Everything Ayah

Stop the clocks!

2010-11-06T20:03:00.002-04:00

It's a good thing we'll be gaining an hour tonight because time is moving way too quickly. It has been seven weeks since I last posted about my adventures: seven WEEKS! And I just counted, I have only five weeks left here in D.C. It really feels like I just arrived here. I've continued to enjoy every moment of my time here and I am sure now that I want to live in this city some day. I have so much that I want to recap. I'll try to make this a brief (ish) overview of the things I've been doing. I have a lot of thoughts and reflections about what I have seen and done, so if you want to know more about any of the things I mention in this post, just ask!

First of all, I have switched from using a paper calendar to using Google calendar - what a great switch that was! I'm finding it especially convenient right now as I'm using my Google calendar to remember what I have done since I last posted.

September
Dr. Adrienne Pine is a really awesome professor who I took Cultural Anthropology from during my semester at the American University in Cairo. I found Dr. Pine to be very personally inspiring, and she played a large part in my decision to switch from a Physics major to more social science-y majors. Dr. Pine is now teaching at American University, and, when I told her that I was in DC for the semester, she was kind enough to invite me to a brunch she was having for her current advisees at her home. It was a really nice time of re-connecting with an old mentor and meeting some really awesome new people. I can't believe that was a month and a half ago now!

Speaking of re-connecting with people from the past, I discovered that another friend from my time in Egypt is here in DC now. Laura was my Arabic classmate at the AUC. At the time, she was a student at Notre Dame. Now she works for Georgetown's Public Policy Institute and lives in the same building as I do. Crazy coincidence! In early October, my roommates and I had Laura and her roommate Delia over for a potluck dinner, along with some friends of ours from our program. I made Egyptian koshari (a rice and lentil dish). It's a lot more fun cooking when it's for other people! We all had a great time eating, catching up and laughing at the naked guy in the apartment across from ours.

Now back to September! In late September, I went to a House subcommittee hearing on water security in South East Asia. The hearing itself was really quite interesting. They were talking about disputes over the rights to build dams along the Mekong River. The issue presents many of the same issues as we saw with various dam construction projects in India.

Also in late September was the Barracks Row Fall Festival. I volunteered at the festival, and in doing so, earned my first free t-shirt in DC (I now have six). The festival was actually rather boring compared to other festivals I had been to. It was neat to see a new part of D.C. though. Barracks Row is part of the larger neighborhood called Capitol Hill and it is currently undergoing massive revitalization projects. The National Book Festival was on the same day, but, because I had committed myself to volunteering at the Barracks Row festival, I was unable to go.

Later that same Saturday in September (the 25th), I volunteered overnight at N Street Village; Luther Place Night Shelter for the first time. Luther Place provides long-term night residence to a group of about 30 women who commit to participating in some sort of recovery/management program over at N Street Village. The first two nights I volunteered there, Kathryn - a classmate from my program, volunteered with me. Kathryn and I have similar views and share a lot in common, so we quickly became good friends. It was certainly nice to have somebody to share in the night shelter experience for those first couple nights. The other nights that I have stayed at Luther Place, I have gone alone which is also really nice because it gives me more of a chance to connect with the women who live there.

At the very end of September, I attended the DC Idealist Grad School Fair. I went intending to look at a few particular grad school programs, but I ended up being most drawn to the Teach for America booth. Since then, I have been doing a lot of exploring options for transitioning into teaching. Over the past few years, I have worked with kids in a number of capacities (as an ELL tutor, as a camp counselor, as a tennis instructor...), and I have realized that working with middle-school aged kids really energizes me. I love how willing to learn 11-15 year olds are, and I also feel that kids in that age group are really looking for direction and people who can help them find their own direction. With all of that going on, there's so much potential to impact kids' lives at that age, and I'm really inspired by that potential.

October
October started in a very busy way. I started off Saturday, October 2nd at the DC AIDS Walk around the Capitol (free t-shirt #2!). I was walking on Team "No Glove, No Love" along with one of my fellow interns and her friends. A lot of people turned up for the walk which was pretty amazing, and I had a fun time getting to know Sarah and her friends. From the AIDS Walk, I went over to Adams Morgan for the Crafty Bastards Arts & Crafts Fair. It was really cool to see all of the neat things people make. I bought a really neat journal made out of an old copy of Dr. Seuss' One Fish, Two Fish. It's pretty awesome. The guy sells all sorts of journals made out of old books from this small one-man company called ex libris anonymous. They make such great gifts too. Very personal. After Crafty Bastards I headed back to the Lincoln Memorial for the One Nation Working Together Rally. There were tens of thousands of people there, but most of them were already leaving by the time I got there. Because so many people were leaving, I ended up being able to sit on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial behind the speakers: pretty cool! I'll put up a separate post with some pictures from the rally shortly.

A couple of weeks ago, I had another fabulously busy week. October 23rd was the DC Stop Modern Slavery Walk (t-shirt #3). I walked on Shared Hope International's team. It was quite a fun walk to do because it was a gorgeous fall day and the 5k walk took us through a tour of the monuments. I also learned a lot about modern human trafficking in the US and abroad. An opinions piece will come soon.

Later that day, I met my fellow intern Alex and my supervisor Aparna at the Green Festival. The Green Festival is basically a huge, traveling convention that showcases all things sustainable. It was really awesome to see what kinds of things out there. I won a t-shirt (#4) from one of the booths by guessing the answers to a sustainability quiz right. I had signed up to volunteer (t-shirt #5) which ended up meaning standing in a hallway directing human traffic for four hours.

The following day, I went over to Karma Kitchen for lunch. Karma Kitchen is this amazing restaurant (and more) that runs on the gift-economy concept. They serve you as much delicious Indian lunch as you want, you pay back the favor however you want, either directly by funding future meals at Karma Kitchen, or indirectly. Karma Kitchen uses their surplus funds to do awesome things like give out treats to random people. I don't know a ton about the other things Karma Kitchen does in DC, but I know that they also occasionally I have free hugs campaigns. :) What I know about Karma Kitchen comes from my supervisor Aparna who is a core member of DC's Karma Kitchen. I picked a good day to go to Karma Kitchen because, not only was I able to take part in a small celebration in honor of Aparna's birthday, but I also was able to eat with a few of the Atlas Corps (the non-profit that I intern with; post about it to come soon) fellows who arrived minutes after I did.

This past weekend was one of the busiest yet. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity was on Saturday the 30th. I was able to attend (and volunteer - t-shirt #6) along with over 200,000 others. It was simply amazing to see that many people come together. I wrote an opinions article about the uniqueness of the event. I will add a separate post soon with some pictures.

After the rally on Saturday, I went to Yoni ki Baat, a South Asian American take on Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues. I heard about the show from Aparna who was performing it. I am really glad that I went. Aparna (and all of the performers) did a really amazing job and many of the stories really resonated with me.

Sunday was Halloween. It was also the day of the Marine Corps Marathon. The marathon started and ended in Rosslyn, right in front of our apartment complex, so there was a general air of festivity all day. When I left at around noon to go to Karma Kitchen again (this time with Tricia, a classmate from the LCWS program) we didn't have much trouble getting on the metro, but when we got back at around 3 the line to get on the metro snaked around the block and continued to get longer. Pretty crazy!

Every year, Dr. Joyner, the dean of the LCWS program holds a Halloween party for the kids who live in the apartment complex that our program is housed in. My job during the party was to hand out popcorn. It ran out fast, so I got to spend most of the time playing fun games like ninja and simon says with a group of about eight 4 to 10 year old boys who I made friends with. It wasn't quite the same as having Kimo to play with, but it was still pretty darn fun. As a side note, check out Kimo, Ashraf and Katie on Halloween! My family is pretty awesome.

November

Has just started! Things have been pretty busy at Atlas Corps, so that has taken a lot of my time. I also tried to spend as much time as possible making calls for the Obama campaign.

Today I played my last team tennis match of the season. We'll not talk about the outcome. :p

Tomorrow I am going to have lunch with another long-lost friend. Caitlin/Alyaa is currently a student at Georgetown. We were cabinmates at Arabic camp back in 2006. Since then our paths have passed in a number of crazy coincidental ways, and this is no different. We had been planning to find a time to catch up anyway, but last Thursday I ran into her at Georgetown when I was on campus for all of a few hours to staff Atlas Corps' table at a job fair. I'm excited to hear about all of the awesomeness that is going in her life!

Tomorrow we have a special Sunday field trip to...Hair the musical! I love musicals, but it has been a very long time since I saw one live. I'm stoked!

Opinions (and Counter-Opinions!)
Tuesday was, of course, election day. Disappointing day, but an exciting time to be in D.C. nonetheless. In anticipation of the elections, my last few opinions pieces were political and two of them garnered responses. Having people respond to my opinions pieces had been one of my goals for the year, so I was very excited to see it happen. I wrote a piece about my dislike of the Tea Party, informed by my experience at the Tea Party rally I attended back in September. Among the claims that Tyler made in his response was that allegations of Tea Party racism are unfounded. I had never intended to make the broad claim that the Tea Party as an establishment is racist, but I wrote this with regard to that issue.

Around the same time, I wrote an (admittedly not very well-written) plea to young Democrats to stand up for what they believe in. Mark replied with a very well-written defense of Republican policies.

I've really enjoyed the challenge of coming up with something to say each week. Some weeks I construct well-reasoned arguments that are very personally important to me and other weeks I just construct arguments. Either way, writing for the paper has so far been a both difficult and satisfying exercise in forming and expressing opinions.

Fieldtrips
This post is already very long. I think I will make a new post to recap the field trips from the past eight fieldtrips.

I should be very busy write now writing papers, applying for grad schools and other programs and keeping up to date with course readings, but if I keep putting off updating my blog until I'm not busy, it will never happen, and I like using my blog as a way of sharing my experiences with others and recording my memories for myself.

Whoo! If you read all of that, thank you! I know that this was long.

Research, Then Vote

2010-10-28T01:34:00.000-04:00

Elections are next Friday and as valuable as it is to vote, I think it is important to remember that a vote is meaningless unless it is well researched. I actually wrote this as an opinions piece for the Concordian before I realized that the Concordian isn't printing this Friday...

If you don’t know who you are voting for on Tuesday and why, getting educated should be at the top of your priority list this weekend. These elections will have very real implications on all of our lives, and there is no excuse for not caring about them. And caring is more than showing up to vote on November 2nd. Caring means taking the time to understand what you believe and to find the candidates who most closely share those beliefs before you go to the polls.

A lot of progress has been made in the past two years. Significant reforms mean that healthcare is more accessible for everyone; perhaps the most relevant change for us right now is that we are now covered under our parents’ insurance until age 26. Tax credit loopholes that allowed companies to exploit tax laws by operating overseas have been closed, meaning that more jobs will be available here in the United States for students like us after we graduate. Student loan reforms have eliminated banks as middlemen in the loan process, meaning more money can be awarded to college students through Pell Grants. Car companies have been required to increase the gas mileage of their vehicles, and billions of dollars have been invested in clean energy technologies, an important first step in ensuring that our generation and generations to come have an earth to inherit. Hate crimes law has finally been expanded to include crimes committed based on sexual orientation or gender.

That is just a small sample of the substantial progress Congress has made over the past two years. The results of Tuesday’s election could mean moving further along that line of progress, or it could mean halting and undoing the changes that have been made.

When large-scale reforms have been passed in this country, citizens have historically voted out the progressive party before allowing the benefits of those reforms to fully take shape. As a collective, voters are perpetually dissatisfied with what they have. They vote by what they don’t want rather than vote for the causes they believe in. This election, let’s not be so flighty. I encourage you to take the time to think deeply about what you truly believe in and vote for the candidates whose principles most closely match your own rather than simply following popular trends.

No matter how busy you are, making time to properly research the candidates who will be on your ballot must be a priority. Start by looking online to see who will be on the ballot in your district. CNN has a great election website. Once you know your options, research them. Go to candidates’ websites and read their issue statements. Read editorials written about candidates. Look up incumbents’ voting records on key issues of importance to you. Go into the voting booth on Tuesday confident that you’re choosing the candidates who will move our country in a direction you can agree with. Your vote means nothing unless you really know what you are voting for.

So much to do!

2010-09-19T00:17:00.000-04:00

Time is whizzing past me. The past two weeks have flown by in what seems like two hours. Some quick highlights:

US Capitol Tour
In the LCWS program, we don't go to our internships on Wednesdays because they are reserved for field trips. Our first Wednesday trip was to the Capitol building. The words the tour guide said were hard to follow because they came out at a monotone 100 per minute. At one point in the tour, our guide explained to us that the painter of that black and white painting that goes all the way around the inside of the dome fell of his ladder and hung from the ceiling for 20 minutes before someone found him and proceeded to fire him. It was a crazy story and probably would have earned a good laugh if we had been able to decipher what she was saying.
My personal favorite part of the tour was the corn cob pillars in the receiving hall!

Atlas Corps
I started my internship! It's been busy since the moment I walked in, and I love it. Atlas is a really neat organization. I'm too tired to do it justice at the moment, so I think I'll give it its own post later.

Festivals!
There are so many going on, and I have a hard time letting any of them pass me by which has definitely contributed to my constant state of busy-ness. (I'm not really sure what the word is...I thought it was business, but that doesn't look right...)

The first of the string of festivals was DC VegFest last Saturday. It was awesome. There were a lot of people there who I really wish I could have met. The woman in front of me in the line to buy a coconut handed a flower to the coconut vendor. She said in the most floaty, dreamy voice I've ever heard "Here. Eat this. It's really good for the eyes. This flower has such good vibrations." My insides giggled a bit. Anyway, the highlight of VegFest for me was the yummy falafel sandwich I ate. Or maybe it was the awesome hair of the woman taking photos in this pic.

Festival number 2 was the Rosslyn Jazz Festival later on Saturday. We got there toward the end and only spent 20 minutes there, but I would have loved to have stayed for longer.

On Sunday, Jordyn, Lulit and I went to the Adams Morgan neighborhood to hit up the Adams Morgan Day Festival. Adams Morgan is known as one of the most diverse spots in DC, and the festival was a lot of fun: plenty of good music, dance and food.

This Saturday, I hit up festival number four. The H Street Festival is DC's largest street festival (I think). It was a lot like the Adams Morgan Day Festival. Good music, great food and plenty of dance. In fact, a jazz band that we saw performing at the Adams Morgan Festival was also performing at the H Street Festival (the same song too!). There were all sorts of crazy booths set up. Here's one a man set up to showcase his motorcycle. The festival was plenty of fun, but not quite as fun as the process of getting there which brings me to my favorite kind of story to tell: an Ayah-Gets-Lost story.

9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington
In laymen's terms: a tea party rally. One of the requirements of the LCWS program is that we attend a protest or a demonstration and write a paper about it; I went to last weekend's Tea Party rally. I had a harder time than I thought I would synthesizing my thoughts about the Tea Party into an opinions piece for The Concordian. If you want to see more pictures of signs I saw, click here.

Newseum
Our field trip this past Wednesday was to the Newseum, the coolest museum I have ever visited. It is entirely dedicated to the news. I spent around three hours there and definitely could have spent longer. My favorite exhibit was the sports photography one because every picture had a placard next to it with a paragraph by the photographer explaining how he captured the photo. Here's an interesting one.
The other exhibit that sticks out in my mind is the 9/11 exhibit. There is a 20-minute long bone-chilling video about news reporting on that day as well as the remains of the antenna that stood on top of one of the towers and a wall full of newspaper headlines from September 12, 2001. The Fargo Forum is in the 9th column from the left and the 2nd row from the top. Some other neat things at the Newseum were Elvis' boots and credit card (I didn't realize they had credit cards in Elvis' time), a piece of the Berlin wall and a map depicting how free the press in each of the countries of the world is (red is not free, yellow is somewhat free, and green is free)

Classes
Both of my classes - The Global Agenda and American Diversity - seem really great so far. They are both very discussion centered, and the professors for both are awesome.

Horton's Kids
I went to a volunteer orientation for Horton's Kids earlier this week. Horton's Kids is an awesome tutoring and mentoring program for the kids of one of DC's poorest neighborhoods. I have applied to volunteer with them this semester, and I am really, really excited for it! I'll be a group leader for Wednesday night tutoring sessions. Only older kids come on Wednesdays and they work, not necessarily on homework, but on skills and projects that will help them finish high school and go on to college. From what I understand it is a lot more relaxed and open than Monday and Tuesday night sessions which are more traditional tutoring. I will also hopefully be able to accompany the kids on a few Sunday field trips.

Tennis
I joined a league tennis team here, and last weekend I played my first match with them. We won - whoo! I also have found a few people to play with online, so it looks like I'll be able to play two to three times a week on a regular basis.

Talk of the Nation!
We got invited to attend the recording of Talk of the Nation's special report on the state of the Gulf of Mexico last Thursday. I was one of only a couple of people who decided to go. It was fun to see what parts are actually live, how they get questions to host Neil Conan, etc. It was also neat to put faces to the names Neil Conan (host of Talk of the Nation), Sue Goodwin (Executive Producer) and Richard Harris (NPR's science correspondent) that I've heard so often. You can see all three of them in this picture. Neil Conan is on the far left, Richard Harris is the lighter-colored-suit-wearing man at the center table, and Sue Goodwin is the only woman on the far right table.

Opinions
My first opinions column of the year was in yesterday's Concordian. It is a reaction to the all of the "Ground Zero Mosque" and Quran burning headlines that have been making news in the past couple of weeks. If you're interested, you can read it here. If you have some time, I'd encourage you to read other columns and articles too. I haven't read the whole paper yet, but I've liked everything I have read.

Tea Party Rally

2010-09-18T23:03:00.001-04:00

Last Sunday (September 12) I went to the 2nd annual Tea Party rally at the Capitol. It was exactly what I would expect it to be in a lot of ways, but it surprised me in a lot of ways too. I wrote my opinions column for this week about it. I'll post a link when that gets published on Friday, but for now, I'll just post some pictures. I know there are a lot; I want to show a large variety of the signs I saw in the interest of not misrepresenting Tea Partiers or the rally.

This man talked to me for about ten minutes about how he couldn't afford high taxes. He was quite nice.

Elect Jesus Christ? Yes. Good luck.

I saw a total of around 20 people dressed in colonial clothing. Many of the speakers spoke about going back to the mindset of colonial times and the founding fathers.
This is the only confederate flag I saw that day. I really wanted to talk to the guy holding it, but when I asked he told me that he doesn't do interviews...

I stopped to talk to this couple when I noticed that the man's shirt said "Bemidji Tea Party" on it. They came all the way from Bemidji, MN just for the rally. Again, they were quite nice people. We just don't share the same views. At all.
This (and a slew of other signs that I haven't posted) is in reference to a remark Speaker Pelosi made about the healthcare bill being too long to read.
Dramatic.

I really can't even understand what point this woman is trying to make.

Lots of people...
This one conveniently sums up the central difference between me and a Tea Partier. Robin Hood and the equity he worked to promote are good things in my book.
I saw a lot of ridiculous signs, but this is the only one that I found truly personally offensive.
This one was popular among the crowd.
You can't see her, but there is a seven or eight year old girl holding the piggy bank sign.

