"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love."

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor and exquisite philosopher, has long held a special place in my psyche for that quote alone, but after delving into some of his other tidbits this evening i am driven to share:

Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

Men exist for the sake of one another.

Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

This weekend reminded me of Thanksgiving. Usually during Thanksgiving break all my friends scatter off to be with family and I stay in the District to enjoy a few responsibility-free days of unplanned pleasure to catch up on school work and simply feel time pass. That is exactly what I’ve been doing. Thursday night I went to my friend Amirah’s house for iftar and enjoyed grilled, stuffed pigeons for the second time. While I was waiting for 3li to pick me up for Taraweeh I was sitting outside her building and an old man with an apartment on the 1^st floor leaned out his window and offered me tea. After a little persuasion and broken conversation in arabic I agreed, he disappeared into his house, returned a few minutes later and handed me a cup of well-sugared tea, wished me a happy Ramadan and disappeared back into his home. Before I left he introduced his beautiful grandchildren to me and took back the cup. It is moments like this that make me really, really love Egypt and its quirky people....

Friday I spent all day in bed flipping thru travel guides between naps. And then in the evening met up with Sameh and we chilled felucca-style on the Nile with Noura and their friend Yasser.

Today’s challenge was supposed to finding a new apartment but I failed at that. It's stressing me out, but weather is too nice and the city's atmosphere too joyful for me to genuinely feel discouraged. Perhaps after 'Eid I'll have a refreshed perspective and will to find something. On a happier note: I’ve gotten all my post-midterm textbooks and am enthusiastically nusring the academic flame that was rekindled last week. Perhaps I won't taint my transcript with mediocrity afterall, inshaAllah.

Tomorrow I leave for Dahab, in the Sinai across the gulf of Aqaba from Saudia Arabia, and I couldn't be happier. I have to work in the evening, so I won't be able to take the bus with the other divers *feigned innocent disappointment* and instead I get to be co-pilot and drive with Sameh. Hopefully a detour to Sharm elSheik or St. Catherine's Monastary will decorate the drive?

I am repeatedly impressed by AUC students ability to sit in the most incontinent of locations. It is not uncommon to have a dozen girls sitting at the foot of a stair case simply chilling, usually with sourpuss looks on their faces and cigarettes in hand. Other times, it is a girl and her boyfriend sitting just far enough a part and centered on the stair so perfectly that it is infuckingpossible to continue up the stairs without some awkward moment where you interrupt their conversation and they make you feel invasive for – heaven forbid – going to class. The quirks of AUC campus bring me an odd comfort, but should I have not been blessed with such a lazy temperament and easily-entertained sense of humor, they would inspire nothing short of insanity. Nevertheless, the first rounds of mid-term exams has passed with far better results that expected (alHamdulila) and just one nominal day of classes (as nearly all international students are leaving tonite… Greg to Palestine, Amanda and Ali to Israel and Turkey, Sasha to Lebanon and Jordan…) stands between me and Eid alFitr break. Mmmm…

Well, it has officially reached that point in the academic semester where all those brief moments of mediocrity accumulate into massive moments of anxiety. It seems midterm exams wreak the same havoc on both sides of the atlantic…luckily, the end of Ramadan brings with it the end of the Islamic calendar and a much appreciated opportunity to makes some “new years” resolutions. Returning from a lovely 8-day vacation will be like turning a whole new page. Highlights include:

A re-discovered ambition to actually engage myself in my classes and coursework at AUC.

Last week our Arabic professor gave this long shpeal about how silly it was to study Arabic unless you wanted to master the language, not just talk showyya showyya. After he finished, I realized the same idea could go for all my classes: It seems that if my academic life is a baseball game, I’ve gotten four balls at bat and walked. I now have the choice to run for home or get tagged out. Home base, baby. Unfortunately two all-nighters, a paper, two midterms, and a realllllllllllly poorly-timed quiz are between me and this hopeful dash. Which means the remainder of this post will be short and lacking in any real wit or style, heh.

Sasha and I’s strategically-improved hunt for a new apartment...

