I'm living in an apartment in Zamalek with two other girls from Wes. The apartment is ridiculous. I'll have to upload pictures of it soon. It has the most haphazard decorations, Japanese print next to a faded, colonial tapestry, which is next to one of those fake plant spherical bush things (on the wall), and this gold-plated Victorian mirror thing in the entryway. It's funny. But Zamalek is a great place to live. It's an island, it's where all the embassies are and it's one of the greener areas in Cairo, next to Garden City (hence the name). It's apparently the place to be for antique shopping--Ally Kotowski, there's this one chair in a window display with teeny angelic children popping out of the dark wooden arms... it's so creepy you would love it.
So… what to tell of my Egyptian adventures? Well I’ll tell first of the things that struck me when I first got here, even though I’d been twice before. First, the driving. Complete disregard for lanes or traffic lights, headlights are optional and mostly used to tell someone either to get the fuck out of the way or to go ahead, and every car miraculously fits around and between others. I always expect at least a love-tap each cab ride, and it NEVER happens. Also, the sounds that people make at each other. When you want to get someone’s attention in the street, which is a fucking loud place, you make a hissing sound, like at a cat. It’s annoying, but way more effective than anything we do. Another one that's frequently used is the smooching sound, but I probably hear that more often because look American.
I’ve come to think of this experience as a series of opportunities I have to trick people into thinking I’m Egyptian, or… a native, I guess, is a better way to put it. I’ve succeeded probably more times than I haven’t, but I may owe that to my face. It's blatantly apparent to everyone here that I'm Egyptian which is a really strange experience because I'm very confusing in America ethnically and racially. Not Egyptians. It’s kind of wonderful. But then I open my mouth and then things star unfolding. But, back to the point, it’s usually fine. The worst experience was at the Cairo Museum. I had no trouble getting the Egyptian ticket (which costs about 30% of the Outsider rate) for my initial entry, but I took my friend Kira to see the mummy room, which is an exhibit within the museum with its own set of tickets, etc. Because I didn’t have an Egyptian passport, the first security guard wouldn’t let us through, and made us wait until three other guys came over and nodded, fired questions at me that I could partly answer, garbled some Arabic at each other, blah blah blah. Basically they were just assholes, but they eventually let me through. Basically, I have to deal with people deciding if I’m Egyptian or not every time we do something touristy. This experience has the effect of (mostly) making or breaking my outing.
The mummy room, by the way, in the Cairo museum is a must-see if you visit Cairo. Eyelashes, people!! The eyelashes have survived the ages. It’s absolutely incredible. And the King Tut exhibit has an unbelievable amount of either pure gold or gold plated items. The opulence is just breathtaking.The university kind of sucks. Our first day of classes consisted of each professor being like “Kids, you have to do the reading. Just because daddy pays for university, doesn’t mean you can just skip every class and show up for the exam, kaza kaza kaza.” Five seconds later, a few girls ask the following questions: Do we have to read the whole book? Why is your grading scale so hard? Do we have to take notes? LET ME REPEAT: Do. We. Have. To. Take. Notes. Yes, I’m serious. In conclusion, this is a very different semester academically for me than the last one. It gives me more time to explore Cairo, I guess. The student body is also super hipster-chic. It feels like the pages of an Urban Outfitters/Forever 21 catalogue just POOF materialized in the desert, where our campus is. Curled hair, layers of eye makeup, boots, boots, boots. It makes my cousins' comments about me dressing in rags totally understandable. The in general the way you dress hear has huge meaning in terms of class and connected to that, education. And AUC is known for its snobby Egyptian student body, so there you go.
Everything going really well, although the social scene is kind of lacking. We’ve been hanging out with my friend Mus from Oberlin and his friends who are in the AMIDEAST program—which is 1000x better than AUC—and they’re a lot of fun. But the language barrier definitely makes it hard to befriend Egyptians. On top of that, we don’t live in the dorms, which has its benefits of course, but we also don’t get that much interaction with Egyptians on an intimate level like that. I basically live part time with my family—I spend way too much time there, eating their food, occupying their spaces. And they’re amazing, so it’s a great setup from my point of view. My cousin Tarek and I and a few of his friends are starting a Ukulele-Kazoo-Marraca-Accordian band, so look out for that on iTunes.
My MSA professor thinks I'm in "la-la land" and LOTR-obsessed. During the first two weeks we had to write sentences using the vocab, everything I produced was naturally speckled (and when I say speckled I mean saturated) with Tolkein references... And she had no reservations about mocking me (lovingly) in front of the whole class. So... some things never change, no matter what language you're using.
I haven’t uploaded any of my sexy pictures yet. But for now, I have one picture I took on Photobooth from a window in the library. The new campus is super clean and sterile, but it is kind of beautiful [of course this picture doesn’t really show that]. Also, I'll do a special post on Arabic, because the fuckups have been plentiful, and they're very funny.I miss all of you, hope this incohesive rambling hasn't clouded your sweet memories of me.
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