Ayah Gets Lost Version 783.2

2010-09-18T22:56:00.000-04:00

Today I went to the H Street Festival although a more accurate summary of what I did today would be to say that I looked for the H Street Festival. I spent over 2 hours getting there and around 45 minutes actually at the festival.

The ads for the H Street Festival said that free shuttle bus service would be available to the festival from the Eastern Market metro station, so I didn't bother looking up directions from the station to the festival. When I got to the Eastern Market station at around 3:15, I couldn't find any sort of sign that said anything about shuttles, so I decided to walk. I picked up a copy of a free newspaper, found an ad for H Street Festival and saw that the festival was taking place on H Street (logical, huh?) between 8th and 14th streets. I looked to the street sign; I was at 7th and D. This was easy to figure out. I started walking down 7th Street. It took me until I reached Independence Avenue to realize that I was walking down the alphabet, not up it, so I turned around and walked the other way on 7th Street. I walked and walked. As I passed G street, I began to wonder why I couldn't yet hear the festival; street festivals are supposed to be loud. I shrugged to myself and kept walking to the next Street: I street. I walked back a block again. G Street. Okay...no H Street.

I stopped and thought for a second before I realized that I was still on 7th street; the festival began at the intersection of 8th and H. Maybe H didn't extend to 7th street. I walked over to 8th street and looked around. I walked up until I saw I again. I walked down to G...still no sign of H Street. Starting to get very confused, I decided that maybe they had put H Street after I, so I walked all the way to K, crossing a highway in the process. Nope. The city planners weren't alphabetically challenged. I walked back to G Street, keeping my eyes peeled for the elusive H Street. Maybe the festival really only started at 10th or 11th street, I thought to myself. I walked down G Street until I reached 10th Street. I turned and walked toward where H should be. All of a sudden I heard the faint noise of music. I was getting close! I got to where H should be, but there was still no H to be found. I could hear the music now, though, so I followed the faint sounds down G Street, all the way to 12th. There at the corner, I found the source of the music: a car stereo.

By now, it was 4 o'clock. I had been looking for the H Street Festival for 45 minutes and couldn't care less about it anymore. I started my walk back to the metro station. I had thought many times over the past almost-hour of just asking someone where H Street was, but I hadn't done it for fear of looking silly. H Street is after G Street, duh. Finally, though, I decided that I'd rather look silly than leave the big H Street Festival mystery unsolved, so I asked a passing young man where I might find H Street. I expected him to laugh and tell me it didn't exist, to point over my shoulder at the general location around which I had just been searching, but he surprised me by pointing straight ahead in the direction I was already walking. "It's that way??" I asked him incredulously. He nodded in a I-can't-believe-tourists-are-so-dumb kind of way and kept walking. All of a sudden, something I had heard on several occasions came back to me; DC is on a quadrant system. I was looking for H Street NE in the SE quadrant. Happy to have solved the mystery I walked the 20-ish blocks to H Street NE in turbo speed. Here I could hear the music from at least five blocks away. The first thing I saw when I finally got to the festival was this sign. That's the same graphic that was on all of the ads. I guess the NE on there isn't for decorational purposes...

Oh well...as far as getting lost stories go, this one was relatively harmless. I turned the short 15-block walk from the metro into a nice 40-block walk, but that's it. I can handle that. Besides, I don't know how I can expect to go anywhere on my own without getting lost. Which reminds me! Last weekend, I did the navigating to the three festivals Lulit, Jordyn and I went to and not once did we get even a little bit lost. This all serves to substantiate my God-wants-me-to-be directionally challenged argument. He moves things around to confuse me when I'm on my own, but not when I'm with others. I get it.

DC Love

2010-09-07T00:04:00.001-04:00

I arrived in DC on Saturday morning, and I am absolutely loving it! I'm so full of anticipation that I can't sleep right now. There are many great things that I can't wait to do this semester! As for what I did so far...

I woke up at 3:15 on Saturday morning (after a full 80 minutes of sleep...) to make it to the airport in time for my 5:15 flight. My plane arrived in DC shortly after 12:30, and I took a short cab ride to the apartment complex in Rosslyn, VA where I'll be living for the semester. I got my keys and hauled my 51.2 pound duffel bag to my top (10th) floor apartment which is absolutely gorgeous! It's a great apartment with nice furnishings, good amenities and a wonderful view. I haven't taken pictures of the building or the apartment yet, but I'll do that soon and get some pictures up here.

When I arrived, my roommate Jordyn was already here, so after some quick unpacking and organizing, she and her parents kindly allowed me to tag along for some exploring and grocery shopping. We walked around the Rosslyn area, stopping to eat at Ray's Hell Burger, apparently an Obama favorite. The place was absolutely packed, but still we managed to get a table after just a short wait.
I ordered something called "The Big Punisher," and try as I might to conceal the fact that my mouth and throat were on fire, you can see the pain in my eyes and the heat in my face in this second picture.

Jordyn's mom took us grocery shopping, so our kitchen is now well stocked. We spent the rest of Saturday night relaxing and getting settled. Jordyn's mom Gail was busy documenting our first day, which is how I have these first few pictures. I'm very grateful!

On Sunday morning, Jordyn and I found ourselves on our own without much to do, so we headed over to the Georgetown neighborhood. Georgetown is literally a 5 minute walk from our apartment. It's amazing! Georgetown is full of neat little shops and cafes and of course there are college students all around, so it's really a great atmosphere. We walked down that area until we hit George Washington. When we got back to our apartment, our third roommate Lulit was just arriving. I don't have any pictures with Lulit yet, but I'll get some up soon. Lulit unpacked, and then we all headed over to the Lutheran College Washington Semester (LCWS) office for the first leg of our orientation. It was pretty standard, things-you-need-to-know type stuff.

Today (Monday and Labor Day), Dr. Joyner, Alyssa and Doug (the full-time, permanent faculty and staff of LCWS) took us on a tour of the major monuments. We saw the World War II Memorial, the Korean War Memorial and the Vietnam War Memorial in addition to the Washington, Lincoln and FDR Monuments and the Washington National Cathedral.

The National Cathedral has held state funerals for late presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. President Woodrow Wilson is the only United States president buried in DC and he is buried at the National Cathedral along with Helen Keller and a number of other notable individuals.
The Cathedral is remarkable for its Gothic architecture and marvelous stained glass windows. Construction on the National Cathedral began when the first stone was laid in 1907 with then president Teddy Roosevelt looking on. Construction finished in 1990 with then president George H.W. Bush there to witness. All facts courtesy of our fab tour guide. :)

The World War II memorial has a stone monument for each state and territory in the Union to honor the lives of those lost.

It also offers great views of the Washington Monument.

Next we headed to the Korean War Memorial which has a very different feel. The Korean War Memorial depicts soldiers trudging through the snow in their heavy gear.

Our last war memorial was the Vietnam War Memorial. The Vietnam War Memorial was designed by a Yale student and contains the names of all 58,000 soldiers who lost their livee engraved in the black stone.

Presidential monuments were a bit more exciting to visit. Here's Abe.
The Lincoln Monument with its many steps provides another great view of the Washington Monument.

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Monument was one that I had never visited before, but it was by far my favorite. It has several chambers that you walk through to see various scenes from FDR's presidency depicted. Many of my favorite quotes were engraved on the walls. Here's one.
Another.
And one more. (Just a few of many). This one is bit hard to read, but I really like it. It says "Among American citizens there should be no forgotten men and no forgotten races." I would amend that to say "Among WORLD citizens there should be no forgotten PEOPLE and no forgotten races," but still I like it.
And here's Eleanor, a favorite of middle-school me. FDR's is the only presidential monument that has the first lady depicted.

We stopped somewhere in the middle for lunch at Union Station, and that pretty much covers our tour. We had a short break when we got back before a session on maintaining our sanity while here. :) I can see how easy it might be to try to do too much!

I had my first session of a course entitled "The Global Agenda" tonight. I got four books (paid for by LCWS...whoo!) that all look really interesting. The professor, Dr. Joyner, seems really great, and I am told by my favorite professor at Concordia that he is very well known and esteemed in the international law world. I am beyond excited for that class...wahoo! My other class, "American Diversity," meets tomorrow for the first time.

This is going to be my best semester yet.

Sartre on Existence

2010-06-13T16:37:00.000-04:00

"I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating." - Jean Paul Sartre

I haven't been able to stop thinking about that quote since I saw it in a book yesterday. I haven't spent a lot of time studying philosophy, so I know little about Sartre. I googled him to learn more. He was a philosopher and a novelist. He lived a very simple and philanthropic life devoted to alleviating the suffering of others. He was once awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but turned it down.

I wonder if Sartre was saying that existence itself is nauseating or that his existence was nauseating. Was it the concept of existence that sickened him or was he commenting on his own lack of purpose? Is his comment a personal critique of his own life or a comment on life in general?

If he was commenting on the arbitrary nature of life in general, I am impressed and inspired by how he chose to live his life despite being nauseated by the concept of it. Rather than hole up and do nothing, he dedicated his life to making the lives of others more bearable. My guess would be that Sartre himself was not a very happy person, consumed by thoughts of pointlessness, yet he strove to make others happier. I like.

Committing to Care

2009-12-15T03:04:00.000-05:00

As this semester in India has progressed, a growing sense of frustration has grown in me. I have started to realize fully the hypocrisy of those of us in the world who consider ourselves sensitized toward the injustices of the world. We claim to want equality, yet commit actions every day that prevent it. The following is a portion of an essay I wrote as my final project. Please read, reflect, comment and critique.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.” Too often, we content ourselves with doing or giving charity. We tell ourselves that we are good people because we dedicate two hours of our week to working with inner-city kids or because we give a portion of our salaries so small that we barely notice its absence to some organization working to eradicate AIDS in Africa. That is not enough. We convince ourselves that giving up a bit of time or money that we hardly even miss contributes to the eradication of inequality, allowing us to fool ourselves into believing that having a pyramid-like wealth structure is just so long as the people on the top of the pyramid are charitable to those on the bottom of it, but that simply is not true. The fact that the pyramid exists at all is indicative of the injustice and inequality that still exist in our world.

We cannot continue to fool ourselves into believing that half-hearted attempts at charity are doing anything to eradicate inequality. It is not okay that a child born in a slum in India might never get the chance to go to school while another child born across the world or even just in another neighborhood in that same Indian city will lead an excessively comfortable lifestyle without ever having to work for it. That is not equality. It is not okay that while cows in America are getting fed tons of grain each day so that Americans can eat more than twice the protein they need, millions of children around the world do not get enough calories in a day to maintain their body weight. That is not equality. It is not okay that I can buy a shirt for two dollars in America when a child is getting paid just cents a day to make that shirt. That is not equality. It is not okay that, while I drive my car from home to school every day, farmers in India are losing their livelihoods due to the increasing irregularity of the monsoon season. That is not equality. It is not okay for me to drive to the store to buy that shirt, then go eat meat that contributes to the starvation of millions of children across the world then spend a few hours a week volunteering and call myself a good person. That is not equality. It is not okay to make poverty more bearable if that means being content with the continuation of poverty itself. That is not equality. That is not justice.

If I truly believe in equality, in freedom, in justice, I will not be content until these values are a reality, not just for myself and people in my country, but for people everywhere. In order for there to be true equality around the world, in order for the children we’ve seen in villages to be free from the hard labor that keeps them from school, in order for every child to have equal opportunities to be what they want to be when they grow up regardless of where they were born, I can’t be content with committing small acts of charity; I must commit to sacrificing my own comforts and conveniences. In order for people across the world working in fields and factories to make a fair wage, I can’t be content with buying one or two fair trade shirts. I must commit to paying for a shirt what it is worth. I cannot expect to ever pay two dollars for a shirt. In fact, I must demand through my purchasing power that people involved at every line of production of a t-shirt be paid fairly and that t-shirts not be sold for two dollars at all. In order for there not be hunger in the world, I can’t be content with sending money to organizations that work to eradicate world hunger. I must commit to not wasting the world’s food by eating meat. In order for the villagers of Putsil village in the Indian state of Orissa to be able to count on the rainy season coming at the same time each year again, I can’t be content with recycling my plastic bottles. I must commit to not buying plastic bottles in the first place. In order for farmers in the villages of Koppal to be able to make enough money off of their food crops to live, I can’t be content with just saying that small farmers deserve more compensation. I must demand of my policymakers that they not unfairly subsidize large-scale farmers in the United States. Knowing all of the inputs – both labor and capital – that go into making food, I cannot expect it to cost so little.

Are these changes and actions easy? Are they convenient? Of course they're not. Change is not easy, and if those of us with the privilege to effect change are not willing to do so because it is ‘too hard’ or ‘too inconvenient’, then we must content ourselves with life in a world full of injustice and inequality. More than that, we must resign ourselves to the truth that by accepting injustice, we are creating it; by being content with living comfortably we are forcing others to live in poverty. We must realize that by choosing not to change our own lifestyles we are also deciding for millions of others around the world that their lifestyles cannot improve. I am not willing to accept the gross injustice of that truth as my reality. Change is possible if we care enough to make it happen, and today, I am making a commitment to care.

Back in Bangalore

2009-12-02T04:35:00.000-05:00

Phew...we arrived back in Bangalore an hour ago after our month-long journey to the North of the country. I had expected to be tired at this point, but I really wasn't; the month was phenomemal!

At the time of my last update, we were in Delhi. We finished off our time in Delhi with a three-day unit on Islam. Unfortunately, the person who was supposed to be leading the unit cancelled on us, so David had to throw together some last-minute things for us to do. Although the program was great considering how last-minute it was, we didn't learn much and we had a LOT of free time. But hey - who's complaining? I love free time.

On Wednesday the 25th, we took a 14 hour overnight train to Varanasi. We spent our first day in Varanasi studying Buddhism. We talked to a very nice monk for a few hours and visited a lot of temples. That day (Thursday) was also Thanksgiving.

In the United States, Friday was Eid el Adha, one of the two large Muslim holidays of the year. In India, Eid was on Saturday. I wasn't sure which day I was planning to celebrate on since I really didn't have anything to do for Eid anyway, but my classmates decided for me. They "woke me up" on Friday morning with a bunch of little gifts and a beautiful rendition of "Eid Mobarek to you." Kimberly and Katie had everyone sign an Eid card for me as well. I have never received an actual Eid card before! Their surprise made me so remarkably happy... Later in the day I got some chocolates to share with everyone, and Caitlin and Allie bought an "Eid Cake". I was so touched by the thoughtfulness of my classmates...definitely the best Eid ever! Also on Thursday, we were studying Jainism, another religion that emerged in response to Hinduism.

On Saturday, we woke up early to go see the sunrise from on a boat on the Ganges! Itwas amazing. The Ganges is a holy river and it is seen as most holy in Varanasi, so we saw many people bathing in the river. Doing so is supposed to wash people of all of their sins. After our boat ride, we were free for the rest of the day. I walked around for a few hours with Katie, Kimberly, Allie and Britta before heading back to St. Mary's Cathedral, where we were staying, to relax for a few hours. At night, I went out with a few people who were getting ice cream. I hadn't been planning to get ice cream anyway, but while we were there, Kimberly and I decided not to eat any sort of junk food for the rest of our time in India, meaning no sweets, no soda, no nasty, oily, fried stuff (unless not taking something would be rude). It has only been a few days, but it hasn't been too hard. Depending on how things go, I might continue this once I get home. Also on the subject of eating habits, I really want to become vegetarian. I will definitely be eating vegetarian for the rest of my time in India and hopefully I can continue to do so at home. I have learned of so many reasons why vegetarian is better this semester (I might post about them soon), and I feel like that's a change that I can easily make.

On Sunday and Monday, we studied Hinduism and a bit of the history and spiritual significance of Varanasi. We left Varanasi yesterday right after lunch. Before lunch, I went back into the central area of Varanasi with Allie, Caitlin and Kimberly to walk around a little bit more and do a bit of shopping. Our train ride was all of 18 hours long from Varanasi to Delhi. Then we had a two and a half hour plane ride from Delhi to Bangalore and now we're back at Visthar!

It's great to be back at a place so familiar, but in some ways I'm sad that we're back. The past month was by far the best of our trip. Mostly, I think, because the members of our group spent a lot more time with each other. We had a lot of great conversations and all bonded so much. It is sad to think that in these last two weeks in India, we'll probably be attached to our computers again and then we'll go home and never get this awesome environment to just hang out with each other again. Looking back to September and how long the semester seemed then, it is truly hard to believe that I will be leaving India in just over two weeks. Crazy!

TAJ MAHAL!

2009-11-22T03:50:00.000-05:00

Guess what I saw on Thursday.
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The Taj Mahal!
I know...that was suspenseful; the title definitely didn't give anything away.

The building itself is absolutely magnificent. It is funny that in our studies here in India we are learning so much about living simply and not extravagantly, yet we celebrate the Taj Mahal, the epitome of extravagance so much. Of course, the Taj was built 362 years ago. Emperor Shah Jahan lived in a different time than we do. Also, I'm not sure if you know this, but the Taj Mahal isn't a temple or anything; it is a memorial built by Shah Jahan for his third wife after she died. To me, it sounds like an excuse to build something huge and memorable. We are still talking about Shah Jahan today aren't we?

The Taj Mahal is big, but what made the day most memorable was that all of the female students on the SJPD program wore saris, as per the SJPD tradition. I got up at 4:30, a full hour before our scheduled time of departure from Delhi, to figure out how to put it on. With the help of Youtube, I think I was mildly successful. Walking around the Taj Mahal and a few other tourist attractions in Agra, we attracted even more attention than our group of 15 white and 2 not-quite-as-white people usually does. Even the other foreigners were stopping to take pictures of us. It was so embarassing. I hate an abundance of people staring at me anyway, but when you add to that the fact that I was wearing a sari for the first time in my life, I was more self-conscious than ever before. By the end of the day, though, I realized that, walking in a group of 15 very obviously Western people and one very obviously Japanese person probably makes it so there is minimal attention on me. I am the only one of the 17 of us who looks like she could possibly be Indian. Anyway, I have a lot of pictures and stories from the day - some of which were included in the 27 postcards I sent out; some of which I will have to tell when I get home.

On Friday, we had a city tour of Delhi. We were all still a bit worn out from the Taj Mahal the day before (we had returned to the Church of North India where we are staying past midnight), but it was still fun. We saw a few sights around the area, but the highlight for me was the Indira Gandhi museum. It was full of pictures, news articles, and items from her life. I was surprised by how captivated I was by the museum. I was absolutely fascinated by her life. I found myself heartbroken at the picture of her at her older son's funeral and then again at the picture of her younger son at her funeral...and his father's funeral.

Yesterday was an entirely free day for us. I had a good time walking around for a while with a few girls from our group. Dr. Kittelson had decided to make yesterday our day of Thanksgiving celebration, so we all went out to a super-expensive restaurant for dinner. We were there for over three and a half hours and did corny, cute Thanksgiving dinner things like go around the table and say things that we are thankful for. I said that I'm thankful for the health and happiness of myself and my family if you are wondering. I am also thankful for the opportunity to travel, for the priviledge of an education, for the security I have in life (I know that I will always have somewhere to sleep and something to eat), for the awesomeness of my family, for a few people on this trip who I really admire and much more.

