I'm sitting in a Costa Coffee in Cairo, writing a poli-sci paper. Brittany Spear's Crazy is playing. I just finished a latte. The man at the next table reads The International Herald Tribune. I could be in the US.
Now there's a child, about 6 years old, tapping on the window beside me. He makes the hand-to-his-mouth gesture that is the Cairo symbol for “I'm starving, please give me money.” The doorman of the coffee shop sees him and shoos him off.
At the mosque across the street, located on the basement level of Rose Land flower shop, Ramadan evening prayers are going on. Whenever the door to the coffee shop opens, I hear a moment of the prayers being played over a loudspeaker. Green rugs are spread over the sidewalk outside. Men take off their shoes and pray. On Fridays, the mosque carpets most of the street. Monday night must be slower; they only take over a few feet of the sidewalk.
The music changes to a techno song I've never heard before. I consider switching to my headphones.
The eight employees stand about, considerably more animated than they were when I last saw them, at mid-afternoon, in the final stretch before iftaar.

On the shuttle back to the dorms Thursday afternoon, a friend and I decided to go up to Alexandria. We recruited two more friends, packed, and, at 7, asked the man at the front desk which train station has the trains to Alexandria. We get in the cab, manage to remember the word for train (utta) and directed the driver to the station.
It being the final weekend before Ramadan, more people were traveling than usual, so the next available one was the 10:30, which we were told to return to the station sometime between 11 and 12 if we wanted to catch. We were advised to take a cab (L 300 between the 4 of us) but we decided that sounded sketchy. Since we didn't want to arrive in Alexandria at 3 am without any hotel reservations, we decided to give up for the night, buy tickets for an early train, and return to campus for the night.
We were supposed to take the 9 o'clock train. We met to leave at 8, then discovered that daylight savings time had taken effect, giving us an extra hour. Coffee and a croissant later, we took a cab to the station. The ride, which took a full half- hour the night before, took about 10 minutes, so we stood in the station for a while, repeatedly being asked by Egyptians if we needed any help finding our train.
We had splurged for the 2nd class tickets (L 21, or about $4), so we were in air-conditioned cars. The ride up is about 3 hours, through the countryside along the Nile, so we got to see rural Egyptian life, even if just from a distance. Tractors, or any other type of mechanicalizaion, seem to be a rarity on Egyptian farms, with humans and donkeys doing most of the work.
We got to Alexandria, the train stopped at a station, and we got off. We studied a map, couldn't determine exactly where we were, but determined which general direction was north, so we set out on foot towards the Mediterranean. We reached it within about 20 minutes. After reaching it, we studied our map and determined that we had not actually gotten of at the downtown Alexandria station, but had gotten off in the suburbs. We hailed a cab and a 5-minute taxi ride took us to downtown though.
We found a hotel, the Hotel Union, (highly praised by the Lonely Planet) which had vacancy, so we checked in (at $10 per person for a beach view and private bath). The hotel is a small one, left over from about 1950, with a lobby with marble floors, old leather couches, a view of the harbor, and retired Egyptology professors scattered about.
We set out down the Cornish in search of some tombs that the guidebook recommended. Instead, we found the library. In honor of the ancient library at Alexandria, Egypt recently built a new library. Rather than trying to recreate the classical architecture of ancient Greece, they went with a modern building. The roof is a giant disc slanted down into a reflecting pool at the same level as the harbor, which is across the street. The interior is terraced down with the roofline, and skylights cut into the disc-ceiling look out onto the water. I'm not sure what the quality of the actual collection is, but the building qualified as the coolest library that I've ever been in.
For dinner, we had traditional Egyptian - lamb tagen with okra and a table full of appetizers.
Friday morning we went to the Catacombs. We set off in a cab, got within a few blocks, and encountered tour-buses trying to navigate ancient streets. We gave up on the cab and walked the rest of the way. As we were going into the Catacombs, we ran into the tour group from AUC. We compared itineraries; they were doing significantly more than us, we were actually spending more than 10 minutes at each attraction, and our trip involved no charter buses.
We explored the catacombs for about half an hour, fighting our way through hordes of tour-groups. Afterwards, we walked back downtown to an area that was supposed to have really cool antique shops. We were either misled or lost.
Next, we went to the Roman amphitheater, which was relatively deserted at the time. We discovered the one spot (about one foot wide and high) that produced an echo that reached the entire theater, took pictures of the ruins, and translated some hieroglyphs. One of the guards called us over and led us back into the area behind the stage. He summoned us back, opened a padlocked gate (which he made me nervous by locking behind us) and ushered us in. We crossed over a pit on a bridge made out of single 2x6, wound around behind the chorus section, and reached the area directly behind the stage, partially under the seating. The room had a really interesting vaulted ceiling. The guard led us back out, let us out of the gate, and we tipped him a few pounds.
As the other three of us were planning lunch, the fourth member of our group, Sean, made friends with another guard, who let us into the closed area where the ancient Roman bath ruins were. He led us climbing over ancient ruins as if they were mere rocks so that we could see the old aqueducts and baths. We tipped him a few pounds afterwards.
After that, we had to return to the train station (this time the one downtown) for our train back to Cairo. Unfortunately, somewhere between the amphitheater and the train, my camera disappeared from the side pocket of my bag, so I ended up without any pictures of the trip.
When we got back to Cairo, we compared our trip with the other AUC group that had gone and decided that, though they got to see more attractions, we felt more accomplished. The four of us set out, relying entirely on our own language skills (I'm one of the more fluent of our group of four) and no real plans and made our way there and back successfully.

