Exploring Zamalek

After five days of exploring Zamalek Island and the nearby downtown area, we're finally going to see our new campus tomorrow! Here are photos of the Old Campus, we most likely will not be attending, but have been spending all of our time at this week at student orientation. Because Peter and I are not taking a Survival Arabic class like most of the normal students who still haven't had any Arabic, we have had alot of free time on our hands. Also because it is illegal for us to be alone together we have been forced to make new friends, haha.

Peter's roommate Ike, is sick right now and might have a fever. I haven't heard of anyone getting sick yet from the water or street food, which is good news because the food is great and cheap. My roommate's name is Maddie, she's a college senior and will only be here for a semester like most of the students we've met. 90% of the students here are International Affairs or Political Science majors, so I'm guessing everybody is going to be taking the same classes. I've also met quite a few Anthropology and Sociology majors who are really fun to talk to. I can't wait for classes to start, but we still have one week and a half left!

Ramadan also starts soon. I guess that means a lot of cranky Egyptians for a week or so until their body's get used to fasting during the daytime. Apparently they also fast from water, meaning I'm not even going to try because we drink 2 liters or more a day just to stay hydrated. Apparently that's not deterring most of the students who plan on taking part in Ramadan activities.

We ended up not going on the horse riding/bedouin night trip. Apparently it's a big sad tourist mess. The horses are these poor malnourished creatures struggling to carry tourists around all day long up the hill to the pyramids. One girl told me the saw a skinny horse get taken behind a building and heard two shots. Also the road to the pyramids is lined with the carcases of camels and horses. Peter and I still haven't been out to the pyramids, but will be on Monday for an afternoon picnic.

Yesterday Peter and I found out that our rooms are just down the hall from each other. However there's a HUGE impenetrable wooden board blocking any access to the other side, aggh! It's so frustrating! I know I know, we were warned..laugh laugh

"I don't want to marry you, I only want your money"

Everyone here thinks Peter is Egyptian.

As soon as we got into the airport yesterday morning a few Egyptian men began coming up to him speaking rapid Arabic. The look on Peter's face is priceless when it occurs (and it occurs often). I wish all of you could see it, but I'm sure everyone in his family can imagine in detail how he handles the situation. Which is normally an awkward smile and a scuffle in the opposite direction. Also, I know this might be a bit blasphemous so say, but I believe Peter has been cheating on his Armenian heritage these past two days by relishing the fact that he looks a bit Egyptian, and trying to play it off like he is so. Unfortunately I don't think he realizes being mistaken as Egyptian while not knowing Arabic is a bad thing. Haha.

Today we began official student orientation at 9 am at the Old Campus in downtown Cairo. Apparently the new campus will be up and running this semester because 99% of the campus is done. However the 1% that is left accounts for quite a bit of scaffolding and dust. The new campus dorms also will not be done until November, meaning all the lucky students who were supposed to live there, now get to live in hotels at Heliopolis, about halfway between Zamalek Island and the new campus.

The president came to orientation, which was located in an auditorium. It reminded me of the student orientation at St. Olaf. The one where the parents officially said good-bye to their son or daughter "forever"(minus the St. Olaf hymn, the professors in Harry Potter robes, the all around emotional setting, and of course our parents). We learned some very interesting statistics. Apparently there are around 225,000 US students studying abroad this year. The top countries are the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, China, Costa Rica, Mexico, Australia....and down the list. Egypt isn't on the list, apparently no country in the Middle East even made the top twenty. I guess only .2% of students make up this category. Which I find disappointing, considering the focus of our foreign policy right now, and everything we have "learned" about Middle Eastern countries on the news. Anyway, I won't get into it but it did spur on some good conversations. The AUC is also the top publisher of scholarly material in the Middle East, just in case I still need to sell some people on the credibility of this college...it's a keeper!

We also got some good advice about street smarts, then got to test out them out this evening at a bazaar located in the Old City. I've been noticing subtleties in the actions between men and women, and a few of my thoughts were confirmed at the meeting.