Today's free again and tomorrow we start our religion unit with a few days on Islam!

2009-11-17T01:28:00.000-05:00

I'm in Delhi now. There is now officially less than a month until I am home. Up until a few days ago, I had been counting down day by day, but last Wednesday I realized that I finally don't actually feel the need to count down. One month seems like such a short amount of time and, after that, I'll probably never be in India again. I am finally enjoying every minute of my time here. We have finished our Environment and Livelihood course (the one I was least interested in) and will be moving on to our Religion course (the one I am most interested in). We are going to the Taj Mahal in TWO days. There are a few people in our group who I absolutely love spending time with. The rest of our month-long travels will be spent in cities (as opposed to villages...). Life is good.

Right now we have been away from Visthar and Bangalore for two weeks. We have another two weeks left before we return to Visthar. On November 2nd we set out by plane to the central state of Orissa. We spent five days with an NGO called Integrated Rural Development of the Weaker Sections in India (IRDWSI). IRDWSI works with several villages in the Koraput district of Orissa. They have a variety of projects, including solar power projects, hydrodam projects, multi-cropping projects and alternative education projects. During that week we visited a lot of villages to see IRDWSI's work. We even spent one night in a village. It was a neat experience, but I caught a cold that night which I still have today, 12 days later.

After IRDWSI, we spent a day in Hyderabad before heading over to the Medak district of Andhra Pradesh. There we stayed with the Deccan Development Society (DDS) and saw some of their work. Their focus is primarily empowering the people of the local villages who are mostly Dalit (a group of people formerly known as untouchables who are excluded from the Hindu caste system) to use traditional knowledge that already exists in their villages. We saw some village seed savers who are working to preserve crop varieties, village health workers who use traditional herbal medicines, the Green School that teaches traditional skills in addition to the usual education and many other awesome things. The theme of the week was millets. Don't know what millets are? I didn't know either until I came to India. Millets are a type of grain that is more nutritious than rice and wheat and can also grow under more adverse conditions. Millets have disappeared from the fields of many Indian farmers due to the Green Revolution. Haven't heard of that either? Again, don't worry. It's new to me too. The Green Revolution, championed by American scientist Norman Borlaug, brought high yielding varieties of rice and wheat to India as a way to prevent famine in the 1960s. Since the Green Revolution, crop varieties in India have decreased drastically and malnutrion has increased as people are no longer consuming nutritious local crop varieties like millets. Not only are millets nutritious, but they are delicious as well! We ate primarily millet-based foods while we were at DDS.

We left DDS on Friday. We were in Hyderabad again for the weekend, and we flew here to Delhi on Sunday. We will be here until the 26th when we'll hop on a train to Varanasi. We have had yesterday and today to work on our end-of-course papers for the Environment and Livelihood unit. Tomorrow we will present our papers. On Thursday, we will drive four hours to go see the Taj Mahal in Agra. All of the girls are wearing saris. All of the guys are wearing dhotis... It should be a good picture. On Friday, we'll have a city tour of Delhi. We'll have the weekend free before we start our religion course on Monday.

In other news, I have decided not to go to Chicago next semester. I am really excited about the Washington, D.C. semester that I have planned for the fall 2010 semester and I don't want to burn myself out before then. I had been really excited about Chicago, but now I am getting excited about being at Concordia next semester. I will get to play another tennis season. I will get to be in the classroom a bit more (I find that I'm actually missing a classroom). I can get a job. I will be close to my family who I love so much. Chicago would have been great, but I'm happy to be spending another semester at Concordia.

49 days, 23 hours, 34 minutes...

2009-10-29T00:59:00.000-04:00

...until my plane home lands in Minneapolis. Meaning that 56 days, 4 hours and some-odd minutes have passed since I arrived in Bangalore. A lot of times I feel as though time is inching by, but then at other times, such as a few minutes ago when I realized that my last post in my blog had been a month ago, I feel as though time is flying. Now that I am past the halfway point, I am sure time will start to breeze by.

Anyway, I thought I would give a quick update on the events of the past month for the benefit of anyone interested as well as the benefit of my future self.

The event of this past month figuring most prominently on my mind right now is my having developed an allergy to Bangalore, Visthar or some combination of the two. I think it might actually be that I'm allergic to some part of the sheets, blankets or mattress that I sleep on at Visthar because whenever I sleep here I get massive bumps all over my body that look like mosquito bites that itch like crazy. On four occasions, one side of my lip has swelled to comic proportions as well (there are clearly other aspects of my appearance that could be considered comic in that picture as well...I had just woken up). Once I get my most recent pictures onto my camera, I will upload a picture from my most recent lip-swelling incident. The other side of my lip is the one swollen in that picture and it's about twice the size of the left side of my lip now. I would think that these bumps were just over-sized mosquito bites, but I have not been bitten by mosquitos and don't always itch. The bumps are always there when I'm in Bangalore, but they get much larger and itch like crazy when I'm sleeping. The result is that I sleep very little at Visthar. The best part of my vacation in Pondicherry was my ability to sleep all the way through the night. I wonder if the bumps on my body and the swelling of my lip are separate phenomena, though, because two of my lip-swelling adventures happened when I was away from Bangalore while the bumps are an exclusively Bangalore thing. Maybe the lip thing is a food allergy...hmm...possibilities!

Anyway, strange allergic reactions aside, let me provide a quick update on what I've been doing recently. Our second course, entitled 'Globalization and the Ethics of Development' (the first had been 'Identity, Resistance and Liberation') finished last week. To start the three-week course, we had a weeklong field visit. Half of the group went to Tamil Nadu (a southern state) while the other half went to Wayanad district in Kerala, another southern state. I was in the group that went to Wayanad. We mainly looked at issues of development. We had meetings with several tribal communities, one of which is being aided by an NGO-funded health project, another of which is at risk of being displaced by a useless dam the government has built. We also visited a variety of schools and healthcare institutions. Once we were back in Bangalore, we expanded on issues of globalization and development with a particular focus on how globalization affects development in the areas of health, education and agriculture through lectures and field visits.

We had Monday the 19th of October off from class because of Diwali and a lot of the group used that long weekend to go to Goa (a beach town) or on a safari in Kerala. I was one of three who chose to stay behind. I had a fun and relaxing weekend highlighted by dinner and fireworks at the house of David (Visthar director) one night and a performance by the Bandhavi girls another. I was responsible for writing the class blog the week that ended with Diwali. You can read it here if you are interested: http://cice.blog.gustavus.edu/.

It is now late morning on Thursday here. Nadeau and I got back from Pondicherry (see previous post) very early yesterday morning. The rest of the group will be getting back from their various break adventures on Friday and Saturday. I need to use this extra time to think about a final project for the semester. I still don't know what I want my project to address. It is important that I decide now because on Sunday, we will be leaving for a month-long journey to North India and we won't have much access to the internet or to books, so I need to bring some of those resources along with me so that I can start work on that project.

We will get back from the North on December 2nd, and the last two weeks here will be a frenzy of preparing and presenting final projects and papers for the final course on Religion and for the final project for the semester before we leave for home early in the morning on December 17. I miss home dearly, but I am sure that once I am back, I will wonder where my time in India went.

I got lost. again.

2009-10-29T00:17:00.000-04:00

This week is mid-semester break, so we have no classes. We were allowed to travel the country in groups of at least two. Most of the class went North to the Himalayas and the Ganges, but I wanted to go to a city, so I accompanied my classmate Brendan to Pondicherry, a city with heavy French influences in the southern state of Tamil Nadu that he really wanted to see. It is the home of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as well as the international township of Auroville, both of which draw huge numbers of foreigners. Other than those two main draws, Pondicherry, undoubtedly a pleasant city to live in, has little for tourists to do.

On our fourth and final day in Pondicherry, we checked out of our hotel at noon but our bus was not scheduled to leave until ten and a half hours later, so we left our stuff in the hotel's storage room and headed out for one last day on the town. Nadeau and I decided to split up and meet again for dinner. I milked as much time as I could out of my visit to Coffe.com, a cute little coffee shop, but when I felt I had overstayed the welcome I had earned by purchasing a 20 rupee (40 cent) bottle of water, I decided to check out Bharati Park, a large park that we had passed while walking around on each of our previous three days in Pondicherry. In order to make sure I had a proper sense of direction, I walked first to Daily Bread, the restaurant where I had agreed to meet Brendan for dinner. From there, I walked in the general direction of the park. I paid very close attention to the path I took and was delighted to find the park on my right hand side after only having to turn left once at a tall-building that I had carefully noted in my mind. Not only had I avoided getting lost on my way there; I was confident in how I had gotten there and was sure that I would not need to walk in circles to find my way back.

The park was great! Since it was the middle of the day on a Tuesday, it was relatively uncrowded, so I enjoyed the book I had brought along in peace. It had taken me about ten minutes to walk from Daily Bread to the park, but, to be safe, I put my book away and headed back at 5:10, twenty minutes before I was scheduled to meet Brendan. I turned left on the street that bordered the park from where I had first seen it and started walking. I immediately became aware that the street I was walking down did not look like the one I had walked up to get to the park. It was starting to get dark now, though, so I wrote this off. I had made a careful mental note of the route I had taken to get to the park and I was sure that I was now returning the way I had come; my memory of the shops on the street was clearly the faulted one. I kept walking, looking for the tall building that would be my cue to turn right. It did not come and soon I found myself passing cobbled streets full of children speaking French to each other. Upon closer look, these mostly-light brown haired students were French students speaking French to each other. I looked at the buildings around me. Many of them were adorned with simple archways and sunken back windows: I had fallen into France. No, I definitely had not walked this path on my way to the park.

Despite being absolutely sure that I had turned the right way to get back to Daily Bread, I had to resign that I was now absolutely lost. I wandered around aimlessly for a bit, trying to look as though I knew what I was doing, when I ran into Rue Surcouf. There! That was a name I recognized. Unfortunately, it was a name I recognized from having eaten at Kasha ki Aasha, a small boutique/cafe that set on the end of it, a couple of days earlier. I looked down at my watch. 5:25. Hmm...well at least I knew where I was now: good two kilometers on the side of the park opposite the one I needed to be on. Beautiful. I increased my walking speed and headed off in the direction of Daily Bread, finally right about where I was headed. 5:30 passed and I was still six or seven city blocks from the place on Mission Street where I would turn onto Nehru Street, walk a block, then turn onto Ambour Salai, walk a block and arrive at Daily Bread. At home this wouldn't be an issue. I would call Brendan, tell him I was going to be ten minutes late and continue on at a leisurly pace. I was not at home and this was not an option and Brendan is not the type to assume that everything is hunky-dory when someone does not show up on time in an unfamiliar Indian city. I increased my walking speed again; I was now close to running, earning myself a lot of confused glances from other passers-by. Pondicherry's advertising slogan is "Give Time a Break". People do not hustle to get places in Pondicherry.

Finally I got to the Bata shoe store, my cue to turn left. I was nearing the end of the block on Nehru Street that separates Mission and Ambour Salai streets, when I saw it. It being a beautiful orange cloth purse. The zipper on the purse that I had gotten in Hampi a month and a half earlier had broken just that morning. This purse was calling to me in its radiant orange beauty. I was now less than a minute away from Daily Bread. I looked down at my watch: 5:07. I considered ignoring the purse and continuing on to save an undoubtedly anxious Nadeau from worry but ultimately decided the purse was worth rounding out my lateness to an even ten minutes. I wanted the purse for 100 rupees (2 dollars), but I had only managed to get it down to 120 when my allotted two and a half minutes for buying said purse were over. I decided that, in the scheme of things, forty cents wouldn't kill me and bought in anyway. I rushed up to Daily Bread just as the time on my watch switched from 5:40 to 5:41. As expected, Brendan looked anxious. It's funny because at home, being ten minutes would be no big deal. If Brendan had been worried, he would have texted or called me to make sure I was okay and life would continue. Amazing the kind of security just having a cell phone provides. Anywho, I apologized profusely, telling him I got lost (8/11 of the reason I was late, anyway).

Which brings me back to my original point: I am positive that turned the right way out of that park and yet I ended up going exactly the opposite direction of the one I wanted to go in. I have thought for a while about how this could have happened and have come up with only one possible solution. God knows that I am directionally-challenged. He knows that reversing directions causes a lot more strain on my brian that it should, so, he keeps a close eye on me and, on the rare occasion that I do correctly reverse directions, he flips the world so that I am still going the wrong way, ensuring that the "directionally challenged" label will stick with me for life. It really is the only plausible solution. Glad I got that one sorted out.

Only in India

2009-09-29T01:37:00.000-04:00

On Friday, we a day in Kolar Gold Fields that can really only happen in India. We started the day by listening to the stories of a couple of women staying at Wimochina, a women's shelter that we, too, had stayed at. Their stories were fascinating, but they were interrupted when one of the women spotted a scorpion in Kirk's shoe, ready to sting. Kirk reached to poke it, but the woman exclaimed "NOOOO! You will die." I was stunned to hear that. It seems so strange that something so innocent and free like a scorpion could kill someone. As it turns out, the scorpion wouldn't have killed Kirk; it would have put him through some extreme pain though.

After listening to the women speak, we packed up our stuff and headed to the bus to go back to Bangalore. Problem: the bus was stuck in the mud and had nestled itself in about half a foot deep trying to get out. Dr. Kittelson looked more anxious than usual, but I think we all knew that it wasn't actually a concern. These things happen in India; the problem would be fixed. The knowledge of all the people standing around regarding how to get un-stick stuck vehicles was pooled and with the use of a couple of wooden boards and the maximum strength of about 2o people we got the bus out. We drove the 60 miles back to Bangalore in about three hours, meaning we made good time for Indian roads.

A few of us decided we wanted to get some ice cream, so we got out of the bus in the village near Visthar. The store we had planned to go to was closed. Why wouldn't it be? I mean - 4 o'clock on a Friday afternoon. That seems like prime closing time... Instead we went to a much smaller store. I bought something called a "Chocolate Nutty" from the guy. It was a chocolate coated ice cream stick. The ice cream had rose water in it. Again, why not? Rose water makes everything better doesn't it? We walked back to Visthar through some very squishy mud. Although India has a monsoon every year, the roads around the area are made of dirt, so every time it rains, it's more like walking along the shore of a beach than it is like walking on any road I'm used to.

At 6 pm we left to go eat dinner at a local politician's "restaurant". It was important for us to leave on time so that we could be there at 7:15 as we had scheduled with him. We were there at 7:15; he came at 9:30. His flight was delayed. There were about 20 of us there and they had around 16 bottles of Kingfisher wine there for us. While we waited, we talked to some of the other random assortment of people there. I talked to "Guru", a man who studied in the United States and now works in politics in India, though he doesn't seem to know what his job actually is. I asked him several times, but somehow he always managed to redirect the conversation to the wild Friday nights he had while in the United States. After food (delicious! the spiciest I've had yet in India), we exchanged a couple of songs and then we decided to sing the song "We Shall Overcome" all together since we would all know the song, Americans and Indians alike. I had never heard the song before in my life, yet all of the Indians in the room knew the words. Love it when that happens!

Oh India...

Eid el Fitr

2009-09-22T11:31:00.000-04:00

I have little to report from a pretty uneventful Eid, but I'm posting anyway since Tant Nivo told me to.

No mosques have women's sections in India. In the morning yesterday the boys in our group went to the prayer at a mosque, and the girls just hung around. I walked into town and picked up some cookies from a bakery to bring to Asma's house. Asma is the sister of Sham, a Muslim man who works for Visthar, and we went to her house for lunch. It was delicious and it was nice to spend some time with a family on Eid, even if that family was not my own. After lunch we came back to Visthar and continuued class. Driving through the streets, you might not have guessed that it was a holiday. The only indication that it might be a holiday was that there were a few stores closed. Wish I had something more exciting to say...

Coping with Koppal

2009-09-20T00:24:00.000-04:00

Okay...the title has little to do with the post, I just couldn't think of a good name...

We spent all of last week in Koppal. A poorer district in Northern Karnataka. Our purpose there was to help build a school for children of women who are a part of the Davedasi (temple priest) system. Unfortunately (or actually fortunately I guess since the region had a poor monsoon season this year) it rained almost the whole time we were there, so we weren't able to build much. The building we did do was great though. Some of the young girls who will be attending the school helped out and one day we got to talk to some of their mothers who were visiting. A good experience all around.

During the week we also went to Hampi, a city built around the 6th century I think. It was a neat place. On the main temple there are statues of women in erotic positions. Our tour guide explained that this was so that the visitor's eye would be drawn to those images and not to the rest of the temple to prevent people from being jealous of the temple and therefore bringing bad luck upon it. Interesting. A few people got blessed by the temple elephant who was trained to tap people on the head when it was given money. Market and religion, anyone? On that day, we visited Hampi University, a small Master's and Ph. D. program university that is working to preserve the culture of the area. We ran into a couple of arts students who showed us around which was great. I got to talking with Veena, one of the arts students. It was great to connect with someone close to my own age.

On another day we went to a village and saw people working on a handloom and then people working on a machine loom. On the handloom, the man has to pump two pedals continuously and push a handle thing back and forth over and over again for ten hours a day. On the machine loom, a man stands and makes sure the thread doesn't get caught. I have often heard that we should try to support the handloom industry and I heard that again on that day. I have a hard time understanding why now. I can see that, since handlooming is slower, it can employ more people, but it employs more people in back-breakingly hard physical labor. If the alternative is unemployment, I can see why that would be preferable, but isn't there a way that people can have jobs and decent conditions? Then the next day, we went to a human hair processing plant. There men and women comb through hair and sort it by length to send it to factories that make wigs. Vishwasagar, our guide for the day, kept telling us about how they don't have their rights and so on, but the women were sitting close to each other and laughing and joking with each other. There labor was hard, but it didn't require massive amounts of physical exertion. They can talk while they work. I'm having a hard time understanding why I'm supposed to consider that work less ethical than the handloom work.

By far, the hardest thing for me to process this week was our visit to a village of about 45o families, 100 of whom are dalit families. For a while, we exchanged songs and questions with each other which was nice. When the Q & A was done, we went around to homes in the village. At each home, Vishwasagar would do his best to point out just how poor each family was. He would pick up food to show us that it was old. He would show us the pots and tell us how they were metal and not clay, a sign of real poverty. At one point, he poured out some of their food to show us how thin it was. I felt awful that we were treating people as objects. The people and homes of that village turned into our textbooks. We exploited their gracious hospitality by going through their homes and objectifying them, pitying them for their lives. We heard nothing positive about their lives because the purpose of our visit was to see despair.