I've been sick the past few days, so I haven't had any adventures of note. Instead, I'm going to post a few of the comments over the past few weeks that I've made in the notebook that I carry around with me during the day:

No one in Cairo walks on the sidewalk. At first, I assumed that most Egyptians feel they are not cheating death enough by merely driving in their traffic, so they choose to subject themselves to it when they are even more vulnerable. After a few blocks of walking their streets, I begin to understand - Cairo's sidewalks are barely paved, even in the wealthy area where I live. Some patches are dirt, some have stone paving, now a buckled mess to trip over, and the entrances to driveways are a good two-foot curb to climb over every few meters. During the summer, the condensation from the air-conditioners above drips down in a slimy rain at random intervals on the sidewalk. Near the embassies and government buildings, the guard stands impede traffic, forcing anyone on the sidewalk to edge his way around a guard with a Soviet-issue rifle or a police dog wearing a muzzle.
Dodging traffic looks appealing.

All of the girls that I went to the pyramids with tried to dress conservatively despite the heat. We got there at the same time that a tour bus let of a group of German tourists - wearing beach-wear.

At dinner the other night, one girl complained that every time she gets into a taxi, it tries to take her to Zamalek (the neighborhood where I live and the most Westernized part of the city). another girl told her that she was lucky, she got proposed to by the driver on most cab drivers. I can't imagine that conversation taking place in any other city: "Every time I get in a cab, I tell it to take me to Harlem, but he gets on the bridge to Jersey City instead, but at least the driver doesn't propose to me."

"Tomorrow" is a loose concept. Apparently, it means "Sometime in the future, not today, probably not the day after today, or the day after that. Come check back with us in about a week and we'll see if we've learned anything new."

The primary export of America to Egypt is bad pop music. No wonder we aren't that popular in the Arab world.

What exactly are cow-heads used for that merits them being the most common item for sale on the street in old Cairo?

Coptic Christians write in Greek. My Latin seems even more useless now.

In Egypt, you are not required to pay taxes on a building until it is complete. Almost all apartment buildings have scaffolding on the top floor, even if the building is thirty years old. I thought this was ridiculous until I remembered highway construction in Alabama consisting of only a few barrels for years after the actual work is done.

Egyptian Museum

An earlier event that I failed to write about:

