cairo rain.

puddle in the sreet,

but there is no rain in Cairo,

sometimes there is soap.

The problem with walking around cairo is that few buildings have central air. This is a problem because all of the airconditioners attached to windows drip water into the street. Atleast everytime I get dripped on, I desperately hope that it is water from airconditioning units.

Also, (this is commenting on the second picture- the one with the soap) since there is no rain, everything gets really dirty. To alleviate this, the streets/sidewalks/whatever sometimes get scrubbed down with a bunch of soapy water. The problem is that since there is no rain in Cairo, there are also no storm drains. Water used for this purpose just sits there and evaporates. Also, sometimes water leaks up from sewage pipes and that is really not fun to be around when that happens.

So that is my relationship with water in Cairo, Egypt.

another Haiku

tea next to the Nile,

a tree disrupting traffic,

where have we gone now?


So far almost every Friday (the weekend is Friday and Saturday here) has been devoted to wondering around Cairo and finding neat shops, etc.
So far I have found:
-A copy of Wuthering Heights that has been thoroughly marked in
-A gun store
-Some fantastic arabic-english and arabic-arabic dictionaries
-The best tea I've ever had
-Terrible art
-An Aquarium
-Unfamiliar odors
-...and many praying muslims (Friday is the holy day)

Rescued art

a huge pile of art,
was cluttering the sidewalk,
this is what I found:

It was really dusty so I tookit home and put it in the shower for a few minutes.
It looks great! I feel that I should restore art professionally.
Thanks, Egypt.

Right now I'd do anything for a nice bike ride with some steep hills.
There aren't many hills here, but today I saw a cloud and that was refreshing.

Class and Weekend.

I finally got around to having class this week.
They are actually all really interesting and more challenging than I expected.
My favorite so far is "intro to development", which is about developing third world nations. I think it is the sort of thing that got me into political science in the first place. Three quarters of the eople in the world live pretty crappy lives with little hope for improvement...but I'm sure you've all seen the commercials with the starving kids from Africa, so on to the other classes.
Arabic is arabic and hopefully I will learn a lot of that because that's what I'm here for.
Then there is Hieroglyphics. I really have no reason to be taking it aside from the fact that I want to impress my friends with stuff like this:

So far I'm pretty much just learning the symbols and their basic meanings. It still seems so weird (and it is weird) to use pictures of owls and boots to express how you feel about the world. I didn't even know that they were owls in Egypt. Anyways, it is a worthwhile class and I feel that I can now better defend myself against mummies.

I haven't really made friends with any Egyptians yet, but there are a lot of Norwegians (well, like 15 or so) that are here for the semester too. They are a lot of fun. They sound funny when they talk in norwegian and they have cool names (Thor, Ingeborg, etc)..


And just for fun, here is a picture of the street my dorm is on:

Dysentery and Movenpick.

I've an intersting last 6 days. For the first 3 I had a pretty exciting case of travel sickness. For the other 3 I was on the Red Sea at a resort for Orientation.

It was nice, but it was one of those places that is just 100% man made. 20 years ago it was just desert and water, but then a rich egyptian built this resort town called "el-gouna" filled with all sorts of beach fun.

My roommate stepped on a sea urchin.

My favorite part about it (aside from the fresh air and the wonderful beach) was that the hotel keys came with a little card that were to be inserted into a slot on the wall when you got into your room. This would allow all the electricity in the room to be turned on. Without it, all the lights and the air conditioning would turn off. Ok, I guess it wasn't that cool, I just liked their devotion to energy conservation.

Anyways, I got really sick before that and things sucked for a few days, but then I got some medicine.

It was about $1 and it worked wonders!

I have my first day of classes tomorrow.