I hated this visit for several reasons. One, we are learning in class here in India that what India needs is to be village-centered. If that is village life, then why?? Why why why why why? At least in a city, new jobs are constantly cropping up. Although moving there would probably mean poverty, there is a chance of upward movement. Where is that chance in villages? I feel as though this is another instance of those of us who are already well-off saying that others can't become well-off because that wouldn't allow us to continue to live our comfortable lives. Second, people just can't objectify other people like that. Other members of the group said it was nice because we connected with them before visiting their homes, but we didn't really. We asked them questions to determine just how poor they are relative to us and they asked us questions to determine just how great life is for us. Is that connecting? We sat on opposite sides of the room. Third, I realized that day that this is what the program I signed up for is. The program's purpose is to show us how awful life can be, so that we carry that away with us and consider it as we go off into our careers. This isn't a cultural exchange. The hope of this program is not that I would build relationships with Indians but that I would see just how many and how deep problems are in India. It's like an extended mission trip except we are basically only viewing the problems, not doing anything to alleviate them. This isn't a fault of the program, per se. There are people who enjoy that kind of program, who are looking for that kind of program. I just should have looked more into what the program actually is before I signed up for it. Now I need to adjust my expectations of this study abroad experience. I need to accept the fact that I'm not going to connect on a real level with Indians, that's not what's it about. That's a hard thing to do.

In other news, today in most of the world but tomorrow in India is Eid el-Fitr. Ramadan in India has been semi-hard, but only because various people who work for Visthar have continually been recommending that I not fast on a large variety of occasions. It was frustrating that in a country that has way more Muslims than the United States does, I got a lot more flack about fasting. Strange how that works. I realize that the Visthar staff members were just concerned for me that I would be too tired; they just don't realize that I've been fasting and completely participating in regular life for ten years. Anyway, I have about eight days to make up. This is my first Eid not with family. Not a big deal though. It will be fun to see how Eid is celebrated here. The guys are going to the prayer tomorrow, but not the women because no mosques in India have women sections. Is it just me or is that uncommon in most places in the Muslim world? I mean, in Egypt not all mosques have women's sections and they're never anywhere near the size of the men's sections but they exist, don't they? Please comment if you know. That's okay though. I don't mind not going to the mosque; that means I get a free morning. In the afternoon, Dr. Kittelson says we are going to the house of Sham - a Muslim Visthar staff member. I like Sham and the members of his family who I've met before, so that should be fun.

Turkey is not Egypt (posted by Mona, Ayah's mom)

2009-09-12T21:07:00.000-04:00

Turkey is so much like Egypt too, but yet different. I think the Eastern and Muslim/partly Muslim cultures share common features and yet are distinct from each other.

Izmir & Istanbul remind me of Cairo so much. Either the Ottomans left permanent marks on Egypt's culture or they absorbed Egyptian culture & brought it back to their homeland. Probably a little bit of both. And the Turks I met so far are not at all like the ones we see in the series. More like the Egyptians i met in Cairo. They are very friendly and simple and down to earth. And they mostly have dark hair and eyes. Most look kinda like dad (your dad). Lots of poverty and homelessness around here too, although probably a little less than Egypt. They even have 3shwa2ee neighborhoods in Istanbul. They call them “gecekonde” which means overnight i.e. they were erected overnight without much planning and so they lack sewage & proper infrastructure..The men don't hassle women on the streets but they do stare and there are hardly any females on the streets after dark in Izmir. A lot more women wear scarves than i expected to see, but the mosques in Izmir are practically empty at prayer times and there are hardly any Ramazan festivities in Izmir. Although i saw ads for coca cola and ice cream on TV that referred to Ramazan. I have yet to go inside a mosque at prayer time in Istanbul, although around Friday prayer time they seemed inhabited from what I could tell from my tram window. At Iftar time they offer free food for those who want in Istanbul. There is a big tent right by the Bosphorus and a huge line of people waiting to get in to eat Iftar for free. Nice touch.

I don't know how but the air smells like Egypt and the stray dogs barking in the streets and the cars honking their horns and the little coffee houses in alleys with men smoking shisha & playing backgammon all remind me of Egypt. (by the way shisha is a turkish word that means “bottle” as in “shisha su” for “bottle of water”and is not used to refer to the smoking pipe here). Also, no street names on most streets, people don't know where things are on the map & don't know street names & give you wrong directions. I feel so at home. The hotel in Izmir even had the pitch black staircase that we are so used to from living in teta's house. Good thing I brought a tiny key-chain type flashlight ;) They do have light in it, but it is motion sensitive & it is set to turn on only when you are directly below the bulb, and for only one second. There are so many energy-saving practices here. I love it. The room's lights and air conditioning are also set to turn off if you leave the room & take your key out of its holder. There is little or no parking on most streets and around most buildings, so people just ride public transportation instead of polluting the environment driving their individual cars. The soap and shampoo in bathrooms are in dispensers so there is no waste of half used little plastic bottles. The paper napkins are tiny and thin and simple, just enough for what you will use them for. No fancy frills. The elevators and waste baskets are tiny, inviting people to use the stairs and to not throw away stuff.

Here are some surreal experiences I had in Izmir & Istanbul:
The Turkish audience at my presentation in Izmir (which went well & attracted lots of discussion from the Turkish people) were all excited about watching season 2 of Kivanc's new series (Ask i Memnu or AIM as the fans call it) that night at 8 on Turkish TV. Here the episodes are aired once per week. There was a conference-organized social gathering at the same time but the Turkish participants said they were not coming because they want to stay home and watch Kıvanc. They are all crazy about his looks. They said they don't care about Songul (the female lead in Gumus) because she does not have blond hair or blue eyes and she is older than Kıvo....interesting how open they are about their euro-centric biases. I got back to my hotel at around 10:30 that night and found AIM still airing on TV. It was kind of surreal to watch it live in Turkey. And i actually understood a lot of the dialogue. It is amazing how fast language is acquired with immersion especially here because Turks don't know any English and even those working in hotels and airports have very little English (although in Instanbul there is a little bit more English used than Izmir). So i found myself just using all the vocabulary i thought i don't have that i picked up from watching Kivo's series and from my Beginner's Turkish book.

And here is the second odd experience: I met with a travel agent yesterday to plan the turkey trip for the summer course and when i told her about what i came to turkey for she literally jumped out of her chair. She is a big fan of kivo and thinks he is the best looking guy in Turkey. And she just met him last month in Konya where she was visiting a friend. She showed me a picture she took of the friend's 10 yr old daughter with kivo. And...she knows a writer of Gumus. A guy who wrote the first 10 episodes or so then quit to work on other projects. He writes for the theater and does magic shows. She said that if there had been enough time she would have had him contact the Gumus main writers and arrange a meeting for me with them. She also said Kivanc played basketball on the same team as her cousin and went to school with her sister in law's husband. I can't believe how small the world is.

Istanbul is a dream city. I am totally and completely in love. So beautiful. So much character. And it is so alive, not like the dead ancient sites of Paris. Here in SultanAhmet area people live on and in and under and around history. They don't even bother to learn the name of the ancient site they are living or working next to, because every meter has ancient history in it. It is a magical area. Truly enchanting! Just like old Cairo and Azhar area in Egypt, or the big Medina in Tunisia & Morocco, or the hilly old town in Greece where we had our beloved Crepe....but Istanbul combines the best features of all these places: It is clean, picturesque, well maintained, lively with endless crowds of locals & visitors, safe, and well served with orderly public trams and buses.

I attended a dervish dance/prayer performed at an old restored mosque. Awesome. I walked/rode by all the historical sites in the old city (SultanAhmet) but did not stop to visit any yet. Istanbul can easily take a whole month to see. I am frustrated by how little time i have here. I'll just have to come again...

A Day on the Town!

2009-09-12T12:08:00.000-04:00

Today was our first free day since we got to India. We all went in to the city of Bangalore together and then spread out from there. It was great to finally feel some autonomy over my own actions.

We started out at a relatively expensive but very clean and organized Indian clothing store on Commercial Street called Fabindia. I bought a couple of things from there. I realized that things were expensive there, but they were also pretty high quality and had the sleeves already attached. Sreet places sell the shirts with the sleeves pinned inside, and you have to go to the tailor to get them sewn on, so at least I saved a step.

A group of us went to lunch at a place called Shilpa's. The food looked great, but it's still Ramadan, so I'm still fasting. After lunch, Katie and I headed over to a market/plaza area. A lot of different vendors have set up little stalls inside to sell clothing, tapestries, handicrafts, jewelry, wall-hangings, incense, dried fruit and more. I got a nice scarf to go with the outfit I had purchased earlier in the day. Really it's something I could have gotten at Old Navy, but it's authentically Indian. The man originally told me the scarf would cost 150 rupees (3 dollars). I bargained with him but was only able to get the price down to 120 and even this price he seemed very unhappy to grant me. This is something I'm not at all used to in bargaining. Most of my bargaining experience comes from Cairo I suppose, and in Cairo, paying 4/5 of the originally quoted price would be getting ripped off big time. I don't think I got ripped off necessarily. A man on the other side of the plaza/market area had tried to sell me a similar scarf for 300 rupees. Perhaps the man who I bought the scarf from was nice and just quoted me a more reasonable price to begin with. I also bought some dried mango and some dried fruit-I've-never-seen-before. The guy selling the dried fruit and other little snacks insisted that I try everything that he was selling. I kept telling him I didn't want to try things like "spicy mango", "rose dates" or "tamarind coated strawberry and mango sauce dipped in apple juice" because I was sure I wouldn't end up buying them, but he absolutely insisted. In the end, I only tried a few things of the many that he insisted I try, but he didn't seem angry at all that I didn't buy more. I was a little worried that he would say something about how I owed him a larger purchase after trying the 12 different items he had insisted I try, but that wasn't at all the case.

After this market area, Katie and I headed to Mahatma Gandhi (MG) road. I stopped by an ATM to get more cash. The ATM was in a little air-conditioned room and to get inside you had to swipe an ATM card. It was interesting. Are ATMs inside banks in the US like that? We went to a grocery store to look around and pick up some essentials like peanut butter. I picked up some biscuit things with creme filling. 16 cookie/biscuits for 10 rupees (20 cents). Cheaper than oreos...I also got some lime soda because every time we've gone out so far people have gotten some, but I haven't gotten the chance to taste it yet since I'm fasting during the day when we're out. The bottle was 15 rupees/30 cents. I like.

After shopping, Katie and I headed over to the cricket stadium. Neither of us had ever seen cricket before and we had absolutely no idea how it works/what the rules are. The only two things that came to mind when I heard the word cricket were men in turbans and Hayley practicing her "cricket throw" this summer at camp. Do sikhs play a lot of cricket? Because I definitely associated Sikhs and cricket very strongly. Despite our clear lack of knowledge of the game, we paid our 49 rupees (1 dollar) to go watch the Bangalore Brigadiers battle it out against the Malnad Gladiators. We watched people run back and forth between two lines, listened to people cheer at seemingly random intervals and gave each other confused glances for a while before deciding to ask the man sitting next to us how cricket works. He told us that this game was part of the inter-Karnataka league, so both teams were from within the state and the game wasn't really important and then turned away from us again. Katie asked something about scoring and told the man we really knew nothing about cricket. He told us to watch and learn because explaining the game would take too long and would make him "lose the match". Oops. It was worth a try...

2 hours later we knew that the batters can earn 1, 4 or 6 points on each bat, we knew that cricket somehow involves something called 'overs', we knew that the live band plays very excitedly when good things happen to the batting team and we knew that cricket games take a loong time to complete. Yeah...definitely going to wikipedia cricket when I'm done with this post. During the game, vendors were going around selling all sorts of food items: lays potato chips, ice cream bars, samosas, popcorn, real corn. There was a short intermission when the teams were switching from batting to bowling (that's what they call the pitching action!) and vice versa. During that break, many people went out and got big plates of rice and stuff. It was interesting. I guess samosas are the hotdogs of Indian cricket games. The family next to us bought a few bags of chips. When they finished with them, they tossed them casually behind them. Classic. The young boy sitting on the other side of us had had dyed-orange hair. He was probably five or six, and I'm thinking his mother probably was going for a light brown color. Definitely orange though. There was a group of about 12 or so elementary-aged boys sitting in front of us. They seemed pretty proud to be there on their own. Incidentally, there were no turban-wearing men on the field today.

We came back to Visthar after the game. There was dinner waiting for us, and it was actually Indian food. Here there is normally Indian food for lunch and American or Chinese food for dinner. That's nice of them, but, since I haven't eaten many lunches here, that means not much Indian food for me. It was great to have some today. I also got to drink my lime soda although it turns out it's lime juice: no carbonation. Still delicious though!

Overall, a very good day. It made me reminisce about the many days last summer that I spent walking around downtown Cairo. I wish I could do the same every day here, but that's not what I'm in India for...

Oo...somehow that reminded me! My mom is in Turkey now, and it sounds amazing! She says that it's a lot like Egypt too. In her e-mail to me she said that the air somehow smells like Egypt which is exactly what I feel about India. I hope to go Turkey someday too.

On Monday we leave for a week-long field visit to Koppal. There we will be helping to construct a school. I'm nervous but excited. It will be good to be doing something different and seeing a new part of India.

Sleepy time for me! I'm so excited to get to sleep in tomorrow.

I'm in India. India is not Egypt.

2009-09-08T07:05:00.000-04:00

A rather obvious statement but one I have to regularly remind myself of. So much of what I see every day here reminds me so much of Egypt, but I have to remind myself that it is not Egypt. I keep bringing up stories about Egypt or relating things I see here to things I've seen in Egypt and then I just have to take a step back and remind myself that the other students on this trip haven't been to Egypt and have no interest in Egypt.

There are many ways in which India is similar to Egypt and many more in which it is not. Let me start with traffic. Like Egypt, India has a lot of it. I've only been to Bangalore so far, but the streets are packed there. They are not quite as packed as the streets of Cairo, but it is still pretty hectic. Unlike Egypt, a large percentage of the vehicles on the road are 3-wheeled auto rickshaws. These are the same things as Egyptian "tuk-tuks", but in Egypt, tuk-tuks aren't allowed on main streets, so they are not seen very often. Here in India, auto rickshaws are the primary form of taxi transport. If you want to ride in a car taxi, you have to call it and have it come to you.

We recently came back from weekend homestay experiences. I was staying with a Muslim family, and I was struck by how similar their house and life were to the houses and lives of Muslim families I've seen in Egypt. The walls of the house were adorned with Quranic verses. The kitchen looked similar. The living room looked similar. The bathroom looked very similar (complete with the lack of shower curtain). Even the beds had a similar hard feel to them. The hospitality of the host family was at once tremendous and overwhelming as I have often found to be the case in Egypt. No matter how much I ate, my generous hosts insisted I was eating "too less". Familiar...

There was a 17-year old girl in my host home named Shifa. She is incredibly nice. She is in her first year of medical school, and, when I first saw her, she had just come from classes. She carried a large white purse with her books, notebooks and pens inside and her cell phone was glued to her hand. It reminded me very much of the students at the AUC last year. Speaking of cell phones, people give them such priority here! They are constantly ringing during class/presentations and people are not at all embarassed to answer them and carry out conversations. This was something I had noticed in Egypt as well. I wonder if it is because in both India and Egypt (and many other countries that aren't the US), only the sender and not the receiver of a telephone call pays for the call. This means that answering the phone when it rings rather than letting yourself miss the call and then calling back later equals saving money.

There are Hindu temples all around Bangalore (obviously since India is 80% Hindu). I had never seen a Hindu temple before, and I am awed by how decorative they are. They all are adorned with little statues of many of the Hindu gods and goddesses. They are a marvel to look at and unlike any place of worship I have seen before.

One thing that I've noticed here that is very different from Cairo is that men do not talk/hiss/shout/stare at women who walk past them on the street. In Cairo, no matter what you a woman wears, she gets a lot of attention from males if she is walking alone. Although we had been told that this was the case in India during our orientation, I haven't found that to be true at all. Perhaps it is true in other cities but not Bangalore. Even as a group of Americans who clearly stands out, we haven't been bothered by men on the streets at all. That reminds me! A large part of why we, particularly the women, stand out is that we don't wear salwar kameez or saris. I'd say about 95% of the women wear one of those two clothing items. Some of us got the chance to buy similar things this weekend with our host families, and I think all of us are hoping to buy at least one Indian outfit soon. Men tend to wear clothing similar to what men wear in the US. They also sometimes wear a kurta, but kurtas are not nearly as common as salwar kameez and saris.

I am staying on the campus of and NGO called Visthar. It is an absolutely beautiful campus full of all sorts of greenery, including many fruit trees! The campus is also home to about 70 girls who attend the Bandhavi school. Had they not been taken from their homes to attend the school, they would have eventually become temple prostitutes. They have all been here for a few years now, and it is clear that they absolutely love it here. The food at Visthar is great! It is currently Ramadan, so I haven't gotten to eat much of it, but what I have eaten is delicious. Our classes take place on campus. So far, our classes have been long and seemingly pointless. It feels sort of like an extended college orientation. We are, though, still in the section of our syllabus called Orientation. I am sure that as things get going, it will be more intense.

So far we have gone on our homestays, been welcomed to Visthar and India in an elaborate inaugural celebration, been invited to participate in the games and feast involved in Visthar's celebration of the festival Onam, toured a slum and an elite mall in Bangalore, been tasked with finding our way by bus to St. Mary's Basilica in Bangalore to celebrate the festival that revolves around the birthday of the virgin Mary, watched a play by the Indian theatre group 'Rafiki' about South African apartheid, and spent many hours in a classroom talking about how we can build community at Visthar.

It has been fun, but I am missing home greatly. I keep reminding myself that I am in India, so I should really be living in the moment and enjoying every moment of it. It is hard, but I think it will get easier as time goes on.

I currently have a mosquito bite on my eyelid and one on my lip, so it looks like I got in a fight. I also have little bug bites all over my forehead and the sides of my cheeks. I'm hoping they don't swell because then I'll really look strange.

Oo...I just thought of some other things to mention. My host family to me to get Mahindi (Henna) on my hands. It was only 25 rupees per hand (50 cents). They also bought me some bangles and a beautiful Indian scarf. It was pretty amazing.

Also, we started yoga classes yesterday. So far, we really haven't done much yoga. The instructor talks about yoga theory/history for most of the class and then yesterday we did stretching exercises and today we did breathing exercises. He said we will start doing poses tomorrow.

Okay, this may be the most scattered blog post (or any piece of writing for that matter) that I have ever written. Sorry about that, but there is a lot of things that I would like to be able to write, and I kinda just wrote things down as they came to mind. Hopefully my next blog post will be at least marginally more coherent.

Never Ever Delete a Blog

2009-09-08T07:02:00.000-04:00

Last summer, I kept a very detailed blog about my travels. Shortly after I returned home, I decided the best thing to do now that I had nothing meaningful to write in my blog would be to delete it. I immediately regretted this decision, so I recovered all of my blog posts using Google. (Even after you delete something from the web, it's still out there...) I saved those posts, and, now that I am again ready to use my blog, I decided to re-post them because I didn't write those posts to have nobody read them. They are all below listed by their original titles and post dates.

well I figured out what people do in summer (originally published August 28, 2008)

2009-09-08T06:54:00.000-04:00

5 weeks and one day after I wrote a post called 'what do people do in summer?', I'm starting classes unable to remember a single second of boredom this summer. I wrote at some point that boredom hadn't sunk in yet but that was just me being pessimistic; boredom never did sink in. My planner is covered in things I've done and things yet to do. I sleep 6 hours a night and yet every waking minute is occupied. I love it that way.