The week before classes began, two fellow Americans and I decided to visit the Egyptian Museum. Since the museum has no air conditioning and the number of bus-loads of Asian tourists increases throughout the day, we decided to go as early as possible - about 9 am.
We took the shuttle over to campus, from which we just had to cross Tahrir Square. To get to the opposite side, we decided to walk around the perimeter, even though that required crossing about 4 major streets (all with about four painted lanes, which translates into about 6 or 7 lanes of actual cars). We made it across within about half an hour (without dying!) and found the entrance to the museum. We made it through the 2 security checkpoints - which I set off both times, was patted down, and could have easily smuggled almost anything past - and, only 45 minutes later than planned, we made it into the museum.
Tammy, one of the girls that I was with, decided that our first stop should be the mummy room. After a few minutes of trying to find a map of any type of the museum, she resorted to asking a young man sitting by the entrance for directions. He excitedly got up and said he would lead us up there and give us a guided tour. All of us had been to the pyramids a day or two before, so we were wary of any offer of a guided tour, despite his repeated insistence that he expected no payment. He led us upstairs to the mummy-rooms, where we discovered that there was an additional admission charge - L100 for adults, L50 for students, and L2 for Egyptians. Since neither of the girls had their student IDs with them and I wasn't that interested in the mummies, we decided that we'd pass on that for the day.
Our guide, Hussein (“Not related to the other one!”) insisted on leading us through the rest of the museum. By this point we had learned that he was an AUC student who volunteered at the museum over the summer as part of his ancient studies major, so we were less scared of him. He led us through the ancient statues, the treasures of King Tut's tomb, and artifacts from various other tombs and pyramids.
Unfortunately, much of Egypt (and this museum in particular) is wasted on me, since I start to find ancient artifacts dull after a few minutes. But I found a few objects that entertained me. A few of the relics could have passed as really cool modern art (as strange as that is).
Throughout the tour, Hussein had been telling us about the Rosetta Stone that the museum had. I thought that I remembered the British Museum having the Rosetta Stone, so I was a bit perplexed. At the end, he led us down to the lobby and showed us the Rosetta Stone, or the picture of it rather - interesting, but not the real thing.
We stopped in the courtyard for a bit and talked to Hussein. Apparently Egyptians enjoy making fun of their president almost as much as Americans enjoy making fun of Bush - though they use much more hushed tones to do so. Hussein also tried to talk us into going to Alexandria and several other historical sites with him, but we declined, since we didn't want to commit to anything at the moment. We exchanged email addresses and he led us back to campus, showing us the trick of cutting through the Metro station (which reduced the time of the trip across the square to about 5 minutes and didn't involve dodging traffic) and we caught the shuttle back to campus.
That night, after returning from my Arabic class, I came down the stairs in the dorm to find Hussein. Since none of us replied to his email that he had sent a few hours before, he decided to come by the dorms and find us. The other two from our group happened to walk through at that moment, so he talked us all into going to dinner. We walked to an Egyptian restaurant nearby that he was familiar with (some of the worst food I've had since I've been in this country) and had dinner. We managed to turn down his repeated invitations to go to Coptic Cairo with him the next day and said goodnight.

Saturday, I went to the Citadell, the ancient military fortress/mosque complex. I was standing outside when I noticed the contrast between the Islamic Mosque in front of me and the Roman statues on the far corner of the plaza. Turning around, I noticed that I also had a clear view of the Bank of Egypt skyscraper and, in the distance, through a cloud of haze, I could make out the forms of the pyramids - 4 major eras/religions from one point.
My favorite part of the trip was, as I was standing on the edge of the bluff, overlooking Cairo, the afternoon call to prayer started. From across Cairo, the prayers from at least a dozen different mosques echoed up, created the most amazing, new-age-symphony-like, combination of sounds. Since I didn't make it until late afternoon, I missed seeing a good portion of the Citadell, so I need to go back to see the rest of it. I've already decided that I will make sure to time it so that I'm there when the call to prayer happens.

