She's all over Egypt. There's some things you hope you can leave behind in America...here she was clogging the beaches in Savannah this summer, and now she's a huge deal here too. Even the university president based his speech on her song, "The Climb." Ugg.
Since orientation week turned out to be more like a 2-day deal, things have been a little relaxed, read "slow," here. Usually we have 1 or 2 things on the agenda we have to take care of (like getting our student IDs or buying textbooks), and then the rest of the day is just spent taking it easy. Hard, right?
For the first 3 days I was here, I decided to drink water from the tap. I don't think that was the best idea. I'll spare you the details, but let's just say that it was not pretty. I'm now sticking solely to bottled mayya (teaching ya'll some Egyptian colloquial Arabic, halla!). Fortunately, it's really cheap: about 45 cents for 1.5 liters.
Speaking of good deals, textbooks here are insanely cheap. Engineering books at Purdue--probably around $150 each, right? I got mine for about $60. Cha-ching!
This evening (Wednesday), we went on a dinner cruise down the Nile. The food was good, even though much of it I wasn't exactly sure what it was. There was some chicken, turkey, meatloaf-like-stuff-but-in-roll-form, lots of good breads, some sort of orange colored juice that tasted like raisins, and stuffed fig leaves, amongst other things. We also had some live entertainment, as seen in the video below. I'm not sure what this dancing is called, but it was neat (Peter, do you know?).
After the Nile dinner, we (me, Rachel, Henry, and Lucy) decided to get an infamous black-and-white cab to go to the mall. We wanted to get a cab that was going in the right direction, so we needed to get across the highway. So we walked across...like everyone else does. Oh, and there aren't nice little white crosswalks or even streetlights for that matter...anywhere. At least we don't talk on our cell phones like the Egyptians do while crossing the road.
That's all for now! Stay tuned...
2 comments:
Oh Bean Ben!! I can't believe you thought you would try drinking the water there... I probably would have tried after a few weeks and gradually... oh Bean Ben. I am glad that you appear to be enjoying Egypt so far! <3
looks like crossing the street in egypt is similar to playing frogger. stay safe (and don't drink the water-I probably should have let you know about that bit of travel advice earlier...)
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