We arrived in Cairo around 9:30 a.m. on the 24th (Saturday). Luckily, we didn’t have any problems with getting through customs, getting our luggage, or with the airport pick up. We stopped off at the New Campus to drop someone off, and caught our first glimpse of where we would be having classes. We went there today for the first time for some orientation events, and the campus is huge. The buildings are amazing and very impressive. Everything is gigantic and beautifully designed. I think I’m really going to like it there. Anyway, after we dropped off the kids at New Campus, we went to our dorms in Zamalek. The residence is more like a hotel than a dormitory, it even has a really beautiful courtyard garden. The rooms are bigger than any dorms I’ve ever seen and have great wardrobes and such. The building is old and kind of beaten up, but is very clean and has a lot of character.
We’ve been pretty busy the past couple of days. Yesterday we did a scavenger hunt around Zamalek, which is the area of Cairo where I am staying. (For more info on Zamalek, try Wikipedia. Basically, it’s an island in the Nile River where most of the embassies are) After running around and trying to ask people where “rahdeo shaq” (radio shack) is, we ate dinner at a local restaraunt. The food was..good. Obviously not my favorite, but edible and fairly tasty. There is a picture of it on the photobucket site (I’ll post a link to the site at the end of this blog). The best part was that it was only 5 pounds, which is a little less than $1. Debbie and I have decided to rent a fridge for the semester, which will cost us about $30 each. That way we can pick up some sandwiches, pita bread, hummus, and stuff like that to keep in our room for when we don’t have time to go out. It will be cheaper than eating campus food, which still isn’t really expensive, but we want to save our money for activities.
Our first activity was last night, called Bedouin Night. We drove just outside of Cairo in the Giza desert, where there were giant tents set up. Inside they had modest seating made out of pillows covered with blankets and small tables. For $2 you could smoke “shisha” or hookah, and most people did. All night that played loud music (some was Arabic, some was very American- like Fergie and other hip hop, which made it feel a lot less authentic). There were traditional dancers who all but forced you to participate in the dances. Pretty much everyone did, and it was really fun. When you walked outside the tent, you could see the Giza pyramids in the distance. It was my first look at them, and it was pretty fantastic. Throughout the night there was horseback riding, where guides took you a short distance in the desert. It was really cool to be riding horses in the desert in clear view of the pyramids. We rode to the top of a hill and got a pretty good panoramic view of Cairo as well. The food was pretty great, although I don’t remember the names of any of it, except the beef, which was “kofta.”
We’re leaving at 6:30 to go on a Nile River cruise, which we are pretty excited about. The “events” here are fairly cheap- Bedouin Night was only $20, and so is the Nile cruise. They have a trip to Alexandria this weekend, but we’ve decided not to go. We feel like we have enough going on this week, and we don’t want to cram all of the excitement into our first 6 days. Besides, we’ve heard that the trip is overpriced (about $90) and that we could do it cheaper if we planned it ourselves. I’ve met quite a few people, and almost everyone is really nice and friendly. We’re going to try to get a group together to go to Alexandria once things settle down a bit.
Here is a link to the photo album: http://s635.photobucket.com/albums/uu80/kayla-in-egypt/
on the left hand side about halfway down there are links to the different albums!
