Highlights of the past few days

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!