Visceral City

Mmm, koshari... our favorite meal.

I don't know how much you guys have been keeping up on recent events in the Middle East, but in case you haven't, there has been one event with a pretty direct effect on our lives this past week. There have been some severe storms in the Mediterranean recently, and, though the exact cause is unknown, two major internet lines were damaged, severing seventy percent of Egypt's internet connection. The effects stretched to the rest of the Middle East and even to India, which lost some absurd amount of money in one day due to it. It's pretty crazy to think that just a few lines could be responsible for that much, and it's a little annoying to have to deal with such a slow and flakey connection, but mostly it's been kind of encouraging to see how little we actually need the web. Sure we

Sharia El Tahrir, one of Cairo's main drags.

haven't been able to Skype or check our Facebook quite as fre- quently, but we've found other ways to spend our time. I've taken up sewing! Well, I've sewn up a couple articles of clothing that needed the patching, any- way. One of my pairs of jeans had developed a mighty rip down the right outer thigh during travel that only increased as we neared Egypt. By the time we finally stepped off the plane, all of Cairo got a hearty view of my boxers and my hairy leg. Pretty amazing. But that's all fixed now. The internet should be running at full capacity (which is still fairly slow by American standards) in a week or so, but maybe sooner if they manage to reroute some other lines.

Matt has a thing for exotic birds.

Other than that, the last week has been pretty lax. The six-part survival Egyptian Arabic courses ran from last Monday until Saturday. They were each night from 4:30 until 7:30. There are twenty or so different classes, each of six or seven students, arranged according to prior ex- perience with Arabic. Everyone in my class had taken about a semester of Modern Standard Arabic, which it turns out does fairly little to prepare you for Egyptian colloquial. I knew the dialects were supposed to be pretty different, but I assumed it would be in ways similar to the differences between British and American English. It turns out that calling them dialects is in all honesty a bit of a stretch. Our roommate Matt estimated that about seven-tenths of the languages are totally different, and I'd say that's about right. And while the two clearly have similar roots,

Fakhfakhina Palace.

so do French and Spanish. Big, important words like "yes" and "good" are totally differ- ent. Grammar, while operating along similar lines, also diverges in some signi- ficant ways. But neverthe- less, the class has been helpful and entertaining. My teacher in particular is amazing. He's a short, cute, middle-aged Egyptian man named Sabri, and in spite of our amateur level, he refuses to speak English to us. As a result, we learn most of the vocab and grammar through some of the best charades I've ever seen. I swear to Allah, if the man ever played Cranium, his team would have an incredibly unfair advantage. He's very laid-back and friendly, and he took to telling us a joke entirely in Arabic at the end of each class. Here's one of my favorites:

There is an American, a Sudanese man, an Egyptian, an Iraqi, and a Palestinian. The American asks the other four 'What is your opinion on the meat which they serve during meals in your country?' The Sudanese man replies, 'What is a meal?' The Egyptian replies, 'What is meat?' The Iraqi replies, 'What is an opinion?' And the Palestinian replies, 'What is a country?'

Pretty funny, eh? Maybe not hilarious, but imagine having it told in a language you barely understand, and each difficult word being conveyed to you through ridiculous Arabic charades. The American's question alone took about ten minutes for us to grasp, mostly because of the somewhat unconventional (by English standards) grammatical structure required to get the word "meal" in there. It was a joke we really had to work for, I suppose.

One ticket to Alexandria, please.

The gardens at Fakhfakhina. It might not be as impressive here, but that's all one tree.

Beyond that, last week con- sisted mostly of running around trying to do all the random shit we're supposed to have done in the first week or two of arriving and then at night trying to meet more students and explore the city. We've gone on three college-chaperoned events, one lame, a couple that were pretty cool. The first was to a night club called La Piste in Mohandisseen. Anything under the auspices of AUC precludes drinking, so it felt a lot like a high school dance. A couple nights later we went to a very classy restaurant on the college's dime. The atmosphere was relaxed, though like so many

Yeah that's right. I climbed a tree.

places in Cairo, it was a bit too loud. The food was good, though there must have been some sort of mistake with mine, since I didn't get it until a half an hour after everyone else. Still, it was a cool night. Then, on Friday night, we went to the Fakhfakhina Palace, which is this absurdly ornate palace about fifteen minutes from campus. I felt like I was in some old movie about Arabian princes and princesses and whatnot. The gardens were probably the most impressive, as you can see in the photos. There was also some very cool traditional Egyptian danc- ing, though once again, the music was absurdly loud. Like La Piste, the event had soupcons of a high school dance, which became most clearly manifest in a big circle that developed around a few somewhat talented dancers but then severely outstayed its welcome. I realize I was part of the problem, but seriously, the circle lasted for about five minutes with pretty much no one in the middle, everyone just standing around the edges, clapping, waiting for the next mediocre dancer to embarass himself. Talking to my friend Meggan (from BC), we realized that the dance circle was only possible in high school because we were too young to know better, and it's only possible at our current age because of alcohol. Maybe we Americans attribute too much of our potential for success at dances and parties to alcohol, but I seriously don't understand how a man can avoid awkwardness in that sort of a situation without it.

So now classes have started, which has actually been a bit of a hassle. Like everything at AUC, it's way more complicated than it needs to be. Any bastion of rhyme or reason gets drowned out in the bureaucratic jumble. Nevertheless, I think it'll work out. The weekends here are Friday and Saturday, so classes started yesterday. I had two then: Modern Arabic Literature in Translation and Classical

In case you couldn't tell, Fakhfakhina was ridonk!

Arabic Liter- ature in Trans- lation, one right after the other and both taught by the same boron. Thomas Hefter is his name, and he's about as thrilling as linoleum. Pro- fessor Hefter is American, and he's unsure of himself, and he's not that passionate about the subject, and he assigns nearly nothing for reading or work, and he's awkward beyond belief, and I hope he's not reading this blog. Needless to say, I came back from those two classes, originally having thought I had my schedule perfect, and decided to overhaul the whole thing. I'm glad to say that I'm now only a few steps away from being in none of Prof. Hefter's courses, and the ones I've switched into (or am trying to switch into) are immeasurably superior. I'm in an accelerated beginning Arabic course, which repeats a lot of stuff I've already learned, but eventually will teach me a bunch of new stuff too. I'm in several new Arabic lit courses at higher levels as well. I'm not sure which ones I'm going to keep and which ones I'm going to drop, but all options seem good at this point. I'm very excited to get better at Arabic and to get back to reading lots of books and writing papers and being generally literary. Last semester at Oberlin I focused mostly on my languages and on Creative Writing, so I missed a lot of that fun stuff.

Anyway, that's how things be. Keep us posted on your lives too!

Another picture of Cairo by night to end an entry, 'cause it's the thing to do.