My job as an RA (Resident Assistant) started a couple of weeks ago and has been absolutely amazing so far. I love the ladies on my floor. Classes start today. I'm really excited about my classes this semester. I'm finally returning to Spanish after a two and a half year gap. I'm taking a linguistic-ish course, something I've always been interested in. I also have International Politics (if you know me, you know that I'm ecstatic about that). I'm even looking forward to my required Religion 100 course. The fall tennis season starts on Monday. I'm a little nervous because I'm still not playing my best but that's okay. I got a job as a tennis instructor!! I can't even put into words how excited I am about that. I always wanted that job but the supervisor Jerry said that he only hires people who work in the summer first which meant that, since I'm never here in the summer, I'd never be able to be a tennis instructor. He called me a couple of days ago asking me to work this session. When I listened to the message, I got happier than I've ever been in my life I think. :)

As a side note, motorized scooters/mopeds have made a big appearance in Fargo. I don't remember ever seeing people riding scooters around here before but I see them quite frequently now which is, of course, great.
Posted by ayah at 2:17 AM

returning to my one true love (originally published July 28, 2008)

2009-09-08T06:51:00.000-04:00

After days of bonding time with the ball machine, I played with a real person today. It was good to finally play someone who has both a strategic mind and a true interest in playing tennis not in getting paid.
Posted by ayah at 12:42 AM

whoa (originally published July 24, 2008)

2009-09-08T06:50:00.000-04:00

I just saw a really green orange in my refrigerator. I was wondering if it was a different species of orange or if it was just really really unripe. Then I realized it was a lime.
Posted by ayah at 6:57 PM

what do people do in the summer? (originally published July 23, 2008)

2009-09-08T06:47:00.001-04:00

My life's boring now. I really don't have anything substantial or interesting to write about anymore. It's been years since I've been at home in the summer without regular scheduled things to do for more than a week. People keep asking me what I'm going to do during the rest of the summer but I haven't the slightest clue.

The boredom still hasn't sunk in because I was busy for the last couple days. I spent basically the entirety of Monday and Tuesday shopping with the trio. It was fun but I've definitely had my fill of that for another six months. I also went to a couple movies and ate at a few restaurants with them. We went to Made of Honor at Safari first. It's your typical predictable chick flick. My friend Haya and I predicted the entire movie down to the little details before it even started. It was cute though. On Monday we ate at the North American Steak Buffet for dinner, per Omar's request. It's what you could expect of a restaurant with such a name: Lots of food. Lots of fat. Lots of people. I'm not sure what it is but that restaurant has always been ridiculously popular among the Egyptians in Fargo so my family used to go a lot, usually with other Egyptian families. After a point, though, we realized that - even if it does cost only 10 dollars for all of the potatoes, fried chicken, biscuits, steak, pie, etc. that you can eat - it's not worth it if the food isn't good. We can just pay the same amount to eat a reasonable portion of well prepared food at a different restaurant. Anyway, also on Monday we went to Dark Knight. I hadn't really wanted to go because I was very tired: I had woken up at 4 on Monday and we went to the 9:40 showing after a solid day of non-stop shopping. Nevertheless, after all I'd heard about the movie, I was excited. As soon as we got into the theatre though sleepiness set in. As hard as I tried to fight it I fell asleep for about the first hour of the movie. I didn't think the movie was all that great but, y'know, maybe I would have appreciated the plot more if I'd seen the first half...I have to say, though (and not just because he's dead), that Heath Ledger was very convincing as the Joker. The ending was also good..not as predictable as many superhero movie endings. On Tuesday we ate at Ruby Tuesday. That is one under-appreciated restaurant. If you aren't familiar, it's sort of like Friday's but it has an all-you-can eat salad buffet that you can get for 7.99 by itself or 2.99 as an add-on to your entree. It's genius: the perfect set-up for me. Their pricing makes me laugh though. They have some items on the menu that automatically come with the salad bar. Some such items: the 2 mini burgers and fries for 8.99 and the soup for 8.49. Basically it's like getting two little burgers and fries for a dollar or a bowl of soup for 5o cents. I'd been planning on getting just the salad bar but, realizing this, I ordered the mini turkey burgers and salad. I ate my salad from the salad bar and took the burgers and fries home for my brother. It was perfect!

The trio left this morning and only now do I feel like I'm really home. Now I'm starting to go back to my real life. I finally had time to organize my room and run errands I need to do. Today I went and toured Park Region, the hall I'll be working in next semester. The rooms are so much more spacious than the ones in Hoyum (where I was last year). I'm pretty excited. I got some things I need for my dorm room. I went to the library. Now there is one thing I've really missed. The AUC library is okay but nothing compared to my good old friendly Fargo Public Library. :) I got a couple dozen books, some movies and some CDs to keep my self busy for the next couple of days. If anyone reads this and has some book, movie or music suggestions, please let me know. I went to yet another movie: Baby Mama. I'm not sure if I mentioned before but here in Fargo we have a discount theatre with $1.50 movies, another thing I missed while in Egypt. Baby Mama was good but not as good as I expected. I thought it would be wittier. I stopped by the club where I play tennis to reactivate my membership. Now I'll finally be able to start playing. I have the ball machine reserved for tomorrow morning! I should go inflate the tires on my bike - another thing I've missed!
Posted by ayah at 10:03 PM

'Home' (originally published July 20, 2008)

2009-09-08T06:35:00.001-04:00

It's cold. It's empty. It's quiet. It's clean. It's Fargo. and Fargo is home. Since I got here I keep repeating in my head, "I live here. This is home." in the hope that it will start to sink in. I still feel like I'm just visiting this seriously population-lacking city and that in a few days I'll be going back. I can't bring myself to change my time on the computer to Fargo time. I'll have to do that soon. It's only been about 12 hours though. The trio (Mohamad, Wafa and Omar) came a few hours ago; their train was late. Their sleeping schedules and mine are going to be complete opposites now. It's 8 am and I just woke up after three hours of sleep; they went to sleep at 5 too but they'll probably wake up around 1 or 2 or later. That means I'll be tired at around 6 or 7 pm and they'll be tired around 3 or 4 am. Beautiful.

The flights were good. We were cutting it last minute the whole time. My uncle who drove us to the airport was really tired and kept falling back asleep so, since I had to take all 8 of our 50 pound suitcases down three flights of stairs by myself, we left about 40 minutes later than planned. Check-in was smooth and since my grandma had ordered a wheelchair to take her to the gate in the Cairo airport, we had no problem with time. The guy who was pushing the wheelchair has the right to skip all the lines (passport control, security, boarding). Once we got to the gate, we, along with the rest of the 'passengers with disabilities' and their families boarded first. I was really impressed actually at how it works. They have a truck with a platform thing that goes up like an elevator so that the passengers don't have to get out of their wheelchairs. That truck then takes the passengers and their families directly to the plane and elevates to the level of the door so that, unlike the other passengers in Cairo, they don't have to climb a flight of stairs to get into the plane. Because they are the first to board, all the flight attendants are free to help them find their seats and put away their luggage. I was impressed.

Upon arrival in Amsterdam, an electric cart picked my grandmother and the other passengers requiring wheelchairs up from the gate and brought them to the waiting area where they were to be picked up an hour before boarding time for their next flight. The woman driving the cart checked all of the passengers in and gave them back their boarding passes. We had a six-hour layover so we spent a lot of time wandering and sleeping. Our flight was scheduled at 1:15. At about 12:15 and again at 12:20 a man came around asking for passenger Morgan to San Francisco. He looked at my grandmother expecting her to be passenger Morgan but she was passenger Ouda to Minneapolis. By about 12:25 we were starting to wonder what was going on; we would be late to our plane if we waited much longer. My grandma took out her boarding pass to check her time and realized that she did indeed have passenger Morgan's boarding pass to San Francisco, leaving at 1:25. She went immediately to the desk and there they realized that passenger Morgan and my grandmother's boarding passes had been switched when the driver of the electric cart took them to check-in for them. Passenger Morgan was not around so it took them about 15 minutes to straighten some things out and print my grandma's new boarding pass. Again, since we were with a wheelchair pushing person, we were fine despite being tight for time since we skipped all lines. When they were scanning the ticket for us to board, my grandma's ticket beeped, telling the guy 'already checked-in'. I quickly explained to the guy what had happened over at the waiting area for people with wheelchairs. They all immediately looked alarmed but let us board right away. As we were walking in the tube, one of the ticket agents from outside was helping an elderly passenger walk, explaining to her that she had been taken to the wrong plane. The elderly passenger, clearly passenger Morgan, had been one of the women on the electric cart with my grandma early. Beyond a careless mistake, does this seem alarming to you?? Passenger Morgan boarded a plane from Amsterdam to Minneapolis in the name of Rawia Ouda. Through all the security checks and questioning in the airport before boarding a plane to the US how could they have possibly not noticed the name on her boarding pass didn't match the name on her passport??? Also, what would have happened if we'd all fallen asleep (which actually almost happened). Passenger Morgan, intending to go to San Francisco, would have ridden the plane to Minneapolis. Wow.

On the plane I watched a Bollywood film called 'You, Me and Us'. It took me until the last 2o minutes of the movie to realize that it was the Bollywood version of The Notebook. It is almost an identical story with a nominally happier ending. Good mood lifter.

We had slightly less than two hours scheduled between landing time from Amsterdam and departure time to Fargo in Minneapolis. I'm not sure who scheduled it like that but never again. Two hours really isn't enough time to get through passport control, get our 8 bags from the baggage wheel, put them on the conveyor for customs, get them from the conveyor for customs, put them back on the conveyor to go to our plane, check-in to our flight, and still be at the gate 30 minutes before departure time. We wouldn't have made it without the help of my grandma's wheelchair pusher who allowed us to skip all of the quite long lines, a very helpful baggage worker who acted as porter for us, taking care of our bags through all the conveyor belts and several of Minneapolis' electric cart drivers. Despite all of their help we were still the last ones to board the plane but the important thing was that we made it.

In Fargo, quite miraculously, all of but one of our bags arrived. That last one arrived to us in our house about 3 hours later. On the drive home I was stunned by the lack of people. I feel like I'm in a dead-town despite the fact that I'm in the largest 'city' in North Dakota. We got home at 7 pm; the trio was scheduled to arrive at the Fargo train station at 3 am. My dad made us a great dinner and then we unpacked and organized as best we could. I did my best to set out beds for everyone. We're currently using all of the sheets in our house except for the extra-long ones for my dorm. I guess that means we're at our full capacity. :)

I'm still in utter disbelief at how horribly the guy cut my hair. I liked my hair long; I just wanted to trim it a bit and give it shape so it didn't get too long in the coming months. I explained that to him but, nevertheless, he chopped my hair off. Taking away the length and any shape that it did have. My mom helped me relax (chemically straighten) my hair yesterday. It's less frizzy but I'm still not exactly pleased with it.

The trio's train arrived late and they came to our house around 4:30 am. They were all beat from a month of ridiculously hard work and lack of sleep. We chatted for a little bit and went in to sleep around 5:30. It took me a really long hard to sleep. I could hear every tick and tock of my clock, every peep of a bird from outside the room. It was eery. The quiet hum of my computer on my desk seemed like the roar of a supersonic jet to me and I had to get up and turn the computer off before I managed to fall asleep. I guess it will be good once I'm moved into the dorms. We all know it's never silent in a college dorm. :D

Kimo has forgotten so many things about home. I stopped at a water fountain to take a drink at the Amsterdam airport. "What are you doing with that faucet, Ayah," he asked. "I'm drinking water," I said. "What," he asked, "you're licking water?? Hehe..that's funny. Can I try the faucet water?" When my mom came he excitedly told her about he faucet and how she could try the faucet water if she wanted. When we went out to the parking lot in Fargo, Kimo couldn't pick out our car and even when my dad pointed at our van he asked incredulously, "that big van is ours??' He was confused when my dad started buckling his seatbelt for him, "Hehe..what's that for, daddy?" He was endlessly amused by the fact that the freezer has a button for ice. He was falling asleep in the car but as soon as we got home he spent hours playing with his toys. He remembered none of them so it was liking having a house full of new toys.

I've forgotten my fair share of things too. I tried to check my cell phone messages but failed, having forgotten my voicemail password. It took me a while to see my new text messages too because I've completely forgotten how the menus on Samsung phones work. I've forgotten where a lot of the light switches are and, of course, I can't find anything. Anytime I want something I have to tear apart my room to figure out where I put it.

Some differences between Fargo, ND and Cairo, Egypt:
-the refrigerator in Fargo makes things cold
-it is possible to spot more than one person an hour in Cairo
-it's logical to wear a sweatshirt in Fargo in July
-free water in Fargo!
-although Fargo has central AC in most places it's 100 times less needed than in Cairo
-driving in Fargo involves rules-
in Fargo I can leave my house whenever I want. Want to go grocery shopping at 2 in the morning? Go for it!

More to come.Well, I'm out to buy some things for breakfast; we'll see if I remember how to drive stick.
Posted by ayah at 8:19 AM 0 comments

yet another boring, pointless post about my day (originally published July 18, 2008)

2009-09-08T06:33:00.000-04:00

which was, as expected sad, productive though I suppose.

I saw some people, called some people, said bye to them all. I didn't get to see the one person I most wanted to see, but hey! Everything for a reason, right? She hates goodbyes anyway.

I got my hair cut. I told the guy I didn't want it too short so he chopped off the front and left the back long. Genius. Whatever..it'll grow. There was a woman at the salon while I was there who kept inserting English into her sentences as if that made her more significant or something. To the guy doing her hair: "Momtaz. Gameel. Bgad nice work." To her daughter, "Mariam, askoty ba2a shwaya. NOW!"

Right now I was thinking of writing the line "I can't breathe." but decided against it. I clearly can breathe I just can't think. Anywho, I was signing in to Skype at the time and right as the line came into my head Skype told me to "Take a deep breath." Ha! Which reminds me: when we were in the library of Alexandria, I saw this guy who I was pretty sure was the not-at-all helpful tourguide we had in Port Said. When I turned for a second look it was actually a Brazilian tourist. 15 minutes later in the basement of the library I actually did see the not-at-all helpful tourguide from Port Said leading around a couple of Spanish tourists. Later in the day, I noticed a Little Caesar's sign. For some reason I was interested and so I turned to look and it turned out that it was actually just a sign for a grocery store. About one minute later, we passed a real Little Caesar's. Ah coincidences...

4 hours until my plane. 25 hours until I'm Fargo home. Wow. Cue waterworks.
Posted by ayah at 3:57 PM 0 comments

and...the battery ran out. (originally posted July 17, 2008)

2009-09-08T06:31:00.001-04:00

I've spent about 12 of the last 80 hours sleeping and haven't slept in the last 36 hours. I definitely feel drained. I didn't go to my last commitment of the day though so I'll be able to sleep right now! (for the last time this year in Egypt??)

The rest of my day was pretty fun. I actually fell asleep for about half an hour after I finished that last post and when I woke up I found that I had some missed calls from Laura. I met up with her and her classmate George and we got some dinner at Koshari el Tahrir. Delicious as always. Afterward I sat with Laura for awhile before going back home to see some aunts and friends at my house and then going back to Garden City for a couple of hours.

My mom had sent me out earlier to buy some cream so that she could make icecream from the fresh mangoes from the tree in the garden. I was a little dubious as to how that would turn out but I just tried it now and it's delicious, really one of the best mango icecreams I've ever had.

I can't believe that at this time tomorrow, I'll be getting myself mentally ready to go the airport. I will have said goodbye/be saying goodbye to my favorite people in Egypt and putting my last electronic items into suitcases. It's real. I'm actually leaving. Tomorrow.
Posted by ayah at 12:21 PM

I Feel Like the Energizer Bunny. (originally published July 17, 2008)

2009-09-08T06:26:00.000-04:00

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

visits galore (originally published July 15, 2008)

2009-09-08T06:21:00.001-04:00

Today was jam-packed. I'm so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open yet I'm writing this post anyway...don't bother trying to understand my logic.

Yesterday night I started looking at class options for next semester. I already signed up for courses a few months ago but, I no longer want to take Neuroscience, so I was looking at what alternatives were open. That led me to look at the requirements for all the majors I possibly could be interested in. After looking at the requirements for about 15 majors, I'm still thinking Global Studies, Global Systems and Issues track is for me. I'm not sure still about double majoring or minoring in Spanish, Political Science, Economics, Sociology or something else. Anyway, I got nowhere near close to making all the decisions I still want to make but decided to go to bed at around 4. I somehow still woke up on my own at 8:30 this morning.

I don't know what possessed me to do so but I decided when I woke up then after 4 and a half hours of sleep to go play tennis, something I haven't done in over a month because of our almost non-stop travels. Again, I don't know what I was thinking but I rolled out of bed, got dressed and left...no breakfast...no water...I didn't even wash my face. 15 minutes of playing and I was so nauseated I could hardly stand up. I told my opponent I was going to have to quit before I fainted. I sat down for a while and drank the soda the coach guy got me (he always insists on getting me soda while playing tennis...I don't get it). After about another twenty minutes I was fun and finished playing. I was much more tired than usual on my walk home though. I guess that's what I get for abandoning the game for so long. It's hard for me to get motivated to go play here though. Tennis in Egypt and particularly in the club I play at is a very male-dominated sport. In all the times I've gone (during the school year I went three times a week) I've never seen another female on or anywhere near the court. None of the people I play ever hit with other girls and so they seem to take any point I win personally. I watch the other guys play with each other and they play differently. They get more into the game and get this competitive spirit. With me it's not the same. I always feel like I'm disturbing some kind of rhythm when I go. I guess going to play isn't as appealing an option for me here since, not only do I have to play, but I also have to work to understand the culture around tennis here in Egypt. One of the hardest things to adjust to was the ball boys. I never know whether or not I should pick the ball up if it's closer to me than him or let him sprint around all over the place. Ah, whatever...a couple more days and I'll be back to the nice, easy to understand tennis world of Fargo, ND. ha.

So, I got back from tennis around 11, showered and went back out. Our original plan was to to stop by AUC to pick some things up, go to a movie and then go on a visiting binge. As it happened, Kareem fell asleep on the way to AUC so, I waited for two hours in the car with him while my parents finished what they had to do at AUC. They had taken longer than expected so there was no longer time for the movie. We went straight to Heliopolis to say goodbye to my paternal grandparents. My grandfather is pretty sick right now so it was kind of sad. After about an hour at the grandparents we drove over to Medinat Nasr to say goodbye to my parents' best friends. That was also sad because, since they're moving to Georgia and we're going back to Fargo, we don't know when we'll get to see them again. From there we went to Ein Shams to say hello to my first host family (which I stayed with for five weeks) from last summer. When I came last summer, their oldest son Ahmed had just returned from a year in the United States. He was having a really hard time adjusting to being back in Egypt so the whole family was tense. When I saw them today they all seemed to be in much better spirits, talking and laughing together, which was nice to see. The thing is, when I try to remember what it was like, how I felt last summer, I can't. at all. I don't remember how I interacted with the family at all. They kept saying things about how I acted or what I did and nothing seemed familiar. I wonder if maybe part of the reason I had a hard time adjusting with them was my own attitude. I'm not sure because I honestly don't remember it but the family wasn't at all how I remembered it. They were nice and talkative and stuff. I don't know. From their house we continued on to Zamalek to see my second host family who I stayed with during my last week in Egypt last summer. I really enjoyed my time there. When I came last summer, their younger daughter Kout was just leaving for the US and their older daughter Dina was in Turkey so I didn't really get to know either of them. This time both of them were there as well as Tant Nashwa and Julia, a girl they are hosting this year. I love Tant Nashwa so much and Dina and Kout were both so nice and friendly. I really enjoyed talking with them. The visits to both my host families were great; I truly feel ashamed that I didn't call them earlier in my stay.

