work on vocab with some people from my fusha class. and now i'm sitting in an air conditioned classroom at auc and i'm going to do homework.

but before i do, i will leave you with this frank rich column:

Wall-E for President

i am SO EXCITED to see this movie when i go home.
but more importantly, i feel like (well i haven't been reading much lately, so someone else might already be saying this) i'm really glad frank rich said what i've been thinking about obama lately:

Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner’s complacency.

i feel like he's sort of lost his spark lately, and i wish he would stop being a run of the mill depressing politician and get back to being inspirational. i miss 2004 convention obama.
/corniness