week one

I thought sending weekly e-mails would be a nice exercise for me instead of keeping a blog, but it also seems like a somewhat self-involved enterprise, so I figured the most non-intrusive way to do it would be utilizing the ubiquitous travel blog. Sigh. I'm going to try to keep it to a weekly post, although we'll see if it withers away to nothing, or if I get overzealous about it.

Anyway, after a week, life seems settled here: classes four times a week, Arabic twice a week, walk to school in the morning, even a gym membership at a nearby hotel! But I just said “Good evening” to our watchman this morning, so clearly I have still have quite the long way to go before I become even marginally self-sufficient here, which is enormously frustrating and humbling.

Our apartments are great, but they're designed to keep out the heat during Cairo's summers. If it makes the Chicagoans and Minnesotans happier to hear this, nights are as bad as Minnesota during winter break; I wear a fleece pullover to sleep every night and drink hot tea and wear socks to avoid the freezing marble floor. Besides that, it's a needlessly big apartment and my only complaint is that because of water pollution, they chlorinate the washwater. Every time I take a shower, it's like being at the swimming pool! The other curly-haired member of our group and I have been griping about its effect on our hair.

Cairo itself is kind of nutso, but above all, very dusty. My first impulse when walking around my first day was to take out an enormous sponge and just scrub the sides of the buildings, even the trees; everything is covered in a patina of grime. The air pollution in turn makes everything look appealingly hazy. On our tour of Old Cairo today, we got to climb a minaret (SO COOL, also a little terrifying, safety guardrails apparently are optional here), and looking over the city was possibly the best moment of our trip so far. I love running across mentions of the city in our history readings; my two favorites are "The City of 1000 Minarets" and Saladin's description of Cairo as "the mistress that tried to separate me from my wife, Syria" (apparently Syria won that battle).

Also, Nana, we went into mosques. Women can go into mosques. Thank you for misleading me for the first twenty-one years of my life.

As I mentioned, settling in has been easy, although probably because we're so cushioned and to some degree coddled here. Even the bombing in Alexandria came as a distant surprise; we've never been near the riots, although we were warned to avoid certain neighborhoods and certain times, and we spot riot police every now and then. But for the most part, things felt weirdly normal, although we did arrive at the bus for our very touristy trip to the Pyramids at Saqqara and Giza and were introduced to Hichem, who was going to accompany us and was sent from the Ministry of the Interior. He looked very 70s James Bond in mirrored sunglasses, and a tan suit, along with a very big gun at his side. The pyramids themselves were fine, but the really fun parts was going into them: the shafts were tiny and steep, and sometimes the lights would be blocked, so it was insanely claustrophobic, but made me feel like a tomb robber or an explorer.

What else? Daily life is pretty mundane, we're all getting really miserly because everything is so cheap here (hello, five pitas for 20 cents), although parts of Egyptian culture still put me on guard. The women overwhelmingly wear at least hijab, which surprised me; I expected more women to be unveiled, but I feel like about 95% of the girls I see have at least a headscarf on. Our professor, who lived here as a child and then studied Arabic here in the late 70s, told us it very definitely is a recent phenomenon. There are also women-only cars on the Metro which we were told to take when traveling alone to avoid harassment; to be honest, they’re emptier than the male compartments, so I’m more than happy to hop on them for a better chance at a seat. But being female and relatively uncovered here is a really strange feeling; even if there aren’t as many stares as you believe, it still weighs you down, and being told by an Egyptian student that, hey, women can’t go into some coffee shops because they’re dirty and the men are being chivalrous(!) by not letting you go there is just frankly exasperating and makes me want to yell about women's rights for awhile. As for the men, some of the girls have started the game, “Who looks like a guido?” and the answer is almost all of them. I actually got confused at the pharmacy looking at hair products I initially thought were for females only to be told that I was looking at a long row of hair gel varietals for men.

We did meet more normal, non-heckling guys when we went to Ultimate Frisbee pick-up yesterday (I have no idea why I went, my legs still hurt, and no, apparently, I still cannot catch a frisbee). The group was a mix of expats and Egyptians who apparently can really easily translate their soccer skills of sprinting FOREVER into being really good Ultimate players. We went to dinner with them afterwards and realized that we were probably hanging out with a very Westernized section of society: they complained about hijabs, told us they could get us into clubs, and compared the agony of their respective hangovers. Apparently the Cairo Jazz Club is the place to be (Thursday funk nights!) so we'll see if I ever get around to that Cairene experience. Mostly we've just been hanging out in our apartments watching Lawrence of Arabia, although we did try one outing to a rooftop bar, which was freezing, and where the waiter asked me if I'd like fruit juice. It didn't really make me excited for nightlife prospects, although given my propensity to fall asleep at midnight here, that's totally okay.

And hey! It's 11:04pm. Time to finish this, go read some more about Islamic history, and fall asleep at midnight to the sound of car horns talking to each other. Another week!