First I'll just say I was always taught to acknowledge people with eye contact or a hello when passing by them at a desk or walking down the street, completely ignoring them would be rude. Men here do not initiate eye contact with a woman, and if a woman does it, it is considered an invitation. The interactions between men and women are also closely monitored on campus. Last night Peter and I made the womens' hall guard nervous by sitting across from each other at a table and talking. (Yes we have guards at the entrances of the men and women dorms at all times, if a man is caught in a women's dorm, or vice versa, they get thrown out immediately.) I was disappointed to find out that women are not allowed to go swimming if they are over the age of 12.

So with the strict rules between opposite sex relations, the environment is very safe for women. If a man does show special interest in her on the street by yelling at her or reaching for her, other men will be quick to react in condemnation. Today a man bumped me on the street, and begged me to forgive him. So, mom, no worries about that. It's not like Ecuador. Even Peter got yelled at today for wrapping his arm around me to pull me away from getting hit by a car. A man across the street in English yelled "Do not touch! Looking is ok, but not touching!" Hahaha.

Actually, the street vendors seem to be the only ones breaking the social norm of having the utmost respect for women. Here's a list of the phrases we heard.

"Come on baby light my fire!" -A man selling Hookahs
"I do not want to marry you, I only want your money"
"I will kill my wife for you"-?
"Can I tell you that I love you?"
"Lucky Man!"-Peter got offended when none of the men said lucky woman
"You stepped on something"...."What?"...."My heart"
"You will spend here"
"Give me your money!"

Anyway, all we had to do was say "la shookrum" No thanks. And they instantly stopped. Laughing them off was also fine, they knew how ridiculous they sounded to us. As the one man said, all they cared about was money.

We also went to this SWEET hundred year old coffee house, which doubled as a hookah bar. Peter shared a hookah with this girl named Heather. He tries so hard to be cool. Haha anyway, I won't do it for several reasons, one of them being women just don't smoke them in public. Heather got reprimanded by a man who was watching her. He basically said that it was bad for her because she was a woman. So I asked him why it wasn't bad for men. He took my comment as an invitation, and started following me. Which is unfortunate because that could have been an excellent conversation!

Tommorow we continue our orientation! I guess it's also Bedouin night, and horseback riding. Unfortunately I don't like horses, however Bedouin sound a bit interesting..

Saturday - Peter

Hello to all of you, we have safely arrived in Egypt, here are a few tales of how we got here.

Wednesday and Thursday were mostly packing and relaxing.  Dad drove us to to the Dulles airport where we checked in and then hung out at the USO for a while before our flight.  Soon it was time to go, we said good bye to Dad and then started through security.  Stacie showed her Passport and boarding pass and would have made it through fine if it wasn't for the fact that I was traveling with her.  As soon as I showed my boarding pass and passport we were magically selected for additional screening!  They had to ask Stacie a second time if she was indeed traveling with me.  Anyway, we sent our bags, shoes, and my laptop through the X-Ray machine and walked through the metal detector as usual.  Then the fun started: we were asked to step into a small, glass cage where we were padded down.  Meanwhile my bag (which still included a CD player, external hard drive, headphones, voice recorder, umbrella, graphing calculator, and plenty of books) prompted a bag check.  Of course since Stacie and I were indeed travelling together, her bag had to be searched as well.  The man searching my bag rummaged around and wiped down everything electronic to make sure they weren't riddled with explosives.  They weren't; but he never dug deep enough to find my graphing calculator or external hard drive.

On the shuttle to gate C1 the culture shock started to creep upon us, most of the people on the shuttle were speaking languages other than English, with no clear majority.  This would be a common theme all the way to Cairo.

Sleep on the DC to Frankfurt flight was sparse and coveted but somehow we managed to eek out four or five hours of it.  Announcements were in English then German, but the flight attendants spoke French with each other.

Our first four hours in Frankfurt were perhaps the most rattling.  We arrived at noon and though terminal diagrams seemed helpful at first, they were far too simplistic to be of any use once we deplaned.  Eventually we made it to and past the passport check.

