Days 8-9: Happy Birthday Daddy

First things first. Happy Birthday Daddy! I love you, and I hope you have a great party on Sunday!

Now, I know I skipped yesterday. I even got the worried, "I'm not going to ask because I know I'm being paranoid, but I'm still going to E-mail you just to make sure you're alive" note from mom. Thank you Momma, it made me smile. But I was fine. I just slept later than I intended to Saturday and was up all night doing homework. So I slept all day when I got back from class.

There wasn't much to say. Class was good. I bought my novel that I'll be reading this summer. I finally charged my phone. The end.

Today, there was a little more to write about.

Yesterday in class Ustaaz Immad invited us to his home to meet his family, so tonight we went as a class to have dinner there. There's only seven of us, so it wasn't really an issue, but still there were problems. For instance, Ustaaz Immad lives on the other side of Alexandria in a cute little neighborhood called Jelaklise. It's not really hard to get to the other side of Alex, you can take the tram or a bus or a taxi, but we chose taxi based purely on time. I was bringing a cake with fresh fruit on it, and I didn't want it to spoil in the hour or so the tram would have taken.

Once we got to the neighborhood though, we were lost. Immad had drawn us a map, but none of us really understood what it was saying. We called him to get clearer directions, but being our dialect professor he told us to ask people in the street. Practice he said. Well, half an hour later, in the middle of an unfamiliar neighborhood, he comes to pick us up. Turns out he'd been watching us the whole time, seeing how we functioned with dialect in unfamiliar territory. It was a bit cruel, but effective.

Anyway, we finally make it to his place. It's a little apartment on the fifth floor of a tall building on a residential street. From the outside it's nothing special, but the doors to the apartments were gorgeous. And though his apartment was tiny (two bedrooms, one bath, a salon, a living room, and a tiny kitchen), the decorations made it classy and comfortable. The apartment also featured a narrow balcony across from which was his wife's sister's apartment. They've erected a levy system between the two homes so that they can pass groceries and such back and forth. It's rather ingenious, and we had far too much fun playing with it.

Ustaaz Immad's family is amazing. There's his wife, of course. Her name is Dineya, or at least that's how you pronounce it. I have no idea how to write it. He has two children, a boy and a girl. We think the older one, the girl, is named Miriam, and the boy is named George. They're in first and third grade respectively and are absolutely adorable. Miriam likes music, she sings and dances and what not, and George plays soccer like pretty much every Egyptian boy. They took turns showing us toys and pictures and it was all great fun.

Dinner was delicious as well. Dineya is an amazing cook, and the spread was gigantic. Plates and plates of all kinds of vegetables. Stuffed cucumbers, grape leaves, stuffed peppers, eggplants, kofta, faraakh, tomatem. We all ate until we had to learn the phrase for "our stomachs will explode." Then we sat and chatted for a while longer before turning to dessert. In addition to the cake I brought Dineya had watermelon and honeydew. And after dessert we had tea and coffee. It was all lovely, and very homey and welcoming. We felt like we were part of an authentic Egyptian family and it was beyond heart warming.

Also, for the first time in Egypt, I didn't feel out of place for not wearing a scarf. In the streets, in the dorm, in the Universities, ninety-nine out of a hundred women are covered, but Ustaaz Immad is a Coptic Christian, so his wife is not muhagiba. She showed her hair, like us. Wore short sleeves, like us. And when the call to prayer came over the city loud speakers we all sat and marveled at it rather than most of us rushing off to pray. As a little a thing as it was, it was kind of nice.

They're wonderful people, and I was sad to go, but alas, we had to get back to the dorms eventually. We took a taxi back again, just because it was late and therefore easier. And now I'm here about to finish the last of my homework. It's late, and I'm sleepy, and I need to go to bed because I have a lot of reading to do tomorrow. Good night all!