The Corniche is a 10 or 12 lane divided highway that runs along the Mediterranean coast of Alexandria. It's very fast moving traffic, about the same type of road as the Washington beltway, except that all of the city streets turn directly onto it rather than having exits and ramps. It's also open to any pedestrians brave enough to try to make it across. Or to people who want to stroll across 6 lanes of traffic carrying babies and groceries, which I've also seen. Us flagship kids have been warned many times never NEVER NEVER ever to ever cross the Corniche.
I was sitting on the wall last night, on the ocean-side of the Corniche with some friends, when a car slowed down next to the curb, and backed up to right in front of where we were sitting. Oh great, we thought, here come some losers to tell us "welcome to egypt" and ask "boyfriend? boyfriend?" But we were surprised when they didn't bother us at all! We were also surprised when they popped the trunk of their car open, whipped out the biggest prawns I've ever seen, and started merchanting to the passersby. A crowd started gathering over at their trunk, so we went to go check it out. They had huuuuge baskets of freshly caught fish, shrimp, and those giant prawns. Selling seafood out of the trunk of your car...sketchy? Nahhhhh.
Tonight I also saw a guy, balancing (no hands!) a HUGGGE square basket on his head, which was seriously about the size of a refrigerator box. He was doing this while simultaneously riding a bicycle on the Corniche highway. I really wish I had a picture of that one.
This story must be prefaced with a disclaimer: I'm not the type of person to go around getting in real trouble. I'm willing to do pretty dumb things, but only if I'm good and sure it won't end up causing myself or others serious harm. I have been and will be very cautious about the people here, and I use common sense. I can take care of myself, and I know how to surround myself with people who can help.
Well! That said, I had a pretty odd evening last night.
Hira, Hannah, Zenit, and I went out after dinner for a walk and a snack, as dinner here is about the same quantity of food as breakfast in the states. We got some falafel, and met the rest of our group at a big movie theater, to see our first Egyptian film! Unfortunately, they had miscounted when getting the tickets and only had two left for the sold-out movie. So, the 4 of us all went to a next-door movie theater and saw another movie together, call Al-Farah, the Wedding, which was very good, (but confusing, of course!). After the movie we hung out in a coffee house for a while drinking tea, and then began to walk back down the street to the tram, window-shopping along the way.
A cute kid about our age or a little younger was selling balloons, and handed each one of us one, which we refused, of course. People will plunk their merchandise in your lap all the time and walk away, then come back and expect you to pay up. But this guy seemed legit. We got balloons, matching the colors that we were wearing. Sweet!
We kept walking along the street, and balloon guy walked with us, asking us about how we like Egypt, etc etc. All of a sudden, this old, homeless-looking guy with no more than 3 teeth total comes up and starts arguing with the balloon dude, thinking that he was bothering us. We decide to take this opportune moment to escape from both of them, and run down the street, balloons in hand, toward the tram. On the way, Hira trips! Slides! On the sidewalk! But we pick her up and leap onto the tram, into the women-only car, phew! Safe. ...Or so we thought.
Then our buddy the balloon seller gets on the tram. All of the other women are glaring at him, and us, as if we somehow let him into their domain. So we tell him to go, but he stays to pay for our tickets. All of a sudden we see a toothless grin pop up in the open window beside us, the homeless old man is back to join the fun. The tram is starting to move now and the old man has disappeared, so we yell at balloon man until he leaves. He does this by climbing, through the window of the women's section to the men's section of the tram. We decide to get off on the stop before our dorms, to ditch the balloon kid before we head back.
So, we disembark from the tram, and Hira's toe is bleeding so we visit a little shop to get some water and disinfectant, and the nice man at the store helps us out, so we give him our balloons for his three young kids. In the meantime, the balloon guy has spotted us again, and comes to save us from the guy working at the store. We finally make him understand that the man is just helping us. Just then, who shows up but the crazy, grinning, toothless old man, who we originally thought was good-intentioned, but now just keeps standing closer and closer. Ew. We all are walking back and forth, trying to get the old guy to leave, so the men who are sitting outside the cafe on the street stand up and help us chase him away, nearly breaking out into a fight for us. They tell us to sit for a while so they can make sure he doesn't come back, and pull up some chairs, and hand us cups of tea. Okay. Cool. We make plans to meet up with the rest of the group, since their movie is over now too, and we call our friend Scott to come sit with us, because balloon guy is starting to get creepier.