"Can we just walk through then?"

"Ya" ...we move to walk around the booth

"Show me passport and I let you into Germany"

"Oh, of course"

"Sprecken zie Deutsch?"

"No"

she smirks and shrugs and then, "Welcome to Germany"

Currency exchange is hell, there is no good deal, and no way out either! After the exchange and the service fee we ended up with 25 euros for Dad's 50 dollars!  I felt so cheated and used.  All signs were in German and English occasionally, but bathrooms were quite easy to find.  

I don't know what it is about talking to someone whose native language is one other than my own, but I always feel like I'm being scammed.  That was the feeling I had anyway when a genteel and uniformed S-Bahn employee tried to help me with the automated fare card teller.  We decided to trust him and bought a day pass covering all public transport for up to 5 people for 13.75 Euros (so, you know, more than half of our Euros).  

On the train to HauptBahnhof central station we sat amongst a group of vacationing 20something Israeli women with a strong persuasion to spend their whole day intoxicated (This is one of our first experiences in Germany, mind you, and when they got on the train with beers and schnapps and what else our perception of Germans was temporarily warped).  

By this time we had forgotten that our day pass covered 5 people, not just us two, and it was a shame that we did, because the conductor made his way through asking for tickets and it seemed that everyone in the Israeli group except one girl was covered by their group passes.  The conductor was speaking in English and German while these women were speaking in English and Yiddish.  It was hard for Stacie and I to understand the situation, but almost simultaneously I began looking for our ticket and Stacie asked me whether our ticket was only for two or not.  We discovered our ability to intercede, but by then it was two late and the one girl was was in tears while her friends were consoling her on how it could happen to anyone and how they would all split the cost.  Their group, the conductor, Stacie and I then got off at the main station where Stacie and I left their drama behind with the feeling that a good deed had just slipped through our fingers.

HauptBahnhof.  That station... you'd better just walk right out than try to figure out what train/tram you want to board.  Following the advice of that genteel S-Bahn employee we sought out the #15 tram as our best way to get to the quaint part of the city.  Unbeknownst to us, however, was the fact that trams board outside the station while the twenty odd platforms arrayed before us were for trains leading to places far away from any part of the city.  Secondly, the Gleis # does not mean the train number, it is the number of the platform.

I'm getting ahead of myself.  We got off of the S-Bahn and boarded the train on platform 15 even though none of the destinations matched any of the tram stops on our map.  We crossed the Main river quickly, which I took to be good news, but soon we were cruising past dense forests and small towns clearly of no relation to Frankfurt.  The train stopped in Langen when we decided we had gotten ourselves on the wrong train, but as we stood to get off, the doors closed and the train took us farther away to Darm??? (I don't have the map right now).  Anyway we were far away and worried about getting back.  We just missed two trains back to Frankfurt before getting on one that took us back.  Total trip: 3 hours

We decided we'd had enough of public transit and we left the station and walked to the quaint part of town in less than 20 minutes.  We were so exhausted by this time that we sat down on a bench on the side of a round about.  This was the beginning of our good time in Germany.  We sat their for 45 minutes or so and just watched the traffic.  Lots of small cars, lots of bikes, and twice a trolley-like contraption propelled by its pedalling riders who, for their hard work, were served cold beers by a bartender in the middle of the trolley.  They made a lot of noise and blocked up traffic in the round about where traffic usually isn't a problem.

Stacie and I then trekked back toward the station looking for a bathroom for me.  Finally I bought my way into the Starbucks bathroom with a 4 dollar bottle of sparkling water later confiscated by security at the airport.

We had ein beir on the sidewalk, a Wiezen, it was good.

Back to the airport, with a McDonald's cheeseburger on the way for each of us.  I was so tired on the train.  Through security to a cafe where the English and German speaking bartender was unable to converse with a Spanish speaking customer.  I finally got to help someone!  The gate was changed, Stacie's seat was changed (starting an awful headache for the Lufthansa desk workers). We got our seats back together and met Maddie (short for Madison), a senior from CU Boulder.  We talked with her while we waited for them to switch our plane, flight crew, baggage, and food delaying our departure by an hour or so.

