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