but...I'm not. For the past few days I've been acting as if I were the Energizer bunny, but - quite unfortunately - my battery does not 'keep going and going'. In fact, I think I'm down to about the last 2% of charge which I have to stretch over about the next 12 hours. It's all worth it though because I've been having a great time and in a few days I'll be home with all the time in the world to attend unimportant little things like sleeping and eating.
Yesterday I started my morning with tennis. I didn't manage to wake up at 6:30 as I'd planned to eat breakfast beforehand, so I opted instead to simply inhale a forkful of tuna on my way out the door. I think that actually might have worked a little bit. My muscles seemed to work much more properly than the day before. As I mentioned earlier, I was playing my favorite ballboy Mohy. I also played the head coach Gamal, who - as always (but usually because of reasons other than his skill as a tennis player) - beat me. I beat Mohy pretty badly, much to his dismay. He played well but I think he was a little nervous because it's been so long since we've played and it was close the last time. I was actually pretty surprised I won at all. He's really getting better quickly. A little note on how the tennis coaching/ballboying system works at Nady Bank el Ahly where I play. There are 8 ballboys - Mohy, Ahmed, Karim, Abaza, Islam, Hamada and two others who I never learned the names of - who I see when I go in the mornings to play. No matter when I go really, they're there, indicating to me that they don't go to school. Instead they come everyday and run around after tennis balls for 1 to 2 pound tips per hour of work. For them, though, it's really quite an investment in their future. I realized with time that, when there are no customers, the ballboys all play against each other as much as possible and they develop quickly as tennis players from all the on-court hours. When I first came, Mohy was strictly a ballboy. Occasionally he'd hit with a customer while one of the coaches (Sayed or Gamal) was changing. Yesterday when I went, the reason that I had to play Coach Gamal before Mohy was that Mohy was giving his own 'lesson'. He must be around 18 or 19 so now, having been a ballboy for who knows how long, he's becoming a coach. I expect that both Sayed and Gamal ascended to coach-hood in the same way. A 'lesson' with one of them involves nothing more than playing a match with him. If you hit the ball out/in the net they say 'NOOO!!' and if you hit a good shot they say 'yes. do that again.' Quite clearly, I don't exactly go the club for the great advice that I get from the coaches. They're decent tennis players and I usually have pretty close tennis matches with them but they just have never learned why certain shots work or certain shots don't so it's near impossible for them to notice little mistakes in form in other people and tell them how to correct them. Mohy and Ahmed (the second oldest ballboy) are always playing when I show up unannounced. I was here on Karim's first day. They had him be a ballboy for me back on that March day. He was chubby, extremely nervous, wearing sneakers a few sizes too big and very confused about the rules of the tennis game and when would be a good time to pick up the ball and give it to the server (let alone who was the server). When I saw him yesterday he had been trained just like the others. He could keep track of the score he always threw the ball perfectly, he'd lost a lot of weight and he'd gone back to playing barefoot since they were too big.
After a quick shower I was more than ready to take a nice nap. Just as I settled down to do so, my uncle Amr, aunt Samaha and cousin Jena arrived. I sat with them for a little while and then went to go see the movie Hassan w Mor2os with my mother. The film was good but it had a little more violence than what I would have been necessary. It's a movie with a great story and if had a little more direction with the scenes it could be really good. From there I went on to Dokki in an attempt to sea AlaaCandace,DC and Dina and 3am Mohamed. I was a bit later than I expected to go so the only ones there I knew were Alaa and Amed. Both of them are really nice but saying hi them but, they had work to get to, so I didn't stay long. I moved on to Garden City where I met [uo with Basma, Abir and Noha. We went to Costa for dinner and coffee and then walked around for a while. Noha got tired so Basma and I took her and Abir home and went to go get icecream for el abd. We almost arrived there before we realized that we didn't actually want icecream so we turned around. I spent the night at Basma's house which involved absolutely no sleeping. We stayed up until 7 this morning talking. At 7, I rushed back to Mohandessein to play tennis one last time and Basma finally went to sleep. The tennis was fun. I gave the boys some old rackets and tennis shoes we had in the apartment and they were really happy with them. I finally beat Coach Gamal, a very hard feat because of his strong tendency toward changing the score in his favor when he is losing. I am not so sure that my ability to beat him now stems from my personal improvement or a lessening of the cheating from his side. Basma and I were going to catch the 11 o'clock bus from AUC's current campus to AUC's new campus to check it out so I showered quickly and left my house around 10. When I called Basma's house it turned out she's still sleeping, quite logical I suppose so I just came and sat here on the AUC campus using the internet. I'm planning on meeting Laura around 1 anyway since we haven't seen each other in a while.
At the beginning of the semester, if I wanted to go to Tahrir Square, I'd go to the busstop by my house, sit on bus 102 and pay 50 piastres to be dropped off right in the square. Sinc ethe gas prices rose though they have changed the starting point of bus 102 to a little before the busstop by my house. Now the buses cost 1 pound and come to our busstop already bursting full. Today was particularly bad...wow...we were quite literally stuffed in like pickles. That along with the 26 hours without sleep I've spent so far led to one very hard to handle bus ride. I just about collapsed when I arrived at AUC. I've fallen into a momentary doze three times while writing this post.
Like I said though, it's all worth it. Mentally I'm not tired at all. I'm still as ready as ever to see all of my friends here and so I'll put off the sleep to a time when there aren't so many great things to do while awake.
Posted by ayah at 3:24 AM
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