Yes, shari3 abdel 7amid said has been lovely. But we are relocating in search of something far more ideal, slightly less invasive, and overall more structurally sound. AlHamdulila. I will wish the shisha-smoking, job-lacking, patriarchial-yet-respectful men that basically live outside our apartment goodbye with light-hearted enthusiasm. The toothless and eternally grateful bowab will be genuinely missed. Unfortunately, the comedy of errors blossomed into full and total chaos as our house is literally falling apart. We have decided to be exquisitely picky about our new abode: We’re looking for a gorgeous old European-style building and spacious balcony. We will have fully-functioning appliances and light fixtures that are securely fixed to the wall. A landlord that has some appreciation for written monthly bills rather than ball-parked estimates about the water and gas. We will remain in noisy-polluted-sketchy wistr alBalady (downtown) because the ease of rolling out of bed twenty minutes before class and not being late is too good to pass up, and the local falafel and ful shops are priceless. We’re also hoping to find another place up high in the building since our air is relatively fresh up there… but maybe this time around we will find something with a fire escape, hah. I am excited to wish the tempestuous bitch of a washing machine we have and the burden of handwashing our clothes ma3salama, too.

‘Eid and the mental-emotional feast that will come with it!

I’ll be heading to Marsa 3lam for the week to enjoy the Red Sea, daily diving, and the sweet company of Sameh and the other diving folks. Sameh (who may very easily be my divine complement) has become an inexhaustible source of joy to me! He might be a 6-year old boy trapped in the body of a grown man, but he also has some moments of insight that make me doubt any perceived childishness. The best part is when we hang out we frolic in our imagination; we’ve plotted the most amazing two-year world trek from San Fransisco to Sydney that deserves an entire post of its own. Eitherway, i splurged at the AUC bookstore for a colloquial egyptian text book, really fascinating Islamic gender thoery book called "Gender Jihad" and travel guide to Morrocco (hem, hem: chere Melyn in February!), so ‘Eid will be a week of sunshine and salt water, diving both into books and under the sea, punctuated by naps, good food, and whatever else finds me.

Some photos and my best wishes to anyone who reads this.

Not exactlty sure why, but this image to me sums up what walking around downtown at night feels like.

The aforementioned team sokar&shai, imagination-syle globetrotting extrodinaires.






Ali, Amanda' flatemate, who continues to impress me everyday with her mad organizational skills and passion for STAR Women's Classes and the amazing women we are teaching from Sudan, Ethiopia, Morrocco, and Iraq. Photos of them to come soon, momkin!









The Citadel from the corniche at Alexandria. Mmmmm.










This is my flatemate Sasha. If you see her, tell her to come home, I miss her. She has made aquaintance with a sweet-talking Palestinian-Jordanian guy who holds her hostage in his company mansion in Masr Gedidah. He will be her escort to Lebanon and Jordan while I am enjoying the serenity of the Red Sea. Which is more appealing: Touring war-torn Levantine countries versus sunsets and scuba diving...why is this decision so much harder than it sounds?

I am sitting in a Chili’s in Alexandria studying for the second of a long line of mid-term exams but instead decided to take this opportunity to enlighten my beloved blog-enthusiasts. Life as of late has been overwhelming but blissful. Last week Moodi tried to express to me that two key factors to the Egyptian psyche are high emotions and religiousity. Both of have which are growing more and more apparent as Ramadan reaches is height and a intimate friendships blossom with the fabulous Egyptians I’ve met.

Ben asked me to explain to him what it is like to be in a city where people are hungrary all day, and this is my attempt to describe the idiosyncracies of Ramadan and the month-long fast that comes with it. I’ve felt weird about writing about it, as if it had to finish before I could truly start to digest it, but here’s a first stab at it, if nothing else…

[ coming soon ]

This is Moodi. He works at the hostel Sasha stayed at when she arrived and has proved to be our local life-saver, see post about the shaming of the local grochery boy. He is from a village in the Nile Delta called Mufriyya, or something similar that I can't accurately pronounce, and it is where most of the Egyptian politicans come from. He invited me to his village last week for Iftar and I met his mother, who cooked for me the most amazing food! I think I liked meeting his youngest cousin best... I forgot his name, but his dad used to smoke his water pipe allllllll the time and would have him get the coals for him, so the poor little boy has been given the life-long nickname Shisha. Adorable, no? Check out my other blog for video clips of driving thru his village. I literally just held my camera out the window, so they are very poor quality and depict nothing in particular, but you can play "Only-in-Egypt 'I Spy'" with them... bonus points if you can accurately count the coffee/shisha places or spot the horse-drawn wagons amongst city buses and taksis.

