A regular day

I haven't been posting very often because I want to describe everything in vivid detail, and that takes time, which I am finding to be in short supply in between taking advantage of opportunities to go and do things and making a valiant effort to be a diligent student. I'll try to at least keep a log of what is going on from now on, even if I have to leave out some of the color and anecdotes...I'm also going to be going back and posting about things that ocurred in the past, so those posts will have old dates and you'll have to scroll back through past postings to find them, so keep an eye out for that.

This past weekend we were invited by Krissy, a friend from the dorm who is dating an Egyptian (and has been for 4 years) to go with them and some of her boyfriend's friends to stay in a villa in Ain Sukhna, a resort town on the Red Sea. It is just beginning to get warm enough for that here (it was in the 80s for the first time this week) and we were eager to get tan...we are all winter-pale, particularly compared to most of the Egyptians walking around, who are naturally a lovely olive shade. We were there Thursday and all day Friday, and we spent Friday evening singing and playing the guitar on the beach...it's funny the songs that the Egyptians knew--they knew all the words to "Hotel California," but no one had ever heard of "Brown-Eyed Girl."

Nothing in particular happened today...I went to class all morning, then sat in the school courtyard and had some tea and talked to some of my friends, including some who came over to AUC to visit although they are currently enrolled at ILI, another language school in Mohandiseen. There is a fair amount of crossover between the schools as ILI is offered on month-long terms and is cheaper, which is more amenable to many students for various personal reasons. After that break, I met Tanisha at the dorm and we went to Beano's (which is kind of like Starbucks) and ate dinner and did homework for 5 hours.

Some girls from my class are having a potluck dinner at their apartment on Friday. Class is relaxed, but most of the chatting that we do is in Arabic about topics pertinent to our current vocabulary as part of practice exercises, so it's not too terribly conducive to getting to know people beyond a superficial level. We do a fair amount of mingling in the courtyard, but the girls in my class were already friends with each other because they had class together last semester, and I had my own friends whom I met in the dorm in the week or so before class started and who were new students like me, so me and my classmates haven't really had a reason to do too much bonding (except to commiserate over the volume of new vocaublary that we are assigned). They seem like very fun, normal girls, and I'm looking forward to spending some time with them outside of class.

I am now about to do my final worksheet for the evening, read a chapter of The Other Boleyn Girl, and call it a night.

And that's an average day.

Morning traffic in Nuweiba, a small town on the Red Sea

They let the goats out every morning to clean the city by eating the trash, and then a real-live goatherd calls them back to where they belong with a horn!