Classes started Tuesday (midway through the Egyptian Sunday-Thursday workweek). After going to all of my classes, I discovered that I came to an American university in Egypt in order to have British professors. Actually, only one of my professors is truly British, but two others are Egyptians educated entirely in Britain and one is Czechoslovakian.
I’m enjoying all of my classes thus far – they seem to be fairly interactive. My Introduction to Development class on Thursday was devoted almost entirely to a class discussion. The half of the class that was Egyptian, and had thus grown up in the third world, brought a new perspective to the discussion on how to define positive development of third world nations. They had a wide range of views, but most of them had little trust in government as a positive force – one effect of growing up with the efficiency of the Egyptian government I guess.
Walking around the AUC campus during the day is an interesting experience. After spending two years on Rice’s campus, the density of students hanging out in the courtyards surrounding campus is odd. Many of the Egyptian students work hard to dispel the myth that everyone in Egypt dresses conservatively. One of my American friends commented that she had brought only one outfit that comes close to fitting in – and she had packed it in case she ended up going to a dance club in Italy over Christmas break – hardly what one would expect to wear in a Muslim country.
Yesterday (Friday) one of my friends and I visited Coptic Cairo. We took a cab downtown (the fourth one we flagged down knew the location of Tahrir Square and was willing to take us there – Tahrir Square is the equivalent of Times Square in New York, any cab driver should know how to get there … ) and took the Metro from there. The Metro is actually a rather efficient form of transportation (I’ll have to do an entire post on transportation in Cairo later; the cabs are ridiculous.) It runs regularly, it’s relatively clean, it has somewhat established fairs, etc.
Coptic Cairo is a community of Egyptian Christians that dates to about the 3rd century. Most of the community is actually built into the walls of a Roman fort that actually pre-dates that. There are 7 churches there, 6 of which are beautiful ancient buildings, the seventh (The Temple to the Virgin Mary) could have been built in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950s.
According to legends, Mary and Joseph journeyed to Egypt to hide Jesus from Herod’s decree that every firstborn in Israel be killed, during which time they lived in the area that later became Coptic Cairo. We went down into the crypt beneath one of the churches, where there was a well in which Jesus was supposedly bathed as a baby. The well water is supposed to have healing powers if you drink it, but given the pollution in Cairo’s water table, we decided that we would pass on that.
When we left, we decided to walk down the street in front of the complex a few blocks. A few blocks turned into a few dozen, and before we knew it, we were halfway back to downtown. We walked the rest of the way, making it home after only about two hours of walking. We saw the Roman-built aqueducts, ancient Cairo, a goat farm, and several dozen stands selling cow heads (I’m not sure what those are used for – there’s the tongue and …. the brain?). We passed several hundred scenes that I wanted to take pictures of, but I didn’t want to attract even more attention to us, so I have no photos.

For Labor Day weekend, the university sent all of the study abroad students down to El Gouna on the Red Sea. We left at 3 am Friday morning. We would have left at a more normal time, but blocking off half of the street in front of the main campus would have been nearly impossible during the day. We were originally supposed to leave directly from the dorms, but the State Department of the Kingdom of Thailand objected to having 8 large buses on our street. (I never realized that the State Department of Thailand would ever directly influence my life)

We started out across the desert, in our 8 charter buses and military police escort (apparently bandits can be a problem when driving at night). I slept for most of the trip. I woke up for the last 5 minutes of desert, followed by our drive through El Gouna. The development looked exactly as I would imagine a wealthy suburb in Southern California would look. Rows of spec-houses built in a pseudo-Mediterranean/Arab style with heavily irrigated lawns surround a golf course. During the 5 minute drive to our hotel, I didn't see a single individual outside, except for some landscapers and construction workers.

Once we reached the hotel, we went about distributing room keys with the typical model of Egyptian efficiency. The rooms were divided up alphabetically by first name. All 300 of us were herded into an auditorium, where they proceeded to hand out all of the keys one by one. My name starts with a D and it only took an hour and a half to get my key.

The distribution of keys was just the beginning of our coordinators' methods of organization and communication. All announcements about meeting times and locations were given by the director walking into the restaurant where we had all of our meals, announcing the message to a table, and telling them to pass it on. Quite a few people ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time throughout the trip.

The Red Sea is shallow in this area. You can walk about a quarter of a mile in knee deep water before reaching the drop-off (and most of the beaches have No Swimming signs before the drop-off, which makes for a wading experience more than a swimming one. The weather was nice though. I spent quite a few hours under an umbrella on the beach reading The Kite Runner. After two weeks of the intensity of Cairo, it was very nice to get away into something much less intense.

The resort was a bit unsettling in some ways. Even if I exclude our group from the statistics, about 90% of the guests were European, so the entire town was filled with wealthy westerners and the Arabs who serve them. And everything about the area felt artificial. A bit like being in Disneyland without having Micky Mouse.

My classes start tomorrow (After Empire: Nationalism and Social change in the Middle East and Introduction to Development) - both of which I'm looking forward to.

I had recieved requests from various people to create a blog of some sort to chronicle my semester in Egypt, so I decided to comply. I hope that this will be in addition to my emailing, as I always love hearing what's going on at home and one way communication contains all of the joy of network television. If you wish to email me, I'm checking my davidanutt@gmail.com address while here.

I also created a flickr account, which I plan on uploading photos onto throughout the semester.

http://flickr.com/photos/72256055@N00/