Our lovely Amanda celebrated her 21st birthday on Greg's pimp rooftop apartment last week, too. The gathering was a soooooo nice, even though I was only there for a few minutes. It was cool to see the different clusters of people we know in the same spot at once: AUC graduate students, Aladin, Walid, Ramy and the rest of the Imbaba gang, our CairoUniversity boys, several of the SCUBAdivers, and even a tolken British guy (Greg's landlords extremely attractive son) to make the event truley cosmopolitian. Perhaps the happiest moment was the two seconds after we sang "Happy Birthday" to Amanda when the Egyptians began singing it in Arabic..."Sana helwa, ya gameela, sana helwa ya gameela...". Please note, Amanda is terrifically picky and in place of a proper cake, Ali is holding a tray of peanut-buttered apples with candles in the photo.

This is a verrrrrrrry blurry picture of Karim, Osama's buddy, and his Bulgarian ladyfriend and her beautiful daughter. I'm posting this photo just because Cafe Pasqua, Osama's local favorite and where this pic was taken, makes me feel like I am back in the Davenport back at AU... They play jazzy music and have chess boards and books lying around. There's also live Arabic music at night, to ensure I am indeed still inCairo.



It's getting chilly in Cairo!! In fact, at 4am when this photo was taken, I was actually COLD! When we were learning weather-related words in Arabic this week and I responded to a question about DC weather right now with words like HOT and HUMID I realized I was forgetting that time is passing back home too... It's deep into autumn there. I'm curious if depressing DC wintertime will be missed?





These are photos of the church I teach at on Monday nights... I still trip on how beautiful and odd Coptic Cairo is everytime I go there. I repeat what I said about florescent lighting and its intricate connection to all things religious here in Egypt.... Funny phrases from my classes this past week.

"Miss Aminah - I have a problem. When you speak, you're Ds sound like Ss, your Ls sound like Rs, and I do not hear your Rs at all. Bishwaaaaaysh, min fadlik!"

Student: "So, you mean it's a modifcation of the verb" Me: "uh...I guess so?" to be continued....

My messy room was kind of getting out of control. So when I got home last I proceeded to tidy-up like it was my sole mission in life. After starting the massive pile of laundry and sweeping under the bed I realized I had uncovered a few less tangible things that were kind of out of control. The past week or so has been decorated with subtle frustrations and blatant comments about how bad my Arabic is. I mean, the people who tell me this are my friends, of course – shop keepers and taksi drivers continue to insist I “bitakallam kwayyis”….but the people who know me and care about me and know how long I’ve been hear assure me, I suck at Arabic and supremely suck at Egyptian colloquial. but! I’ve figured out why picking up Arabic has been so difficult… Beyond the fact, fus-ha (modern standard) is USELESS outside of the classroom. The problem is, I am not thinking in Arabic. French was easy to learn because I was able to think in the language... I have yet to grasp an Arab mentality or psyche for myself. But in the last 24 hours I have committed myself to aquirering one, and things are already looking hopeful. I've forced myself to ask how to identify everything in the room if I am with a native speaker (and so my room and our apartment will become labeled like a lifesize picture dictionary, heh) and I forbid myself to complete simple tasks with English.

On a more exciting note, tonite was my first night teaching with STAR, an AUC organization that teaches Sudanese refugees... and it was really exciting. One of the women invited me to her home in Dokki for Iftar on Friday! On verra.

MashaAllah! My first day teaching at LAMB was the best teaching experience I’ve ever had! Things went smoother than a satin dress against a bottle of Greygoose… I got a photocopy of a text book last week and absolutely no preparation and training and I was the one teacher assigned to a class without a tutor or an assistant, so I was mildly nervous… the anxiety peaked when my supervisor told me my class was supposed to start at the same time as tonite’s Iftar and that it “would probably be ok” that I was wearing hijab and am not Christian, but “to be prepared for some resistance. Or at least a few attempts to convert me” lol. He also told me my nose piercing, chicly tied back scarf, and quirky personality would probably win them over. All of which did, but I thank God, FLY, and the intimidating kids of Garfield Elementary for such amazing classroom grace, rather than the nose ring, heh… it was magical! I tell people that I feel most alive and most ‘me’ when I teach, but I now know it’s entirely true. Happily, this is the one thing I am kind of good at, and I am just excited something I love has overlapped with an ability to do it well and help people in the process…alHamdulila! I am teaching two blocks and the first one is outstanding – their English is impressive and they are willing to engage in my pseudo-cheesy teaching style. The second class is older and it’s tricky for them to take someone younger than them seriously, but luckily their English isn’t strong enough for them to rebel…yet!

