Dream Park. Mall. Arabic class.

Thursday Night--> Felluca ride with the AUC kids ( they think everyone in America has a villa and their own car.....hrmmm. not so much)

Friday--> Dreampark: the Disneyland of Egypt. A pretty hilarious place. I thought it was gonna be bad when we paid to get into the park and then found out that we needed to buy tickets to actually ride the rides...grrr. Luckily our security guard (yes, we travel with a security guard annnnnd he has a gun) showed us to the part of the park that had free rides :-D

There was a Ferris Wheel, spinning tea cups, bumper boats and a ride called "fancy cars" where you couldn't control the cars which made it perfect for chinese fire drills. Hi-lights of Dreampark: riding a bumper boat with the security guard,  going on an Egyptian roller coaster, and having lunch at Little Caesar's Pizza where they sell pizza by the meter!

After Dreampark we went to the Heliopolis Mall to round out our day of Egyptian culture. Avery and I found a Bebe and some horribly fantastic dresses to try on. There were shoulder pads and excessive amounts of ruffles involved but  my favorite dress by far was the white halter with black lepoard spots. Best Finds in the mall: TWO Starbucks,  pizza in a cone, and a sweeeet belt to go with the dress I always steal from Ashley.

All in all, a good day :-D

SATURDAY:
Went to Islamic Cario, wore some ridiculous green booties in a Mosque. Climbed a Minuet to the very, very top and saw a sick view of Cairo through the smog. This was kinda a long day 'cause we toured ALOT of Mosques and historical sites and they're definately all blending together at this point. 

On a kinda random note. Meg's Mom was in Munich for a business trip and had the weekend off so she decided to pop down to Cairo for a visit. She took Meg, Avery and myself went to dinner at a place called Abu el Sid (Sp?),to try some local Egyptian dishes. The menu there had funny little comments about some of the dishes, pointing out which ones were "very old recipes" or "traditional egyptian meals". nom nom nom.

SUNDAY:
The photo kids and myself went to the Cairo zoo and played with the lions. No joke- lions. Rob and Victoria took pictures with a lion cub (the thing was drugged out of it's mind, but that's besides the point), and seemed to be having a good time posing with the kitty. I wanted nothing to do with the baby lion and maaaaay have hid behind Meg until the zoo people locked it up again.

Yesterday:
Took a walking tour of downtown Egypt with Prof. Sullivan and ended up at the "Gates of Heaven",  a  Jewish temple that was mentioned in a book we had to read for our int'l affairs class. I was stoked to go inside and get out of the busy city streets for a couple minutes. Oh, we also lost Clancy while we were downtown. Luckily, she got back to the hotel just fine and we found her later in the afternoon.

That afternoon I went to my second "survival" Arabic class. As part of the international affairs class we take 3 intro to Arabic classes. Yesterday we learned how to barter, say "your mom" and that t-shirt is t-shirt in Arabic and that when you conjugate it, it's t-shirt-taco.

There are only 10 days left in the trip and I'm feeling pretty ready to leave Cairo, not necessarily Egypt but the city of Cairo. It's loud and crazy and I would love to jump in a car and drive up to the LOJ right now, but that would be a lonnnnnng drive from here. So in the meantime, I'm making the most of the time I've got left here and am geting stoked for the class trip to Alexandria this Friday :-D

Tuesday:
Myself, Meg and Avery took a ride around the city in our friend Moe's car. Moe drives a 1973 sky blue Volkswagen beetle with giant springs under the seats and roll down windows. Honestly, I was shocked that the thing actually started- but it ran great. (And I'm pretty sure my dad had the same car when he was in college- Meg and Avery said the same thing about their dad's). Driving with Moe was definitely an adventure, it kinda felt like riding in a race car...or driving with my roommate Liz.

Avery taught Moe the finer points parrallel parking (the old guys sitting on the sidewalk watching thought this was histarical) and after the drive we went on another 3 hour photo walk. We walked across a bridge/road thing above 26th July Street where the "sidewalk" is pretty much just a curb....BAH!

Aside from scary walks on the side of the highway, traveling with Moe is awesome. He is fluent in Arabic AND English so he can translate what the locals are saying.


