Settled In

My first two weeks in Egypt have been so full of things to do that I've hardly had a chance to look around and be fully cognizant of the fact that I am in Egypt, the land of King Tut and mummies and oases and hieroglyphics.

My flight landed at 3:00 in the morning, and even at that odd hour the airport was crammed full of people. I had to walk through a gauntlet of them in order to make it past baggage claim, and I imagined as I walked through the rows of jostling, curious faces craning their necks for a glimpse of the disembarking passengers that this must be something like what it would be like to be a celebrity on the red carpet.

School registration happened, slowly and inefficiently (in true Egyptian fashion), over the course of several days. In order to obtain my student visa, for example, I had to:

(1) go to registration and obtain instruction sheet
(2) go to the Business Support office to see if the forms that I sent in to the New York office had actually been passed along to the office here in Cairo
(3) I then had to leave my passport for a few days
(4 )then come pick it up
(5) take additional form to the Visa Services office to have someone sign and verify that I am registered for class
(6) take said form to a third office for verification that I have paid
(7) return all red tape to Business Support Office
(8) wait for visa ~ 2 weeks
(9) go pick it up.

Step 9 is yet to be completed. But I must say it seemed like it would have been simpler for everyone if the necessary people had come to the registration fair and sat at the tables the students had to circle around anyway rather then requiring several hundred students to run the Indy 500 around the campus!

Nonetheless, like the rest of this wonderfully Eastern and Western city, bursting at the seams with activity and relentlessly developing even amidst rubble and general decay, the system somehow manages to function in spite of itself.