Today was the first day I didn't have any meetings. This morning, I went on a tour with Sharou', my TA for the semester. She is incredibly sweet and absolutely gorgeous. She took us to the Royal Jewelry Museum via microbus. I'd never been on a microbus before, but it wasn't half as bad as I expected. I sat next to a sweet old lady and we had a nice little chat about why I was in Alexandria and so on and so forth.
After we got out of the microbus, it was a few more blocks to our destination. Since the museum is in a more residential area, there were a lot more cars parked along the street. It made me laugh that in the span of thirty seconds I passed two exact replicas of my mother's car. Just goes to show that it's a small world after all.
At the museum, we weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but the outside was beautiful too. The museum is housed in an old palace that King Fu'ad built for one of his lesser relatives. It's ridiculously extravagant, of course. The decorations, however, were redone by a European couple in the last hundred years. So the stained glass windows show European celebrations, and the ceilings are covered in frescoes. The architecture is still something to marvel at though.
After the museum (which was somewhat far from the university), Sharou' found us a double decker tour bus to ride back on. It took us the entire length of the corniche, so we got a great look at the beach. Side note: Hadir (my roommate's name) means sound of the ocean. I thought it was cool.
Once back that the University we had lunch, Koshery and this delicious chicken soup like concoction, and went to Wal-mart.
Okay, so we didn't actually go to Wal-mart. We went to Carrefour, which is identical Wal-mart except some of it's in Arabic. I got all of the necessities I needed to buy. There's a terrible selection of toilet paper here, by the way, since no one uses it.
My biggest purchase of the day was my new Egyptian cell phone. It's pay as you go, as most Egyptian phones are. Since I don't have any minutes on it yet I can't call out, but now Robyn, the program director, or anyone else can get a hold of me if they need to. Most people's phones turned on in English when they activated them. Mine, for some reason, turned on in Arabic. It was a lot of fun figuring out what went where, but I think I've decided to leave things in English for now. Business I'm doing on my cell phone is too important to screw up.
My roommate has another exam tomorrow, so when I got back from Carrefour she was napping so that she can study all night. When she woke up, she told me that some of the other girls were going out to the movies tonight and that I'd been invited. Not being willing to turn down any opportunities in Egypt, I, of course, agreed.
After dinner, we all gathered together in the dining room and Ala', the amazing girl who proposed the trip, organized us into groups for taxis. The taxis without Egyptian girls in them had some problems getting there, but we all made it eventually.
Buying tickets was an ordeal. In Egypt, there's assigned seating in movie theaters, which means we had to buy our tickets together in order to be able to sit together. Zeinab, another of the girls, organized the money, and one we all had our tickets we went to get ice cream before the movie started. I had mangos and cream. It was delicious.
I was happy to find that I understood most of the movie, despite it being in Arabic. The title translates to "Black Honey," and it's all about an Egyptian man who became an American citizen before returning to Egypt to work on a photography project. While in Egypt, he has a lot of issues with the same cultural things we're having problems with, so I thought the movie was fitting. Eventually, having lost his passport, an family he used to friends with takes him in and shows him that he doesn't have to loose his Egyptian roots just to be a citizen. Then they find his passport and he gets to go home. There's more to it, of course, but that's the gist, and I was falling asleep through half of it, so I'm proud I could keep up.
Egyptian movie theaters are a trip. Apart from the assigned seating, there's no real agreed upon rules like there are in American movie theaters. Everyone had their children there for starters, babies, toddlers, and all the way up. There was an intermission halfway through, like it was a play. Then, there was no phone etiquette. Not only do you not have to turn off your cell phone, but a guy sitting a few seats away from me actually answered his phone and carried on a conversation in the middle of the movie. None of it was really bothersome, surprisingly. They play the movie very loudly, so it drowns out everything else.
Now that we're back, and I've gotten ready for bed, I'm even more exhausted than I was to begin with, so I'm going to end this post here. More to come tomorrow, in sha' Allah!
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