Wednesday night:
As part of the participation grade for the international affairs class that I'm taking, I'm required to go to at least 6 cultural events. These events can be anything from going to the movies, learning to belly dance or going to an art opening. So last night I signed up to go to a Sufi dancing/whirling dervish show near the Khan with a bunch of other students. But when we got to the venue, we found out that the show was sold out and that the vans weren't gonna be back for an hour and a half.

Myself, Meg, Avery and a couple other people decided this was a perfect reason to go into the Khan and find some Sheesha- it ended up being a great night! And it was a lot more fun to wander around the Khan now that I've had an Arabic class- BAS (stop), SHOKRUN (thank you) and LA' (no)  were very useful!


Thursday:
Crit Day!

 

Double Days

First day of having two classes....brutal!
I haven't had 9-5 classes since....freshman year. blegh

Photo editing in the AM, we went walking around the school on a mini-class shoot and got bombarded by kids from a local middle school. They were hilarious and love having their pictures taken. A couple of them were jumping onto the hoods of cars and posing, it was great.

Had lunch at a local spot, got one of their "sandwishes" (yep that's how it was spelt), pretty ligit.

In the Afternoon I had arabic class, which was hilarious! The first words the Prof. taught our class were BAS (stop/enough), KHALAS (it's over), and YALLA (let's go). lol. I think it's gonna be a good class.

Skype, the Hard Rock and long walks

5/16:

Woke up SUPER early (like 7 am) to drag myself over to the internet café across the street. 7 am may not seem that early, but it definitely felt early. Why was I getting up so early on a Sunday? Well, when it was 7 am here in Egypt, it was midnight on Saturday in Boston and I wanted to go to a graduation party….via Skype.

My roommate, Ashley, graduated this May and is leaving for New York this fall ☹ The week before I left for Egypt we were talking about how it was a bummer that I was going to miss it and I jokingly told her to skype me into it. We realized that it was actually a good idea. So I got up early and got to say hello to Ash and Liz (my other roommate) and the guys.

The one thing I didn’t take into consideration was how annoyed the other people in the internet café would be at me as I kinda yelled into the computer to the kids on the screen…. they were not pleased. In fact, our skype sess. had to be cut a little short because of the looks I was getting from the café manager….Even when were an ocean apart, we nearly get kicked out of wherever we go together. Love these girls.

Later, Meg, Avery and myself went on a 3 hour walk around Zamelek taking pictures. Even though it was hot as B***S, it was an amazing walk! I got a lot more pictures for my graffiti project and got to take in some Egyptian street culture at a slower pace. Meg and Avery were getting great stuff too, including a bunch portraits of all the people who saw us walking around with cameras and stopped us and asked us to take their pictures. (by ask I mean point at the camera and then themselves while saying some stuff in Arabic that I totally couldn’t understand.)

Me, Meg, Clancy and Kelley went to the dinner at the Hard Rock Café Cairo, we figured that it couldn’t be toooooo long of a walk, wrong. It was not nearly as close as we thought, but after an hour and a half of walking we found it and had some fantastic nachos and milkshakes :-D


p.s. It was 110 degrees today in Cairo! BLAH!

Coptic Cairo

5/15:
This morning’s class was a tour of Coptic Cairo. We were split into groups and each group member was assigned to research a part of the city and act as the tour guide to the rest of the group for that one section. I did the Hanging Church, it was pretty cool.

At the end of the tour we went in into a Mosque- that was an interesting experience. In order to enter the Mosque, the girls in the group had to be wearing conservative long sleeve shirts, a long skirt or pants, and a headscarf. If you did not dress appropriately, you would be asked to wear a green jump suit so as to preserve the holiness of the Mosque. Luckily, no one in our group wore clothing that was deemed inappropriate.

(This would have been unfortunate --> http://photos.igougo.com/images/p155165-Egypt-bad_girls_in_green_robes.jpg )

Aesthetically, I thought the Mosque was awesome, but I’m not a fan of the scarfs, the separate entrance for women or other patriarchal rules associated with the Mosque.

We also visited a cave church, which was pretty amazing- it can hold more people than Matthew’s arena and in order to get to it you have to drive through a city of garbage.

Our guide/ Prof. Sullivan’s friend, Abdu, had us all over to his house for lunch where his wife had cooked 2 GIANT turkeys, fries, sambosas, grape leaves and a bunch of other food. The food was amazing and his family was super nice. By the end of the lunch I was in serious need of a siesta.