I just came home now and I am, once more, about ready to faint. I don't know why I took the time to write this really. I agreed with one of the ballboys Mohy to play tomorrow at eight and this time I want to eat breakfast before I go so I need to wake up in another six hours. Yikes! I would just cancel but Mohy is my favorite ballboy and, I saw him hitting with Ahmed - another ballboy, and he's gotten really good. Besides, this may be my last chance to play him. Posted by ayah at 3:30 PM

So I went (originally published July 14, 2008)

2009-09-08T06:16:00.000-04:00

I did decide to go. It was actually pretty fun...a lot better than last time. I spent most of Thursday regretting my decision to go but I was over that by nighttime when I went out with my parents to buy some fans. On the way we saw, among other things, sneakers marked with the Mcdonalds 'M' for a brand, a car full of guys: 6 inside and 4 on top, a little girls' toy on which was written 'for playing pleasure with you' and the Egypt McDonalds' slogan 'Everything but the Combo'. I've been confused by that slogan since I came to Egypt but finally I realized that it is a translation from the similar phrase 'koloh ila el combo' in Arabic. It makes sense in Arabic, meaning roughly 'Take Everything but the Combo'. In English, not so much.

Saturday was good, just a beach day. You'd be amazed at how many people wearing a niqab (full body covering) are in the water in 3agamy. Other people just wear training suits or their normal clothing. Some wear long underpants under their swimming suits. My mom loves that about the beaches. You don't have to care about what you look like at all; you can just enjoy the swimming. Of course, a few days later when we saw a couple girls in bikinis on the beach it became very clear that, even in 3agamy, appearance matters, just in a different way than on the beaches in the United States. The lifeguard on Saturday was going a little crazy with the whistle. According to him the only safe area to swim was the approximately 25 foot by 25 foot square directly in front of him. Seeing as this was Hanovil beach in July that equaled a lot of people in a very small area and, when you mixed that with the waves, that equaled a lot of elbows in eyes. It was all worth it for the waves though. I love wavy water.

Sunday was great. We drove a couple dozen kilometers over to Alexandria, the first time I've been there since I was in diapers. We met up with my parents' tour guide friend Romany at the library of Alexandria. I was amazed at the functionality of design of the library. Among other things, the windows are made in such a way as to let natural light in without letting in direct sun rays, the echo-absorbing slits in the walls double as tributes to the old library of Alexandria and the large library has a capacity of 10 million books as our tour guide Randa told us. For all that functionality, the library really isn't being put to good use. On the lowest floor there is a giant printing press, the fastest in the world or something like that of which there are only three copies. My dad asked what the printing press is being used for. Randa gave us a variety of answers, none of them really belonging to the question indicating that the press really isn't used at all. The 10 million book capacity I mentioned? Only six percent of it is being used. Should you like to read one of those 600,000 books though, you'd have to pay the 2-20 gineh (depending on who you are) entrance fee to the library every time you want to read a couple pages, as none of the library's books are available for check out. The library also has about 150 computers equipped with remarkably high speed internet access. We were there at a prime time (around 3 in the afternoon) yet only about 20 of the computers appeared to be in use, maybe since most Alexandria residents aren't willing to pay the 2 pound fee every time they want to go to the library. There are some things they are doing right though. The volumes of historical/archaeological/artistic works that the library has archived and digitized are available online to the general public. Although that seems obvious, a very similar database of information collected as a part of the Egyptian government's Cultnet project is only available at a center in the Smart Village in the outskirts of Cairo. Cultnet has collected great information so it's sad to see that it isn't available to the majority of people. I was glad to see that isn't the case with the Library of Alexandria's databases. Overall, I was glad I went (and not just because of the free internet access). After the library Romany's wife and children met up with up with us at the fish restaurant Rakoda. I really liked it which is a lot coming from a fish-hater like me. If you're ever in Alexandria I'd recommend it; It's on the Corniche on the right, a little bit after the library.

I wasted most of Sunday morning sleeping. In the evening we went to go visit my mom's aunt and cousins who were also vacationing in the area. Somehow conversation turned to doctors during childbirth. My mom's cousin's husband Naser, a gynecologist himself, started talking about how - when it comes to serious things in medicine, especially women's medicine - only male doctors could fix things. All of the other women in the room didn't seem to find that statement offensive, even his wife (my mom's cousin), also a gynecologist. My mom and I shared a short little glance and decided to take this one up. I started by asking him if he was sure that there wasn't a single female doctor who was good with women's issues. He said yes, they just aren't as level-headed...My mom's other cousin (not his wife) piped up that in America they aren't supposed to say things like that, so Naser said, "oh..then what are you supposed to say?". My mom's (male) cousin piped up, "What. Do you think men and women are the same or what?". My mom told Naser it might be more accepted to say something more like, 'over the course of my career the best gynecological surgeons I've encountered have been male.' Naser replied, 'yes, but, it's across the board, not just me.' I already could hardly contain my laughter but then he continued, ''but I'm not saying women are worse. They are the best cooks!''. At that point I lost it. I burst out into long and loud laughter. In my defense, I really thought he was joking. He wasn't...that led to a nice awkward silence. I had much more I would have liked to say on the subject, but y mom swiftly changed the course of conversation from there. We later landed on women who wear the niqab, another hilarious conversation. My mom's cousins live in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, more conservative countries than Egypt. They were talking about their difficulties with telling their friends who wear the niqab apart. They just had so many funny stories about getting confused/tricking their friends because of a niqab. It was just so, so funny to hear them tell their stories. The question I've had for a long time came up: how do little kids tell which one is their mom? I really want to know the answer to that. If you know, please share.

Today (technically yesterday I suppose) we got up, ate, cleaned the apartment, packed and came back to Cairo. We then unpacked and promptly packed again, this time for Fargo. I feel so strange when I think about Fargo. Cairo feels like home now and so it will be strange to go back to my house in Fargo. I was registering for a tennis tournament today and I realized I forgot my USTA (United States Tennis Association) number, something I've had memorized since I became a USTA member in 2000. Later, I was e-mailing someone at home my cell-phone number and then realized that I'd forgotten it. I honestly don't know how that happened. I'd remembered up until a couple weeks ago but today I had to email another friend to find out what it was.

Just a few more visit-packed days and I'll be on an airplane.
Posted by ayah at 6:52 PM
1 comments:
B a s m a said...
i wish i could have been there to laugh in that idiot gyno's face, that story reminds me of the guy we saw in the documentary on the first woman marriage counselor in egypt, remember that guy?
haha thanks for your comment i'm not perishing yet though.
see you soon!
July 15, 2008 10:18 AM

still haven't decided (originally published July 9, 2008)

2009-09-08T06:04:00.001-04:00

or slept. shouldn't be this hard.
Posted by ayah at 6:51 PM 0 comments

good old family (originally published July 9, 2008)

2009-09-08T05:45:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was cool. I picked up my Egyptian national ID card with surprisingly little trouble. Other than that I look like a 7-year old after drinking caffeine for the first time, the picture's not bad. I went to cut my hair but then chickened out on the cutting part and just got it straightened and then headed to Basma and Abir's. We walked around Zamalek. It was fun. We talked a lot about basketball shorts.

I'm not at all sure why but I stayed up yesterday until 6:45 this morning, a few minutes after my mom woke up. Sleeping in is really not something people do in my house so my waking up at 11:00, the latest I've gotten up in years, sort of messed up the rhythm of the house. Needless to say I was tired. About 10 minutes after I woke up my uncle Amr, his wife Samaha nd my cousin Jena came over followed shortly by my mom's cousin Tant Hanan. I didn't really sit with them; I fed Koko instead. When Tant Hanan left we went over to my other grandparents' house in Masr el Gadida to say hi and pick up my dad. The first thing that my grandma said to me was 'enty zedty hna fe masr msh kda?' (you've gained weight here in Egypt, haven't you?') Things like that don't normally bother me; I can't even count how many times I've been told I'm fat while I've been here. This time I was kind of irked though. I haven't gained weight in Egypt; I've actually worked really hard to lose a lot of it. I didn't know what to say so I just kinda looked at my mom to save me but she didn't hear so she asked my grandma to repeat. This time my grandma said, "I'm just saying Ayah's gained weight here hasn't she? You and Ahmed (my dad) have lost weight, but she..." I don't know why but hearing it again really hurt me. My mom noticed my downcast face and covered for me but my grandma still made a big deal of how she'd made me sad and stuff. Immediately afterward she served us lunch as she always does when we visit her and, as always, she insisted vehemently that we eat portions of food better suited for a hyena than a human. Normally, I give in and try to agree to eat some of the things she offers me but this time I felt no obligation to do so. I ate a spoonful of the spinach and two fries and refused to eat anything else. I told her I wasn't hungry since I'd eaten breakfast late, which was actually true. I mean, if she's going to call me fat she can't expect me to stuff my face.

My mom's aunt tant Moshira and cousins Ranya, Dina and Ahmed were supposed to come over with their children at around 6 so we rushed home, arriving at around 7. They weren't there and didn't come until around 8:30. I was supposed to meet Basma and Abir at their house to go to this concert/stand-up event thing at the cultural wheel at 9:00 but, since I had to say hi to my family before leaving I called them to tell them to meet me at the culture wheel instead. Noha answered and told me they weren't there and when I called back at 9 nobody answered so I figured they'd forgotten/decided not to go. As it turns out, Noha lied. They were home but she's just mad at them/me for not letting her come with us yesterday when we went out. Thanks for that, Noha. It was alright though. I had a good time with my family; the ones who came are my favorite branch of it. It was crazy to see how much my cousins (second cousins?) have grown. We had a little circus going on in our house for a while. Kimo had a blast showing all the little kids (all 9 of them) his toys.

My family is going to Alex tomorrow and, as of yet, I still haven't decided if I'll go too. If I stay, my uncle and his wife will stay with me...I don't want to go but I'm not sure yet...oo decisions. :P

Sorry this was kind of whiny...not the best of days.
Posted by ayah at 2:42 PM

and I thought Egypt was bad! (originally published July 8, 2008)

2009-09-08T05:32:00.001-04:00

The police corruption in Morocco is ridiculous. We got stopped 3 times by the police blatantly asking for very large bribes to not give us tickets and saw the same happen to plenty of other people. It was crazy. The first time my dad didn't really get what the guy wanted so he explained in perfectly plain terms. Either you can pay me 400 dirhams here or I'll take your license and you can pay 700 dirhams at the government office to pick it up. My dad managed to talk his way out of giving one of the guys anything and bargained with the other two to bribes of only 200 dirhams (~27 dollars). One of the times it wasn't actually the officer who stopped us who was getting the money. It was his supervisor sitting in the car on the side of the road; the officer sent my dad over to the supervisor for bargaining.

Other general observations about Morocco:
There are beggars in Morocco. Lots of them. It's hard to walk 10 feet without being approached by them and if you give them any acknowledgment at all they keep on you like a fly. I've been to plenty of other places with beggars but not like there. It's really rather sad. It kind of makes sense that there are more beggars there than Egypt considering that, in general, people appear to be in the same economic state there as here but things there are considerably more expensive.

Things in Morocco are way more expensive than you'd think. Food (even cheap Moroccan food) costs about what it would in the United States. Gas costs about the equivalent of six US dollars a gallon. Bread costs about 10 times what it does in Egypt. Basically the only cheap things are movies. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but pirated movies are everywhere. They are sold for the equivalent of about 65 cents, much cheaper than even renting a movie in the United States.

I think I said this before but I don't mind saying it again. It's really refreshing to see how women are treated here. They dress as they want and aren't really harassed on the streets. They do everything men do. I saw a female garbage cleaner, a female taxi driver, plenty of females on motorcycles, female passport control people...all sorts of jobs women can't really take in Egypt.

The cars (including the taxis) are remarkably not bumped and scratched here (also true of Jordan and Tunisia). It was just odd to see after being in Cairo for so long. When I got back to Cairo I was actually kind of shocked to see how banged up all the cars are.

Mobile phone minutes in Morocco as well as Tunisia are significantly more expensive than minutes in Egypt, a fact visibly noticeable in the streets. I saw very few people in both countries using their cell phones and by very few I mean two or three a day. It was truly amazing. As my mom pointed out, mobiles would be a good way for the Egyptian government to tax the rich. Nobody really needs a mobile but people here talk on them incessantly...it couldn't hurt to tax the minutes a little bit and using the taxes to help the less well-off portions of society.

Almost of the hotels we stayed at in Morocco had switches for the lights in the hallways. When you go out, you press the switch and after 10 or 15 minutes it turns off again. Many of the hotels had master switches in the rooms by the doors so that as you're leaving you can turn off all the electricity to your room. Many hotels in Egypt and Tunisia have it so that you have to insert your key card in a little slot by the door to make the electricity work in your room. All of those are great ideas to help save energy, none of which I have ever seen being used in the United States. I read on this trip the book Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert. Although Part I of the book is ridiculously boring, chock-full of scientific facts presented in a most un-appealing matter, Part II was marvelously eye-opening. Kolbert writes a lot about the real facts of global warming and what people can and desperately need to do to stop it. She also talks about the international efforts that have been made to try to avert climate change and I was truly astonished by how uncooperative the United States has been in the whole process. I recommend reading it (and skipping Part I).
Posted by ayah at 4:53 PM

NO, FEDERER, NOOO!!! (originally published July 8, 2008)

2009-09-08T05:31:00.000-04:00

Roger Federer lost to Rafael Nadal in this year's Wimbledon final, the longest Wimbledon final in history. I couldn't even watch the match since none of the channels on the TV in our hotel in Fes were showing the match. When I saw the score online though I was actually upset. He was so close to a record-breaking 6 Wimbledon titles in a row. He's still my favorite though.

I also missed Williams day at Wimbledon. Serena and Venus Williams played each other again for the ladies' title. Although it happened before in '99 and '02 it was particularly remarkable this time since both of them have sunk considerably in the rankings in recent years and have just very recently started their climb back into the top 10 . Venus won and the two sisters returned later in the day to win the ladies' doubles title together. I, of course, saw none of it. :(
Posted by ayah at 5:31 PM

The White House and Marrakech (originally published July 3, 2008)

2009-09-08T05:27:00.001-04:00

I don't know why but I've always thought of Morocco in kind of an exotic way. So far I've been surprised by how mundane it actually is. One thing though. In Egypt people refer to hooded galebeyyas as 'Moroccan galabeyyas' and I was surprised at how true that is. About half the women here wear these pointy hooded galabeyyas; I wonder why.

We spent our first night here in Casablanca. We arrived at around 4 pm and then found a hotel and slept until around 8 then went out. We walked around this pedestrian walkway they have there and ate delicious shawerma and ice cream and drank the best orange juice I've had in my life. It was fun. The square we sat in to eat was absolutely packed with people; a lot of them were just people there by themselves, sitting and watching other people. There were also a lot of little boys kicking around soccer balls, a lot of old people getting hit on the head with soccer balls and a LOT of beggars. We bought some really cheap pirated movies too. Most of the movies were in French though. They had the new Sex and the City movie but in French. Casablanca has a very frenchy feel to it. The streets are wide, dirty and cobble-stone just like the streets in Paris. The hotel we were staying in had a guest-use computer with internet in the lobby. I was going to use it to update yesterday but the keyboard is French and it took me way to long to type.

Yesterday morning we went to visit the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca. It's huge and really beautiful. It was finished in 1993 at a cost of half a billion dollars. It can hold 105,000 people for prayer (ahem...100,000 men and 5,000 women). It has the tallest minaret of any mosque in the world and their is a laser that shines from it at night 45km in the direction of Mecca. The mosque itself is the third largest in the world after the mosques in Mecca and Medina. It has tons of local artisan work on it. It's really a spectacular sight. After seeing the mosque we drove to Marrakech. We swam in the hotel pool and then headed out to 'jamaa el fnaa square' - the center of activity in Marrakech. There are snake charmers, story tellers, monkey trainers, man pretending to be women belly dancing, tons of food and drink stalls...The thing about it though is that it doesn't really seem like street performing. Most of the people didn't really have shows, they were just trying to get you to take a picture with/of them so they could ask for money. They didn't really do anything that deserved the money though. The strangest event of the night though: as we were walking by the mosque I saw one of my counselors from Spanish camp. I couldn't believe it. What are the chances that I'd see my Mexican counselor from Spanish camp in Morocco?? The hotel we're staying at here has free wireless although it rarely works. Oh! and here there are tons and tons of motorcycles and mopeds and the amazing thing is that women ride them too. All kinds of women I've seen lots of higab wearing, tank top wearing, niqab wearing women riding motorcyles, a sight I'd never see in Egypt.

I have to go to Rabat now...woohoo!
Posted by ayah at 4:29 AM 0 comments

I don't quite get it (originally published June 2008)

2009-09-08T05:25:00.001-04:00

Sarah Palin is a strong advocate of abstinence education and family values. Bristol Palin, 17 year-old unwed daughter of Sarah Palin, is five months pregnant. When it came time for Sarah Palin to marry husband Todd, she eloped, choosing not to include her family in her marriage.

A $100,000 investigation is currently in progress in order to determine whether Sarah Palin's decision to fire Alaska's Public Safety Commissioner was an abuse of power. Suspicions arose when it surfaced that the Commissioner was fired shortly after refusing to fire a state trooper who happened to have recently gone through a messy divorce with Sarah Palin's sister.

The extent of Sarah Palin's political experience is under two years as governor of, as John McCain put it, the largest state in our union. That largest state is, of course...Alaska. That's not to say she is experienced; As McCain will gladly tell you, she has plenty of experience with the PTA and with selling state planes on Ebay. How about foreign policy experience, you ask? She has been out of the country. Once.

Out of all of the millions of Republicans who live in this country, John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate for the 2008 presidential election.

I'd like to clarify two things. First, I have nothing against Sarah Palin or her daughter as people; I just don't quite understand how McCain would see Palin as an asset to his ticket. Second, I'm not angry with McCain's choice of a running mate; I never wanted him to win.

Just Some Kimo-isms (originally published June 2008)

2009-09-08T05:21:00.001-04:00

"No, Teta! Superman is NOT Muslim.""Girls don't know how to play baseball."After asking for the rest of my mom's can of soda, "Well. It's almost gone but a little goes a looong way."
Posted by ayah at 3:39 PM 0 comments

We Went to Neeja (originally published June 30, 2008)

2009-09-07T21:55:00.001-04:00

Last week in Marsa Matruh Kimo kept telling me that we were going to 'take a plane to Neeja'. Finally I decided to correct him. "Tu-nisia", I said. He replied, "yes i know..we're going to Neeja". It took a while but finally he understood that the name of the country actually has a to sound in it.