On the plane we met "Hart" a Junior from a college in NC, his real name is Robert, he reminds me of Bret Peterson and Jacob Lovely.  I stayed up teaching myself Arabic for the 5hr flight.  Announcements were in German, then English, then Arabic.  We arrived at 4 am this morning.

After passport check and wet luggage we found our AUC driver with space enough for seven people in his van (by this time we were a group of 15).  He only had ride requests from five the 15, due in part to those like Stacie and I who got our slips in late, and also in part because of the seven or so students on our flight who were booted from their erlier-scheduled flight.  Our AUC driver decided to squeeze 9 students w/luggage into his van. The other 5 of us he left to get cabs.  We five were Hart, Robbie, Victoria, Stacie and I.  We ended up in two cabs, Robbie and Hart in one, Stacie, Victoria, and I in the other Speeding across Cairo at 5 AM to Zamalek and a dormitory we had never seen.  Somehow our driver, who helped me pronounce a few words in Arabic, was able to find the dorm.  We actually arrived before the other van!

Into the first floor lounge we dragged our belongings and tired bodies, piling our bags to the side, handing over our passports, and piling ourselves in the lounge chairs.  Most of us were too tired to introduce ourselves, and too tired to care what was happening to our passports.   My name was called with Isaac's and we became roommates.  Isaac, aka Ike, is a Junior from Georgetown U studying History.  Like me he hasn't had any Arabic classes yet.

By 7:30 we had unpacked and I had an hour and a half of the best sleep ever.  At 9 I showered and met Stacie in the Lobby for our trip to the huge mall, City Stars.  Waking up in a bed made it Saturday for me, and I still feel like today is my second day here.  We have Vodafones now for local use only for the time being.  Our 4pm meeting laid out a lot of the rules, both enforced and cultural.  Many questions were answered, Dominoes pizza was served.

Stacie and I spent some time afterwards relaxing in the courtyard, have a nice conversation about everything happening around us and more.  Her Internet still isn't working, so hopefully that will come on line soon.

Tomorrow we have formal orientation (and breakfast!) over at the old campus at 9AM.

Good night all.

Peter

Monday - Peter: PICTURES

This weekend Stacie, Dad, and I traveled to New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia for Stacie's and my last weekend in the United States (AHHH).  We left Friday afternoon and made it to Fort Monmouth NJ by 10:30 or so.  Two rooms, Dad got the bed, Stacie the fold out, Peter the roll away.

Saturday morning, continental breakfast: bagel/creamcheese, coffee, yogurt, orange juice.  We drove to Metropark Train station to ride to New York City on the NJ Transit (This is where the pictures start).

Out of Penn Station we walked to the Empire State Building and braved the lines (about an hour).  Dad chickened out so Stacie and I went up alone.  On the 86th floor the morning air was cool, crisp, and free of carbon monoxide and cloroflorocarbons. Habia unas buenas vistas!

Then we walked to Grand Central Station on our way to Times Square.  At Times Square we stopped in the M&M store, I bought a rap CD from some lady, we saw "The Naked Cowboy", gawked at all the huge screens, and then started walking towards Central Park.

Stacie and I had Gyros from an "All Halal" street vender, while Dad had a Falafel sandwich.  BEST GYROS EVER $4.  Seriously , the Gyro was amazing.  We ate them on a giant boulder in Central park.

Next we walked throught the park to the Apple Store, there were tons of people there (and a line to get in!)  I played around on an iPhone for a while (so cool) and then we looked at headphones, too expensive.  

We took the Subway to Washington square, which is under renovation and totally closed down.  Walked through Greenwich Village to Little Italy, Chinatown, the southern fish market on the east side, and then down to South Ferry.

On the ferry to Statton Island I somehow was able to get a great picture of the statue of liberty from behind the heads of three rows of tourists trying to get the same thing.  Lady liberty is actually quite short compared to the New York skyline, you have to pretty close to feel that patriotic nostalgia immigrants were able to muster from much farther away on their way to Ellis Island.  Like the warmth from the embers of a neglected fire.