We ended the day with a sunset Felucca boat ride on the Nile.

motocross at the 'mids

5/14:
Today was a free day so I got to sleep in- epic.
Then a bunch of us went to the Cairo Museum to get cultured and check out Tut’s stuff. We saw a lot of animal mummies, hieroglyphics and carriages. Me and Meg chilled out for the rest of the afternoon in the room and caught up on photo editing and enjoying a quiet day.

At night we all headed to the Pyramids of Giza to watch the Red Bull X Street fighters (motocross), obviously this was epic on it’s own. But only got better when we got inside. Originally we all had standing room tickets, cause the seated tickets were sold out, but within an hour of being there most of us had media bracelets and were snapping pics from against the rail of the riding area…..Probably one of the best nights of my life.

It was more than just an awesome way to watch the event, it reminded me how much I really love photography, especially sports photography. It’s been a while since I’ve shot an event or a game. And the past 2 months I’d been editing (my least favorite part of photo) and putting my senior book together (which was a handful), so it was nice to do the fun part again.

walks and graffiti

5/13:

Today was a working day in photo class. We spent the first 3 hours editing, then took a break to check out some of the street vendors nearby the school. Victoria and Rob bought corn on the cob from one of the vendors, which I tried, it’s definitely not like American corn on the cob but it’s still pretty good. We spent the last hour critiquing, talking about our project ideas and showing the pictures we have taken since arriving in Egypt. (good stuff so far!)

Meg, Matt, Steve, Drew and I went on a photo walk adventure around Zamalek and found at least 5 different embassies (including Lithuania!). We also found a SICK garage with a giant graffiti mural on the outside wall. The mechanic tried to tell us more about the artist but there was kinda a language barrier, so I’m too sure what he was saying. But we’re gonna go back next week and try to find someone who speaks English to tell us more about the artist.

Chilled out and watched the Italian Job. During the movie one the girls stopped by to show us her solution to constantly needing to buy water- she bought a office cooler jug of water. 22 litres for 20 pounds- not a bad deal, but a tad bit inconvenient.

Later that night Me and Meg met up with Amr who is a friend of my friend Lily (she did this dialogue 2 years ago), and he gave us a tour of Cairo by car at night. It was pretty sick, Cairo definitely loves lights!

Class- day 1

Our classroom in Cairo....good thing there are only 7 of us

5/12:
We had our first day of class in Cairo, it was pretty much like every other first day where you spend alot of time talking about stuff, but not really doing too much.

Meg, Avery, Ana and myself got lunch at the Falafel (sp?) stand across the street from our hotel- so good! and so cheap!


In the afternoon we visited the American Embassy and went through ridiculous amounts of security. We weren't allowed to bring in anything electronic, had to walk through 3 metal dectors and handover our passports in order to get a vistor pass!


One of the kids on the trip (Matt) turned 21 today, so we celebrated by going to dinner at the Marriot by the Nile. They were nice enough to sit all 20-something of us and didn't give us a hard time about the fact that we brought our own birthday cake :-)

Photo re-cap of the past week

After touring our 8th temple, we started to have some fun with our pictures... 

 

Starting a little late...

I kinda meant to start this before coming to Egypt, but better late than never!

This is what I've done so far:

5/2-5/4
- Good-bye BBQ dinner and an awesome chocolate chip pancake breakfast- you guys are amazing! I miss you all so much!
- Flight from Boston to Frankfurt. (7+ hours)
- Checked out the McDonald's in the Germany airport with Meg, coffee was like 5 bucks (boo exchange rates!).
- Flight from Frankfurt to Cairo. (4+ hours)
- Arrived at the Flamenco Hotel and tried my first slice of Egyptian pizza, which was actually pretty good! 

5/4- 5/10
- Overnight train to Aswan.
- Bus to Luxor
- Flight back to Cairo
- We saw at least 8 temples and tombs, including King Tut's (awesome!), pictures to come later.

5/11
- Pyramids of Giza.
- We rode camels to the pyramids, tried to make a human pyramid and and stuffed ourselves on some fantastic Egyptian pita, dips and kabobs at lunch.
- Shesha with the locals.

Our class basically ran around for the past week doing as much touristy stuff as possible and we're back in Cairo where we will be taking classes for the remainder of our trip.

I'll be in two classes here, a photography class and an international affairs class. I'm pretty stoked for both and will upload pictures soon! (i promise!)

                                                                                           Photo credit: Victoria Stewart

- MGS