Anyway, Scott arrived, and we all walked together to meet the group, and we ran into these two really big protective Egyptian guys, Nadir and Ahmed, who work with our program, and they caused a scene in the street that drew a pretty big crowd and almost broke out into the second fight of the evening! We had to shove 7 girls and one guy into a car and escape to the Corniche because of innocent little Sabir the balloon boy.
As usual, the night ended happily with our habitual drinking tea by the sea, but man. Who would have thought we'd get involved with such a mushkila just by accepting a free balloon!
Monday, June 8: Orientation... We had a really cool tour of the Library of Alexandria, which has been rebuilt to pay homage to the original library which was destroyed. The new design is very cool, with a lot of symbolism in the architecture, to mimic elements in Egyptian history. The library looks from the outside like a rising moon or sun facing the Mediterranean, with eye-shaped windows, and pyramid-like shapes along the front of a connected building. On the back of the building there are a bunch of cool scripts from ancient languages...I don't know what they say. Inside it has eleven floors, and space for 8 million books!
I got to talk to Bridey to say happy birthday! Yay :)
June 9: We had to do a craaaazy scavenger hunt all around the city to take pictures of different significant monuments. My group was only girls, and we got a lot of psssssssttts and invitations from guys on the way, which was lame. We talked to a LOT of people and learned that anyone in Alex is willing to give you directions, even if they have no clue what you are looking for, haha. So we trekked across the city, and finally gave up without quite finishing. Ohhhh welllllllll.....
At night we found a sweeet cafe on the water, which we've been back to a few times. It's kind of tiki themed, with palm trees, and it's called the silsilla, which means necklace, I guess because it wraps around a little cove and sits looking right out over the water. We're pretty much VIP there now, and the owner always makes sure we get the best spot in the house. They play Celine Dion, whose music is taken seriously over here and beloved by all Egyptians. Even the 20-something-year-old guys. Hm.
June 10th, Wednesday: First day of class! I'm only studying Arabic for the summer, but I have three separate classes. The schedule is realllyyyyy confusing, because there are five classes, based loosely on the levels of the students, and each has a different schedule. But! I'm in the highest level Fusha class (Modern Standard Arabic), which has what I though was going to be a really intimidating teacher, but who is turning out to be tough but really really good. He has a really deep voice, and sounds very cool when he speaks the very formal Fusha Arabic. My second class is Aaamiyya Masriyya, or Egyptian Dialect. When I got the syllabus for this class it said it was for "near-fluent speakers"...woahhhhh! The lady we have for Aamia is pretty cool, we've mostly learned about the vocabulary you need to do some good shopping, yay! The third class is Media, which I haven't had yet.
Thursday my group is finished class at 11am, so I had most of the day free, and used it to just chilllll out! It was great, I finally unpacked. Hehe... Today is the beginning of our Friday-Saturday weekend, which will take some getting used to. The program reserved part of the pool at the University club for us to use this morning, so Monica and I took advantage of thatttt, which was AMAZINGGGGG! My shoulders are finally starting to tan, since I never wear sleeveless shirts here.
After the pool, I went SHOPPING! And used some of that vocab, yeaah! Got some delish baklava (for free!), and a pretty scarf.
Peace out homes, sorry for the lengthy day-by-day summaries. If I don't write this stuff down I'm definitely going to forget it all!
Thursday, June 11, 2009
I saw my first accident today! Or, rather, I heard it. I just ignored the loud smashing sound at first and continued walking, because that's a pretty normal thing to hear in the city. When every single person on the street around us started running simultaneously in one direction though, I realized what must have happened. It turned out a minibus had been hit by one of the bigger buses in an intersection. How exciting! No one was hurt, luckily.
I'm really surprised that I haven't seen more accidents though. The people here drive the way they live, really really close together. Cars somehow manage to fit into tiny gaps in traffic, and a taxi ride is...quite the experience. Parking is also pretty insane. Seeing cars double parked on the street is very normal, and I've seen some pretty crazy triple parking, cars parking sideways in the spaces between other parallel parked cars, or driving up on the sidewalk to triple park.
After we walked by the big accident, we crossed a small one-way side street and saw a backup of about 4 or 5 cars that had turned onto the street, but couldn't move because of the car that was driving up the street the wrong direction. I'm not sure how they resolved that...