Tunisia is a cool country. There isn't really all that much to see touristically speaking but it has a nice vibe. Although it's 98% Muslim, it's a lot more liberal than the other Muslim countries I've been to. Not many women wear a higab and they seem to be allowed to have any job unlike places like Egypt. Despite the fact that women dress less conservatively here, there is virtually no harrassment in the streets (unlike Egypt). They're also really fashionable here. My mom and I starting noticing this in the airport. We could tell the Egyptians from the Tunisians by how they dressed and wore their makeup. Egyptians try to be fashionable too it's just that they often end up looking tacky. Tunisians are really fashionable. They apply their makeup nicely, cut their hair in cute ways, wear appropriately fitting, chic clothing. Which reminds me, Tunisians seem to be a lot less brand obsessed than Egyptians. In Egypt there are fake brand name products all over the place and walking down the street you see people wearing all sorts of 'Gucci' belts, 'Prada' shirts and 'Chanel' purses. Here that's not really the case. People are comfortable wearing fashionable clothing with no visible brand name.

My dad pointed out to me on our first day here that Tunisia seems a lot less Americanized than other places we've been to. After a while, I realized how right he is. During our stay here I did not see a single McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut, Chili's or any other American restaurant. This is the first country I've ever been to without seeing a McDonald's. Maybe it's because of the heavy French influence. It's crazy how French everything here is. There are sidewalk cafes everywhere serving crepes and paninis, baguettes are basically the only type of bread people eat, everyone mixes a lot of French into their Arabic while speaking, signs everywhere are written always in French, sometimes in Arabic...Oh..and speaking of Arabic. Their Arabic here is really hard to understand. It hardly even sounds like Arabic in some regions of the country. But back to French

We flew into Tunis and drove to Hammamet on our first day here. Hammamet is basically a resort city. Our hotel had a nice pool, tons of food (all-inclusive...) and clean rooms. Oh..rooms..they didn't have tvs in the rooms. If you wanted one you could get it for 5 dinars a night. I've never seen that in a hotel before. and the bathtub. The bathtub was really high off the ground which ended up being the case at all the hotels we stayed at in Tunisia. When I was getting out the first time I took a shower I was in a rush so I forgot how high it was and smashed my knee against the rim. still hurts. The first night here we just went to the beach for a couple of hours. The second day we swam in the pool in the morning and then drove back to Tunis and walked around the market here for a while. The market, like all the markets we went to in Tunisia, is inside the ancient Medina, a big area surrounded by high walls. After walking around for a while we went to Carthage, an ancient city that was built first by the Carthagians (something like that..) and then destroyed and rebuilt by the Romans and then (mostly) destroyed by vandals. We didn't actually go in but we saw it from outside; it looked pretty neat.

On our third day we drove to Gabes, stopping on the way at Sousse and Sfax. At both Sousse and Sfax we walked around the markets for a while before moving on. We bought some delicious peaches...I don't really remember much else. Our hotel in Gabes was funny. It had doors all over the place. There was the door we entered to get in the room. When you walk through that door you find a hallway. On the left hand side there are two more doors, both of which lead to the same room that contains three beds, two sinks, two closets and a tv. On the right there is a door that has a bathtub and a sink behind it and straight ahead there is a door that has a room with just a toilet in it. It was the oddest set-up ever. On our fourth day in Tunisia we first ate the hotel's breakfast (which consisted of bread and butter and jam...) and then started our day's trek. We went to Matmata which is this town that was built under the rock. It was really cool. We went inside someone's house and got to see how they live and stuff. It was a little strange; as you walk along the road all of the house owners try to wave you in to come look at their homes in the hopes of receiving tips from you. Matmata also served as Luke Skywalker's home planet in the Star Wars movies. I haven't seen them so that wasn't as exciting for me as it was for a lot of other tourists...After Matmata we continued onto Medenine where we saw one of the best preserved Ksars in Tunisia. A ksar is an ancient grain storage thingy with lots of little rooms. All of the rooms at the ksar in Medenine have been converted into souveneir shops and we were the only tourists there when we visited so all of the shop owners were just staring at us. It was cool...After Medenine we continued to Jerba, an island just off the coast. It's really pretty and it has a lot of religious importance. We got there pretty late though so we just ate and walked around for a while before driving back to Gabes to stay at our peculiar hotel for another night. We got there at about 1 am, absolutely exhausted.

On our fifth day (today) we drove back to Tunis, stopping at Kairouan on the way. Kairouan has the Great Mosque, the oldest mosque in North America, built only about 25 years after the start of Islam. My parents were pretty excited for it because apparently they learned a lot about it in history class in Egyptian schools but it was actually kind of disappointing. There was nobody there and all the streets around it were covered in garbage and stuff. It closes at 2 for foreigners (really just Western foreigners) and we were there at about 3. Maybe if we had been there earlier or at a time of prayer it would have been more lively. We also saw a really ancient well in Kairouan that is powered by a camel. Kimo loved that. As we were leaving that little attraction, located in the center of Kairouan's market, we stopped at a shop and bought this sweet shirt for me. When we got back to Tunis we went back to the market here to buy this other sweet shirt for me that we saw on the first day. The first shirt is turquoise and the other is white with turqoise fabric stuff on it. They don't anything alike though and, seeing as the color turqoise is everywhere in Tunisia, I thought I'd take the chance to add a little of the color to my wardrobe. Also, on the first day my mom bought me this bracelet with turquoise beads..now I'll have something to wear it with..ha! We had some time to spare and Tunisia is supposedly famous for henna so I decided to get a henna tattoo. The stuff the guy did the tattoo with wasn't really henna; I'm not sure what it was. Maybe it had some henna in it? Anyway, hopefully whatever he drew it in lasts for a while.

As you can probably tell from the very poor quality of writing in this post, I'm pretty tired from 5 days of hardcore traveling. Nevertheless, I had to take advantage of the free wireless in the hotel here. Tomorrow we wake up bright and early to fly to Casablanca...woohoo!
Posted by ayah at 5:23 PM 0 comments

Home Sweet Cairo for a day (originally published June 25, 2008)

2009-09-07T21:35:00.002-04:00

I was back in Cairo today. It was great. I met Basma early and we went to fill out some paperwork at AUC and ran into her philosophy professor again. I don't think I've mentioned him before but we run into him basically every time we go to AUC now. He always talks on and on about some random topic. Today it was his troubles with getting money to the sick mother of his son in Iran. He's really actually quite a friendly guy; it's just that any encounter with him is sure to last at least 2o minutes. After our little chat we went to get fiteer from the place by Greek campus on Falaky street. It's kind of our little ritual because we always used to go during the semester. Fiteer is fried dough that is served with honey or sugar usually, kind of like a crepe. It tasted so good when we first got it but now, especially because of the summer heat, it's kinda lost its magic. We still get it though because it's tradition. :D After fiteer we went to Costa to escape the heat for a while. After spending about a half hour trying to get their free wireless to work (we ultimately failed), I went over to the Greek campus to ask my mom something quickly and I ran into Laura! It was terrific. Basma left to get ready for her cousin's wedding and I hung out with Laura a bit. We had some fun times trying to figure out how to make her new cell phone function properly. It was good to catch up with her again; I can never get enough of Laura. :D

After I left Laura to tackle her mounds of ALI (Arabic Language Institute) homework, I headed over to Arkadia mall to meet Mona and Maha, my cousins. We walked around for a while. A lot of the stores have neon green and yellow shirts. My cousins pointed that out to me...it's crazy...yellow and green are everywhere. The sisters I met in Marsa told me they noticed that too...everyone is wearing yellow and green. Rahma decided that it must be part of a long-term plan to change the colors of the Egyptian flag...Mona says her aunt thinks that Egypt is just envying Brazil...who knows? At the 2.5 pound store I bought a wind up truck for Kimo. On the package it said "LORDLY FOR FRESHLY NOTION" in one of those big stars that usually says something like "New and Improved" or "Sleek new design" in it. If anyone has any clue what lordly for freshly notion is supposed to mean, please, by all means, share. After we were done walking around we sat in this cafe that overlooks the Nile. The view was nice, the drinks: not so much. I got lemon juice that tasted like water with maybe a couple of drops of lemon in it...It said on the menu that it was 8 pounds but the guy charged us 11, saying that the prices had changed since the menu was printed. Considering all of the prices on the entire menu were whited out and had different prices written, I doubt that, but...hey! What could I do? While we were sitting a couple came and sat at the table next to us. As soon as she sat down the woman pulled a small furry white dog out of her purse. Yes. That's right..out of her purse, Paris Hilton style. The guy then proceeded to take a very long series of pictures of 'Pooky'. It was hard not to laugh.

I needed to give the taxi driver on the way home 7 pounds but the smallest change I had was 20. He didn't have change so I went to the stores around to see if anyone could give me change for my 20. It took me about 6 or 7 minutes and 8 stores to finally find one that had change. It's crazy how hard it is for people to give you change here. It's really common for even big stores to not have change for you when you buy something. I had the same problem this morning. I bought a recharge card for my phone for 10 pounds and gave the woman a 50. She left the store and came back around 5 minutes later with my change. About the only people who have change on a regular basis are the microbus drivers after they've been working for a few hours and the metro station.

Now I'm home. It's almost midnight and I have to pack...again. We're going to Tunisia and Morocco for a few weeks, about a week and a half in each country. I'm really excited. If nothing else (which hopefully won't be the case), it's a chance to get the coins from two more countries to add to my coin collection.
Posted by ayah at 3:16 PM 0 comments

Higab Hypocrisy (originally published June 24, 2008)

2009-09-07T21:33:00.001-04:00

The other day I was walking with Basma downtown and I saw a veiled girl wearing a shirt dress that went just about to her knee walking holding hands with a guy. Under the shirt dress she was wearing spandex capris that went about to the top of her calves which were bare. I pointed the girl out to Basma although at the time I couldn't explain to her why. I've obviously seen similar things before. Veiled girls wearing miniskirts with spandex pants, veiled girls wearing cleavage-bearing or short-sleeved shirts, veiled girls wearing skin tight clothing that shows their every curve...Everytime I see things like that I am slightly annoyed. I used to think that the source of my annoyance was the hypocrisy of the girls. They wear a higab to symbolize their modesty yet dress unmodestly.

I realized when I was trying to explain to Basma why I pointed the girl out to her that I was being hypocritical. I complain about how Egyptians have strict rules aobut how people should act and don't know how to handle anyone who deviates from those rules yet that is exactly what I am doing when I criticize veiled women/girls for showing skin. I have created two categories in my mind into which I place all of the Egyptian females I encounter. There are the veiled women who cover their arms, legs, hair, chests and usually their necks and there are the unveiled women for whom it is acceptable to wear a wide range fo clothing including low cut/short-sleeve t-shirts and capris. When someone deviates away from those two rigid categories, I criticize them. Why do I think that it is more modest/decent/proper/respectable/acceptable to cover your arms and not your hair than to cover your hair and not your arms. Why does a girl who wants to dress more modestly have to follow a certain pattern-legs, arms, then hair?

I guess then that the annoying part of this for me really isn't the fact that girls/women wear a higab while showing skin but rather society's perceptions of ladies who do so. No matter what I wear in Cairo I get stared at; that is just a fact of life for any female in Cairo. The 'harassment' by men in universal and virtually unavoidable. This is not true of the women. On the women's car in the metro, women always stare at me, give me piercing looks as if to shame me and occasionally they even say something to me aqbout veiling/being modest or mutter a "tsk, tsk" as I pass by. Veiled girls on the other hand wear whatever and they are left alone by other women. I have seen girls wearing very low cut shirsts, some that even show cleaqvage, with a higab tied Spanish style but they get no attention from the other women on the metro. I on the other hand, even if I'm wearing long, loose pants and a long-sleeved shirt whose neckline is literally up to my neck, am the object of disapproving glares. It is as if there is a some kind of code among women: if you wear a higab you are a good person and deserve respect, if not...

All of this was a long tirade toward my argument that, for many, the higab really isn't a sign of religion at all right now. There are certainly some for whom it is. For them, the higab is the final touch on their modest dress. Others wear the higab yet wear unmodest clothing for this culture. Nevertheless they appear more religious in the eyes of society than their modestly dressed, non-veiled counterparts. It is as if society is telling girls that the key to being a better person/better Muslim is their decision to wear a higab. To me it seems that, for many (but certainly not all) women in a society that puts (or at least claims to put) a very high value on religion, the higab is a tool to appear religious rather than to actually be religious.
Posted by ayah at 4:44 PM

What I should have started doing a while ago (originally posted June 18, 2008)

2009-09-07T21:14:00.001-04:00

It would have made sense to start blogging before I came to Egypt for the semester and not after, but I've never been one for logic before the fact. So now, here I am writing about the past semester I've spent here in deep retrospect and all at once. First, some general observations.

The first thing I noticed at AUC was the number of smokers. Basically everyone at AUC smokes. It is the cool thing to do. Having lived my entire life in the United States, this was surprising to me. At home, smoking has long outgrown its coolness. The vast majority of social groups look at smoking as dumb rather than cool, something for the social rejects. Not at AUC. Here people sit on the 'plat' steps, the cool place to be, smoking their cigarettes and giving disapproving looks at everyone who passes. At first, I figured that it was just the people who sat in the places I could immediately see who smoked. I figured that I was just hanging around the smokers' spot. If I moved to other parts of campus, I'd find the groups among which smoking was uncool. That didn't happen. Day after day I was shocked at the kinds of people I'd see smoking. A highly studious guy from my Psychology class. A fully veiled, abeya wearing girl. A very nicely dressed girl with pearly white teeth and freshly done hair. It took me weeks before I realized that, at AUC, it doesn't matter your social class: smoking is just plain cool. I even noticed that a large number of American students there smoked. I was tempted to ask them if they started smoking while in Egypt but refrained because of the obvious rudeness of the question. There is a large percentage of people who smoke in Egypt but the percentage at AUC is much greater. My friend Yara, a recent transfer to AUC from fellow private, English language university MIU (Misr International), told me that she too was shocked when she came to AUC. At MIU, she said, smoking was popular among the guys but, although there were girls who smoked, there numbers were very few and they were looked down upon by the rest of student body. It's as though smoking is a method used by AUC's ridiculously rich student body to distinguish them class-wise. It was hard for me, the long time anti-smoking coalition member, to just settle down and watch but eventually I barely even noticed the cigarettes in my friends' hands.

The other main thing I noticed: the fashion. The AUC population is consumed by it. On my first day, still friendless, I sat in a chair in the main courtyard and watched the people go by. The guys were almost all in jeans and sweaters. 99% of the girls sported one of two fashions. There was the skinny jeans with flats look and the boots on top of jeans look. The overwhelming unanimity of those fashions made anyone wearing flared jeans stick out like a football player among ballerinas. On that particular day, I was wearing very wide-legged jeans and even me, usually pretty oblivious to fashion, felt out of place. By the end of the week, the fashion had broadened a little bit since people were no longer wearing their favorite outfits. Even so, I was never anywhere close to unconscious of my appearance and the appearance of my clothing while at AUC. People treated coming to college like the big social event in their life, and, because of the way Egyptian society is, for many of them it probably was. The Study Abroad students with their loose-fitting sweat pants, t-shirts and sloppily tied up pony-tails create a sharp contrast with the Egyptian students, with their meticulously applied make-up, beautifully done hair and clothes that I would probably choose for interviews. I appreciated it really. I liked that college was something you get ready for and not something you roll out of bed and stumble into. It made education feel more important. Oh..then there's the bag thing. I happened to bring a messenger bag with me to Egypt rather than a traditional back-pack and several of my Egyptian friends at AUC commented on that. I remember Yara saying that she thought it was peculiar how so many Study Abroad students wore backpacks. 'Don't they know they look silly?', she said. Mahinur one day told me, "the best thing about you is that you're not like other study abroad students. You don't carry a stupid backpack. I hate how they walk around carrying those backpacks as if we were in school or something." It was true. Find someone with a backpack and there's a 99% chance they're an international student. Where then, do they put their books, their notebooks, their pens? Well, for starters, very few full-time students at AUC buy the books. They photocopy the necessary pages. Those who do buy the books though are very unlikely to bring them to college. Why, after all, would they need them there? Few of the Egyptian students I met do their studying on campus. They come to socialize with their friends and go to class (if they feel like it) and go home to do their work. Notebooks and pens some girls carry in the ridiculously oversized purses that many girls at AUC carry. Others just ask for a piece of paper and pen from the person sitting next to them in every class and keep the assorted pieces of paper in their purses. The guys are a whole other story. Guys clearly don't carry purses and backpacks aren't cool so the solution? Just don't bring anything to school that doesn't fit in pockets. That's not entirely true. I did see some guys carrying around a notebook but many of the guys in my classes just didn't take notes unless the professor explicitly said they should and then they'd borrow a pen and paper.

Mmm..and attendance. All of my classes at AUC and, from what I hear from my friends, most of the classes at AUC have strict attendance policies. The 2% penalty for each class missed that my Anthropology and Media professors impose is apparently not rare. The strange thing is, people still frequently miss class. When I'd ask my friends why they missed classes they'd usually tell me they were tired, not in the mood, didn't do an assignment due that day or just wanted to hang out with their friends. Yes. I'm not kidding. On several occasions people told me that they skipped a class because they were having too much fun with their friends to let the loss of a couple of percentage points in a class take them away from their fun. This is in sharp contrast to what I found to be the main goal of many AUC students: to get good grades. Many of the questions people asked in classes went along the lines of 'professor, how will this information show up in the exam?'. In classes, not I suppose too different from anywhere else, students did only the things that would clearly contribute to a higher grade in the class. My Anthropology class, which had a percentage of the grade dependant on participation, was much more lively than my Psychology class which had none. Activity on my Anthropology class blog increased greatly after it was announced that there was a possibility of extra credit for those who were active on it. When my Media professor offered extra credit for attending an event he announced in class about half the class showed up as opposed to the one or two who showed up when no extra credit was offered. To be fair, this could have been just because all my classes were introductory courses that most people took only to fulfill core requirements and had no real interest in them. Many of my study abroad friends said that people were very involved and passinoate about their upper-level courses.

In Egypt, it rains. Sorry but that's for Laila; she was convinced that it never rains here, but a large part of February was rainy, so...

Being a girl in Egypt is hard. Guys have it so much easier. They walk around, do whatever they want and they're just left alone. As a girl you're constantly scrutinized, stared at, talked to. It's not hard to ignore. I just don't pay attention to the looks I get and what people say. It just bothers me that society has just accepted that things are that way. Girls are second-class citizens who deserve to be annoyed for the mere fact that they dare to walk outside. I rarely walk around with guys here, but when Ashraf was visiting I obviously took him around. I was surprised to notice that nobody said anything to me when I walked with him. It's like society is trying to make girls feel as though, without a man, they just don't belong. On a day-to-day basis I don't actually let what anybody says to me on the street bother me at all but on a matter of principle it is annoying. Why is society that way?