At Statton Island we turned around and got back on the ferry.

We road the Subway to Times Square, passing underneath the site of the former World Trade Center.  The lights on the subway car were flickering and the operator slowed the train down as we pass through what was once the WTC subway station.  An eerie but important experience in my opinion. 

At Times Square we found a pizza place to eat; pepperoni, Fanta.  Stacie and Dad had cold ones and made jokes about their twentyoneitude.  The mascots were out in force again; Elmo wouldn't let Stacie take a picture with me unless I paid Elmo a dollar.  So I snapped one just of Elmo as we crossed the street.  Mickey mouse was out too, and the screens seemed even bigger and brighter.

On our circuitous way back to Penn Station we walked past the Church of Scientology [sic].  I made jokes about Zenu and Thetans (Tom Cruise I'm sorry you wasted all of your money and sanity, now we have to tell ourselves that we're not like you, not so easily sucked in to manufactured religions, but it's hard, you know, with all the Thetans).

Anyway, we made it back to the hotel.

Sunday

Continental breakfast: bagel/creamcheese, two bowls of cereal, two cups of orange juice.  I drove us to Philadelphia in the morning, we went to the Reading Market for hoagies and cheesesteaks.  Stacie and I were pretty tired from all the walking in New York, so after seeing the Liberty bell we let Dad go solo while we sat in the grass by some historical house.

It was a good trip, I hope you enjoy the pictures!

.

Tuesday - Peter

This is the week we are going to New York and Philadelphia. We are leaving Friday afternoon and returning Sunday afternoon. We haven't planned much of the trip yet, but Sunday we hope to see Tony Campolo speak at a church service. He is a professor emeritus of Sociology at Eastern College and is a strong believer in Jesus and the separation of Church and State. It should be an interesting sermon.

While in New York Stacie would like to see China Town, Time Square, the Statue of Liberty, and the Empire State Building. I would like to see the Apple store on the SE corner of Central Park.

No plans for Philadelphia yet, although, I would appreciate an authentic cheese steak (w/ cheez wiz).


Here is our flight information!!

DEPART
Thursday, August 21, 2008

United AirlinesFlight 932 Nonstop

Thursday, August 21, 2008Depart: Dulles Intl, Washington, DC, US (IAD) @ 9:54pmArrive: Metropolitan Area, Frankfurt, DE (FRA) @ 11:45am Friday, August 22, 2008

<<>>

United Airlines Flight 8910Nonstop Operated by Lufthansa

Friday, August 22, 2008Depart: Metropolitan Area, Frankfurt, DE (FRA) @ 10:35pmArrive: International, Cairo, EG (CAI) @ 3:35am Saturday, August 23, 2008

Here is a PDF of our excursion schedule.

TTFN,
Peter

Sunday - Peter: PICTURES

Last Thursday Stacie came down from the Parklawn building so we could go on an adventure to Oliver Johnston's house (one of my fellow interns) with the other interns and Sam the intern coordinator. We had a great time riding the commuter train to Stafford, VA, kayaking in the Blue Heron reserve, getting my camera wet, eating, and talking until late in the evening.

Luckily my camera dried out and is fine. I was able to upload my pictures and now I have them for you all to view!

I got a big backpack! It's huge! It will be useful for our travels in Italy, Greece and elsewhere in the mediterranean and the middle east.

Friday - Peter: PICTURES

I hope this works, hopefully this LINK will take you to a page where you can view our pictures. If not, let me know. I found my camera cable, and my camera, but at a fun get together at a fellow intern's house yesterday I got my camera submerged in the river! I took the battery and memory card out, and I plan on taking the blowdryer to it when I get home today, hopefully it will still work!

As it turns out, Stacie and I are already planning our trip to Italy and Greece over January, we have the whole month off and it will be nice to travel around a bit. I just wish the dollar would get a bit stronger relative to the Euro so we might save some money.