Week two in Cairo

My Arabic classes started last week and it seems like its going to be intense. The classes are broken up into grammar, speaking, and colloquial. The main area I hope to improve is hearing and speaking. The colloquial is extremely important because in the other classes they teach an extremely formal why of speaking which gets you no where on the street.

Over the past week I’ve been to old Coptic Cairo, the pyramids in Giza, and took a bus tour of Cairo.

Old Coptic Cairo, as the name implies, is the old center of the Coptic Church. I visited Churches that were hundreds of years old. The only problem is that tourist guides are not available. This may have something to do with the fact that there is no cover charge for entering these ancient buildings.

I went to the pyramids that are located in Giza which is about thirty minutes from downtown. This was kind of disappointing because I assumed that we had to go deep into the dessert to see the pyramids.

The most amazing part is when you first sent your eyes on the pyramids. For years we’ve seen them on television, like National Geographic, and read about them in school, but to see them in real life is a bit overwhelming.

The pyramids at Giza are not considered the best ones so I may venture out to the other ones. One problem with Giza is the amount of hustlers and lack of proper policing. In fact one of the security guards tried to hustle me and my group. I won’t bored you with all the ways people tried to hustle us but this one was funny. Four of us walk up to a pyramid and a man in uniform propositioned us for a tour and introduced himself as the tour expert of that specific pyramid. Maybe he thought we were illiterate because he was wearing a badge that said security guard, in English. We decided to follow him. This is how it went for the entire time:
Man: “see this”
Us : “yes”
Man: “this is a cat”
Man: “see this”
Us : “yes”
Man: “this is a…”
You get the picture. What he didn’t know was we had a fact book. When we approached him about the discrepancies between his information and the book he merely shrugged it off and continued.

We actually had fun with him because he tried really hard to entertain us.

On of the most enjoyable things of being here is the people I get to meet. So I decided that I would try to profile a new person as much as possible.

I’ve spoken about Bakry in my last post. He is now finishing his Masters thesis and has applied to some universities in the US in pursuit of a PhD in public policy. Interestingly, his first choice is the University of Washington, Seattle. Maybe my family will have him over for some good Eritrean food.

In my next post I’ll profile Aisha. Aisha is a graduate student from Uganda.