People here are, in almost every respect, all alike. They can spot someone who doesn't belong from a mile away. Here, someone who looks different doesn't pass by just like any other in a busy crowd. No. They are stared at. They are approached. They are asked questions. Some foreigners are annoyed by this. Many others take it as welcoming. The funy thing is that, from my appearance, people can't tell I'm different. My blood is Egyptian and so I look the part. When people hear me speak any more than a few sentences though they can tell I have an accent and imperfect grammar. Some people are blunt in their curiosity. 'why is your arabic broken?', 'is one of your parents foreign?'. Others just give me odd looks and try to size me up, trying to decide whether my broken speech is due to some disability or if I'm drunk. It's amusing. When people ask me where I'm from, I tell them Egypt. They normally continue to prod trying to figure out where my accent comes from but I only give in and tell them if I really like them. The best is when I'm with my friend Basma. She too is Egyptian-American. She was raised mostly in the US but now she lives here again. People always look so confused as to why we, two Egyptian looking girls, would be speaking English to each other. Once, we were in a taxi with her sister Abir, the driver kept asking us where we were from. We said Egypt over and over until finally he got frustrated and asked us why then we were speaking English. We asked him why not. He looked confused and then I told Basma to say we were practicing for our English test the next day. She did and the guy looked so confused. It was absolutely hilarious. It's just interesting to see how people handle difference here. Anyone who doesn't follow the strict 'foreigner' or 'egyptian' molds they have for people just baffles them.

I think that's a big part in why people have such a hard time placing me here. Some, like my friend Ann, are quick to say that I'm American. I've lived my whole life in America so how could I be anything other than American. Others, like my friend Mahinur, say without thinking that I'm Egyptian. My parents are fully-Egyptian; how could I be anything else? The funny thing is people seem to have a genuine need to place me in just one of those categories. Just as people expect me to give a straightforward answer when they ask me if I like Egypt or the United States better. Of course there are aspects to Egypt that I like better and aspects to the US I like better. People are never satisfied with that answer; they take it to be a polite way of saying I like the United States better which is really not at all true. In the same way, people can't seem to accept that I'm Egyptian-American. I am both. There are aspects of my personality that are very reflective of my upbringing by Egyptian parents and there are aspects that clearly evidence the years I've lived in the US. According to Basma, that is exactly what being American is all about. I'm not like other Americans but that's the whole point of America. People are different. Difference is what makes up the country. I suppose I agree with that to a certain extent. Having a mixture of cultures is what America's all about but, still, I feel as though there are people who identify completely with being 'American' and I just don't...for now Egyptian-American will do.

Ah the memories (originally posted on June 18, 2008)

2009-09-07T11:42:00.000-04:00

I might as well write down some of the things I've done this semester before I forget. Most of this will probably be boring to you, my imaginary reader.

January

I don't think I really did much of anything in January. Just my AUC study abroad orientation. I guess the only notable things during that were I met two other Egyptian Americans spending the semester at AUC, Aya and Menna and that I met some cool people like Amy and Kara, who remained my friends for the rest of the semester, on the Felucca ride that was included as a part of orientation. That Felucca ride was freezing by the way. Oh yeah..one other thing. I spent my nights freezing cold in January and February. Temps would get to around 50 or so which is pretty hard to sleep in...

February

I went to a movie with Wafa and her friends Aya, Radwan and Nehal. Khaleeg Na3ma I think was the movie. It was horrible but at the same time great because we had that many more opportunities to laugh. It was supposed to be a drama, but..uh..

My birthday. I didn't really do much but it felt worth mentioning.

I went to City Stars (again...) with Mona and Maha and Sara. It was fun. We took Kimo and Sara to the Magic Planet (is that what it's called) play area. They had a blast.

I went to the Friday Market on my Anthropology field trip. It was an amazing experience. I'd never seen a market like it before. They sell a lot of random things: old English books, empty bottles, snakes, bicycles, shoes, toys, medical equipment. A lot of the things seemed like to junk to my classmates and I but it obviously isn't to some people since it does get sold. I think a lot of the people who shop there are in the business of buying things in order to try to resell them at a higher price. Most though are just looking for a good deal on things they need, whether that be a broken of piece of a cassette tape or a pair of new 'nike' tennis shoes. If you're actually interesting in hearing about the market, I'd be happy to tell you more.

STAR Orientation. STAR is this great program started by students at AUC. I think it stands for Student Action for Refugees..something like that. Well anyway, I was planning on volunteering as an English teacher but, because of a series of unfortunate events, didn't end up doing so..Something good did come out of it though. At the orientation for teachers, I met Basma and, although we weren't really friends at first, she later became a very good friend of mine.

I went to Wafa's house while my mom was at Carrefour. I spent hours talking, playing cards and laughing with her and her three sisters. They're all so adorable and sweet. It was great; I wish I had sisters!

March

uhhh...let me think...i didn't do much in march.I think we had a short break in March. Yeah..we did and I went to a little village place in Fayoum on a trip with my grandma's bank. It was cool; there wasn't much to do but the food was good.I think I went to el 3en el sokhna in March too. That was great! It was hot and the water was nice. We saw some dolphins. Good times.I also started working on my Anthropology final project in March. I did fieldwork on Study Abroad students in an effort to determine how AUC's move to New Cairo will affect them. It was great fun!
I saw all three male leads of the very popular Egyptian movies Aw2at Fara3' and Magic standing on the plat at AUC. I was with Basma at the time and, although she hadn't seen either of the movies, she pretended to be as excited as I was and then she walked up to them and asked them if they go to AUC. It turns out one of them does..

April..ahh april!

There was a big strike planned for April 6. A lot of mobilization happened for it via facebook. The facebook groups and events called for people to stay home from work/school and to not buy anything on that Sunday. The strike had originated among laborers in some of the factories on the fringes of Cairo. On the 6th the government sent in huge numbers of police forces to prevent the workers in the factories from striking and they also placed hundreds of officers in Tahrir square, the site of a planned sit-in, to prevent any visible political activity. As a result, many declared the day with its little visible results as a failure. I really don't think it was though, especially because of the international media coverage it got. If we say things like that are unsuccessful and shouldn't be repeated then that leaves the people nothing to do. Again, if you read this and are interested, let me know. I'd love to talk more about it.

I went to the Like Jelly concert. Like Jelly is a band made of mostly AUC students, one of whom is Yousef Atwan - one of the leaders of my pre-departure orientation for my AFS trip last year in D.C. I went with Laura as well as Ahmed Sadeeq. A friendly guy who about everyone at AUC knows. It was fun and I saw a lot of people from AFS Egypt there, most notably Alaa. I've missed her so much.

Spring break was in April. I went on a trip with the Cultural Development Club (CDC) at AUC to a little village about an hour from Cairo. Ann, my partner for my Anthropology project and by that time my very good friend, was the one who encouraged me to sign up for the trip but because of an odd mix up was not allowed to come on the trip. As a result, I knew none of the students on the trip. My Anthropology professor was chaperoning though so I ended up sitting with her and her husband and the other two professors chaperoning. It was a lot more fun than it sounds and that's when I started to really admire and respect my Anthro professor.

After that I went with my family (my brother, my grandma and my mom) to 'Agami (right outside of Alexandria) for 10 days. It was fun but actually pretty cold. It was hard to go in the water because of how chilly it was and the mosquitos were ridiculous. My arms are still entirely covered in scars from the bites I scratched over those 10 days...uh. Then I came back to go to class for two days and then..I had another break.I went out to eat and to the movie Fools' Gold with Ann and her sister Maureen for Eastern Easter. By this time, Ann and I were really good friends. I love her for her genuineness and sincerity and we had a great day.

I toured Coptic Cairo with Laura. We went on Easter though and many of the churches there were closed but we still had a good time walking around getting lost. Afterward we went to Maadi and walked around there for a while before eating at Lucille's.

May

I went on a trip with the International Student Services Office (ISSO) to Port Said. Port Said doesn't have much to do but I had fun with the other students on the trip. Laura G. was on the trip and I also met some other great people. Port Said is nice too. It's a quiet and pretty city.

I finally realized how great of a person Basma is and we started to become better friends. My last few weeks at school were by far the best because I got to hang out with her during all my gaps between classes.

I presented my Anthropology project in AUC's student research conference. If you know me at all you can probably guess that I was nervous as hell but my presentation went fine. I went to as many of the other presentations as I could too. Most of them were really interesting.

President Mobarek announced pay increases of 20% (I think) for government employees which amounted to very little for even the most highly paid in the government and then the next day announced a reduction in gas subsidies and an increase on cigarette tarriffs. Since then, prices have been steadily going up due to the increased gas price. As food and transportation prices are going up quickly, hunger has become a grave issue in Egypt.

June

Ashraf came which was pretty awesome. During his couple days in Cairo I tried to introduce him to as many people as possible.We went to el wa7at el ba7areya..the bahareya oasis. That was very cool. We saw all sorts of mountains and rock formations in the desert. Ashraf especially loved it. He had a great time showing our Bedouin hosts at the hotel his contact juggling tricks (he's gotten really good). Since summer is the off-season for the desert, we were the only guests at the hotel and the whole area was pretty quiet. On our second night the people at the hotel put on a show of singing/dancing for us which was pretty amazing.

I said bye to Menna which was really sad. I met her at the Study Abroad student orientation. She like me is an Egyptian American who came to AUC for the semester to live with her family and reconnect with Egypt. She was a great friend to me and we had a lot in common. Hopefully I'll get the chance to see her again some time.

I got to go out with Ann. We went to Arkadia mall and walked around for a while and then went to the movie Iron Man which I didn't like much. It kind of enforces stereotypes...and..the action was kind of overblown.

Basma and I wanted for a long time to go to the Amre Heiba art exhibit at the Townhouse Art Gallery. We met up with Laura and were really excited to go on the last day of the exhibit but when we got there it turned out they had already taken the exhibit down. Regardless, we had a fun time walking around and eating koshari.

I finally met Abir and Noha, Basma's infamous younger sisters. I like the three of them a lot and went over to their house a lot in June. One day when Ashraf was still here I saw them walking by AUC and so we all went to get Frescatos. Another day, Basma, Laura, Abir and I went to Chili's for dinner. A different day, earlier in the month, Basma and I spent the day wandering around in Maadi. We went to the movie Indiana Jones which was pretty bad. Basma spent the whole day convinced I was mad at her, which I wasn't. A different time, Basma, Abir and I were walking to their house. I was trying to convince Basma that Phoebe is everyone's favorite character on friends and so I told her, "I'd ask some random person on the street who their favorite character is but that'd be awkward.". Basma, who is much braver than I am, asked the next person she saw, but, as it turns out he hadn't heard of Friends. Neither had any of the people in the store he entered to ask about it. In the end though, the guy tried to lead us into the store saying, 'yes, Friends, this way..' although he still had no clue what this mysterious Friends was.I got to hang out with Mahinur and her friend Hedy, hopefully not for the last time. We went, along with Basma and Abir, to the movie Definitely Maybe which was extremely cute and not at all bad as far as Romantic Comedies go.

I went to Jordan. I absolutely loved it. All over Jordan there are pictures of the royal family...it's crazy! They're seriously everywhere. Amman is gorgeous. It is built on six mountains which make it appear absolutely magestic. It may even be my favorite city. We went also to Petra which is also amazing. It is an ancient Roman city carved into the rock that has survived two earthquakes. The buildings are amazing but the cultures of the rocks are even more spectacular. it was great despite the 4+ hours we spent walking in the heat. We floated in the Dead Sea which was a crazy experience. I tried to swim but you just can't..you move your arms and legs but don't go anywhere. I also got a little bit of the water in my eye...oww!! I couldn't open it for about 3 minutes. The private beach on the Dead Sea we went to also had a pool and I swam (like real swimming) for the first time in a couple of years. It was so much fun! We were scheduled to spend our last day in Wadi Rum, but upon arrival we found it to be a less magestic version of el Bahareya so we decided to spend the day on the beach in Aqaba instead. The beach seemed great but I, unfortunately, was unable to enjoy it since I fell asleep from the time we arrived around 4 to about 7:30. Oh well. It was a nice nap.

I got to spend a couple days with Laura M. before she left. We went and ate some tasty sandwiches and not some tasty Om Aly at Mo'men one day and then went to Isabel's apartment where she was staying to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (I love that movie) and then we got takeout from Felfela with Laura G. and sat for hours talking at AUC. On Laura M's last night she, Basma, Abir, Isabel, Isabel's friend Mahmoud and I all went to Khan El Khalili. Laura got lots of shopping for gifts done and afterward we got some juice and Laura got sheesha at Feshawy, a (as Basma tells me) famous cafe in Khan el Khalili. After that we headed over to my grandma's apartment for a little while before it was time to say good-bye to Laura, not without a little excitement though. She forgot the galabeyya she'd just bought at my apartment and so she took a fun little round trip taxi ride to get it back...my personal theory: she just wanted one last chance to see me. :D

The last couple of days I've spent just sitting around the house, running after my brother, helping my grandma with the cooking and cleaning and reading. I highly recommend the books the Yacobian Building and Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany.

Today (the 19th) was a wonderful day. I spent the morning playing with and feeding Kimo and then I met Laura for lunch at Pizza hut. To be perfectly honest I didn't really like my Alfredo pasta but, as always, I enjoyed my time with Laura. After that I went to meet Candace, one of my friends from the SLI program last year. I sat with her in Koshari el Tahrir and had a great time catching up with her. Laura met up with us again which was nice. After Mina came and took Candace home I went over to Basma's house. She, Abir, Noha and I spent hours exchanging the most disgusting and morbid stories imaginable: murders, vomiting, pedophiles, car accidents, broken bones, bloody noses, peeing in pants. It was horrible yet so fascinating. I really had a great time with them. Again, I wish I had sisters! I feel really bad now though because I had been meaning to call Laura to see if she was free to join us but somehow forgot. :(Tomorrow morning (technically later today), I'm leaving bright and early to Marsa Matruh. It should be fun but I can't wait until I come back.
Posted by ayah at 4:44 PM

Forget "Summer Lovin"; I'm lovin' summer!

2009-06-17T17:10:00.000-04:00

I've been at Camp Kamaji for just over a week now, and I am infinitely impressed by it. I am boring my fellow counselors with accounts of how "my camp" did things differently. It's not that I thought the Language Villages were better but actually that they were not quite as good! Don't get me wrong; I loved my El Lago del Bosque and Al Waha days (I should mention, too, that the two serve different purposed and aim to achieve different things), but I already think Kamaji is so much better...and campers aren't even here yet!

The many ways in which Kamaji has impressed me so far:

1. I will be a counselor in a cabin of seven 12-year olds and I have two - yes two! - co-counselors. I still can't get over that ratio. The cabin group right next to us also has three counselors with only six campers! Over as a camper at the language villages, I was perfectly pleased with the 8 to 1 camper: counselor ratio; I can only imagine how great it must be for campers here.

2. I was hired as a tennis instructor and cabin counselor, not as a we'll-put-you-in-whatever-activity-we-feel-like-whether-or-not-you're-qualified-to-teach-it instructor and cabin counselor. The counselors for each activity know enough about it and love it enough to have been comfortable applying for a job that has teaching that activity. This severely reduces the chances that a camper will know more about an activity than the counselor teaching it. It also almost eliminates the possibility that a camper would be more enthused about an activity than the counselor teaching it. Oh and did I mention that there are four tennis instructors? Yeah - you should be impressed. I doubt most of Kamaji's girls know just how valuable the activity program here is.

3. Windsurfing, canoeing, kayaking, climbing wall, low ropes course, sailing, water skiing, horseback riding, archery. All things I had never done before arriving here last week. All things campers get the chance to do while here at Kamaji. The activities here aren't your run-of-the-mill activities that most girls already take part in gym class. These are activities that you can't go to your local rec center and sign up for. Kamaji really does give girls the chance to experience something they couldn't experience at home.

4. The support system. Not only is the camper to counselor ratio great, there is an amazing support system in place. Counselors aren't expected to fix every problem that might cross their path. There are people here whose job is to help counselors problem solve, brain storm and be better at their jobs in general.

5. The days off system. Counselors have a full day and a full night off every week! Okay. I guess I don't really know if that's unusual, but it seems pretty darn great to me. That's 36/168 hours in a week; 21.4 percent of the summer; 3/14 of the contracted period. You get the point; it's a lot of time off. You get the sense that the directors of Kamaji really understand that, in order for campers to be happy, counselors have to be happy, and I'm definitely happy.

If you haven't picked up on it yet, the point of this post is that I'm already loving Kamaji. I feel like this is a place that is set up in a way that it can really influence young girls' lives. One more thing I haven't mentioned is that the camp is privately owned, meaning that the owners are the directors, meaning that the "head honchos" at camp have a vested interest in making it a good place. I would have loved to come here myself as a kid, but I'm equally - if not more - excited to be a part of what makes this place so special for girls.

Summer is around the corner...

2009-04-28T11:55:00.001-04:00

...and I can't wait! I'll be teaching tennis at an all-girls summer camp this year. I'm a bit nervous, but I'm really looking forward to it. The camp looks like a great place, and it'll be nice to spend time on the tennis court this summer. I'm getting really nervous for India too. I have a pre-travel orientation coming up in a couple of weeks.

In other news, I played on my college's tennis team this year. I didn't really enjoy it at the beginning of the year. I only stayed with it because I thought it would be rude to quit mid-season. I've started to really enjoy it now though. I love the girls on the team, and I'll really miss them. We also have the best team in 15 years or something like that. We're 12 and 6 right now and by the end of the day we'll hopefully be 13 and 6. If we win today we will most likely be going on to the conference tournament which will be fun. I started the season at 4 singles, but then I switched mid-way to 3 singles. My record is 11 and 6 right now - not horrible, but it could have been better. I've played 2 doubles the entire season with Ashley, and we're 12 and 6. I'm pretty happy about that that one.

Back to Blogging

2009-03-03T22:49:00.000-05:00

I've had a really hard time deciding whether or not I want to have a blog. There was never anything I'm not proud of on this blog, but I always worry about having any piece of myself or my thoughts on the internet. I've deleted this blog and then re-created it four times now. I'm a little sad that I got rid of my Egypt posts, but they're gone now so there's no point in whining.

I'm really excited for the next couple of years. I will be spending the fall 2009 semester in India on a Social Justice, Peace and Development program and then I'll head over to Chicago for an Urban Studies program in the spring of 2010. After that, I hope to transition to a political internship in D.C. for the fall 2010 semester before I return in the spring of 2011 for my final semester of college at Concordia. If my plans work out as I hope they do, by the time I graduate I will have spent four semesters on campus and four semesters off of it. This summer I've been hired to work as a cabin counselor and tennis instructor at a really great looking camp for girls called Camp Kamaji. I loved my camp experiences when I was younger and this one looks even better than the ones I went, so I can't wait. I figure I'll have lots of experiences over the next few years that I'll want to share so now is as good a time as any to revive my blog.

In case anyone actually reads this and is interested in the rest of my future goals, after graduation I'm hoping to go on to law school. As you probably know, law school is expensive. I've already decided I'll apply for a Rhodes scholarship, but those are hard to get, so I'm doing everything I can to prepare myself. After law school I'm hoping to be able to worm my way into politics somehow. I don't actually want to be a politican though; I'd like to be a foreign policy advisor or analyst. My dream job is secretary of state...we'll see how that goes...