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.