Coptic Cairo is really fascinating too. The school is inside a big Coptic church and when I was leaving it was dark out and the whole place glowed like some medieval castle. Only in the Middle East do blue and green florescent lighting go so well with religion! I’m going to try to take photos next week. Mar Girgis, where the church/school is, is very quiet and very interesting. I broke fast right before my class in the metro station and it was so nice: a little boy ran up and gave me a date and so I split my candy bar with him, another man gave me a packaged date-brownie (I guess the modern day, on-the-go adapatation to dates, heh) and it was just very comforting. Jon Hill, my supervisor was telling me how Cairo is not a city of diversity and it surprised me. I was attracted to Egypt because of its beautiful cultural pluralism, but I’m realizing the Christians are much more of a marginalized minority than I thought. It was awkward to hear the call of the muzzeins echo into the walls of the church, as if even the sounds of the majority religion could be escaped. Then again, there was a certain tinge of un-sacredness to the place too, as my supervisor continued smoking and cursing while entering the church yard. Sometimes I find Muslims hypocritical for altering their behavior SO drastically within holy places or during holy times, but I guess a distinction is still better than a complete disregard? Eitherway, I am very glad I decided to work in Coptic Cairo and am looking forward to spending Christmas and New Year’s with my students’ families and friends… Here's to another new adventure.

<-- The kitchen-aftermath of a very well-enjoyed home-cooked Iftar. Belisa, who is this crazy interesting Brazillian girl that Sasha met at her hostel when she arrived, was living with us for the past week and has just left for London. Side note, she is getting her master’s degree in poliSci with this really cool program that requires you to live in 3-4 different countries over a period of 14 months. We had Iftar together last week as our final meal and wound up talking politics, and religion, and academia, and men, and languages, and life generally for a few hours. I’m bummed she’s gone because she was giving me hope of learning some decent colloquial Arabic – en fin! - but also because I’ve been thinking about how transient our lives are sometimes. Yesterday someone said, I wish I could live in the US for six months, and then a different country for six months, and then a different country for six months… And I was just thinking about how amazing that would be, but how unforgiving time would be. Life would pass by so quickly. I know study abroad is hyped up to be this time of infinite self-discovery, but lately I’ve just felt kind of numb. It’s like life is a sort of anesthesia that just won’t kick in – I get very happy, but I don’t go under, yet I still can’t really function like normal either. I don’t mind that I haven’t actually made my bed in weeks and that books, stray piasters, empty cartons, and clothes are tangled between the sheets. All I know is that I am happy for the time being to exist in a state of shrunken ambitions because I am still optimistic about the possibilities.

Eitherway, it’s getting cooler in Cairo. I rarely sleep with my window open and I find myself turning off my ceiling fan from chill. It’s October and I’ve never flirted with an Autumn as pleasurably mild. Some of my travel plans are finally coming together, since ma chere Melyn will be in Morrocco next semester and Emily Hyatt invited me to Israel after the Jewish holidays in October…

This past weekend I disappeared to Hurghada again and it was blissful. The weekend was entirely different – the crowd was nearly comatose in comparison to last week’s quirky chill bunch and fasting put a different spin on the trip, too– but the advanced diving course was exciting and the tranquility and sweet company were very appreciated. I basically spent the entire week with Sameh and Sawaan, but tried to snap a few pics of everyone else too. The night dive, deep dive, and wreck dive were absolutely pimp. I’ve forbidden myself to go out of town again anytime too soon, but I am plotting some plans for Dahab or Marsa Alam during the Eid alFitr break… on verra.

1. Osama's binat getting out of the water.
2. Underwater group shot, last weekend.
3. Greg is the resident pirate.
4. Osama, Sawwan, me, and Sameh.
5. the advanced course taking the Zodiac out for our drift dive.
6. team chai&sokar
7,8,9,10. a little chill time on the upper deck.