The boys showed up in ties and tucked in shirts to begin the long awaited "real life" portion of our semester abroad. Arabic class started out well. I already know some, but it will take a lot of time to adjust my classical Arabic to the colloquial, Egyptian dialect. And then the rain came. Not literally, but in the form of about 1 million pages of reading. I kid you not, we have 4 text books, and 3 hefty reading packets with a combined total of 883 pages (we counted). Yikes.
The good news is I am more than excited to read everything, however I am incredibly dubious about my ability to read all of this , write 7 papers, and research for 1 debate, while living in Cairo, traveling around the country and the whole Middle East. I am a little tired just thinking about it.
This coming Friday, Saturday is literally our only free weekend. So we all figured that it would be a good thing to go to the Pyramids, no big deal. I will report back and hopefully learn how to uploads some pix of that adventure.
Besides that I recently conquered Egyptian suprmarkets and predatory Egyptian taxi drivers. They think they can scam me, but I have their number now....this basically means that one driver got about 6 times as much as he should have, and I have learned my lesson. The supermarket was awesome. I shopped with three of my flatmates for 8 girls in our flat (we are communal creatures here). It was fun!
One last thing, just a minor note really. Everyone in the program gets to do a service project every Tuesday. Mine=teaching English to Sudanese refugees. I started yesterday and had a blast. The Sudanese are welcoming and so so lovely. A lot come from Darfur and are waiting for the UN to recognize them as refugees. The organization I work for is called "Refuge Egypt" and absolutely incredible Christian NGO in Cairo. Love them.
Until later, Salaam :)
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