I've been in Alexandria, Egypt for...2 days now, and I think I'm already starting to think in Egyptian. Right now it's 1 am and I am exhausted from the sun (shems) and the day's adventures, but here are some quick highlights of my first couple days:
Alexandria....it's about 25 miles long and maybe 5 wide, stretching along the Mediterranean Sea. We live in the dorms of "Kulliat San Markos" (Saint Mark's College) about 3 blocks from the water. Tonight and yesterday at sunset we walked through the tunnel under the Corniche, the large road that runs along the sea, and went out onto the beach to put our feet in the water. SOOOO amazing to be able to stand in the waves and watch the sun go down with the lights of the city surrounding us. Ahhhhhh!
It's been pretty hot, but not uncomfortable. It's not yet as hot as the summer in Maryland, and not nearly as humid. I hear it'll definitely get a lot hotter though....hehe. But, I'm ready!
TRAFFIC is craaaaaaazyyyyyy! You WILL get run over if you step into the street without paying attention. People here use the horn pretty much constantly. And they only use headlights to flash at pedestrians when they get in the way!
Everyone is soooo friendly. The dorms we live in are very conservative, and tonight all of the girls threw us a party and cooked us tons of felafel and fool and other egyptian foods and we all danced and sang egyptian songs :)
Guys in the streets are pretty annoying, it's kind of funny the number of times we'll hear "Waalcoome to Egeept" as we walk by in the street though. The boys hiss at us to get our attention, so we call them snakes.
Mostly so I can remember, the basic details:
Friday June 5: leave airport in Dulles, fly through the night. Watched He's not that into you, or somehting like that.
Saturday June 6: Arrived Frankfurt, wandered confused around the airport for a while, found a place to leave our bags, got a really bad rate exchanging dollars for euros, then took the train straight from the airport into the city!!! We saw some awesome old churches, from as early as 1300s, and walked around old town Frankfurt. We tried some Fleischschnitzel, german beers, and apfel streudel! Yummmm. We ran into a group of british guys, who tried to get us to come get "leathered" with them. Haha! We declined, though we did learn a new way to high five.
Flew through the night again on Lufthansa, soooo much nicer airline. Real silverware!! Sat next to an Egyptian guy, and talked to him in Arabic a lot. He wants us to visit his stainless steel shop in Alexandria.
Sunday June 7: Arrived in Alex 2 am! Got through the customs and swine flu checks, and headed for the dorms by bus. Got to the dorms and were greeted by lots of lovely Egyptian ladies and girls from the dorm who helped us get settled. I live with Rachel, my same roomie from college park. Slept a few hours. (literally a few)
Woke up, lunch at noon, (yum!) met Mama Hoda, hilarious lady in charge of food, and Iman, in charge of the housing, learned the rules of the house etc. Walked from the dorms to the University of Alexandria, where the Flagship program has its own floor at the language center, and we have our own "dar" with a kitchen, a/c, comfy couches, and computers etc. Met all the professors, and then we had our placement testsssss ahhhhh in both aamia (egyptian dialect), and fusha (more formal ...and more difficult...Modern Standard Arabic.)
After orientation stuff was over Ahmed and Iman (the two students who are our contact people in the respective girls and boys dorms, and very very fun and nice) took us around the downtown part of the city by tram (women and men ride in separate cars, it costs a quarter ginea, which is less than 5 cents in US dollars) to Radio Shack and atms to get chargers and converters etc.
Dinner lezeez! Afterwards I went around with Hira and Hannah to downtown area and went to watch the big futbol game between egypt and Algeria in a cafe.
Sleep
Monday June 8:
Woke up, breakfast! Left with the whole group to do some touring of learning about Alex. Went to see a huge old fort at the entrance to the bay, amaaazing! Visited an old mosque and I didnt have a headscarf with me, but I borrowed one and went inside, I'm so glad I did. It was beautiful and grand.
Had some more orientation stuff at the dar, then Muatez (another one of the young people) took us to the market, or supposedly. Really he took us on a whirlwind tour around the city, downtown, saw some catacombs, ate the best falafel in the city, and learned a very important secret lesson. 3 hours later we were back in the dorms in time for dinner. Then afterwards, walked along the corniche, and went to a cafe (ah-hoo-a) for shay (tea) and sheesha (hookah). PHEW!
THEN we came back to the dorm in time to be serenaded with our third dinner, prepared by the adorable dorm girls, so sweet! Dance party in their room, we played the egyptian version of spin the bottle which is actually a lot like truth or dare. Sang LOUDLY in arabic! crammed about 20 girls into a dorm room. They are all the sweetest people i have ever met. And here I am! Good night. Maasalaaamaaaaa!
