Ramblings about Egypt...

The following is directly cut and pasted from an email that I'm sending my mother. I would go through it and make it more general reader friendly, but my computer is being spectacularly stupid as of late, and plus it is midnight and I have gotten abysmally little done today. So, anyway, let the musings commence!!!

(background: I'm going to London in the spring! My mother is attempting to counsel me about it.)

But I don't want to go to London, I like it here.....everything will be so impersonal and expensive and cold there! What am I going to do??? I somehow enjoy the experience of being a person living here. I feel like the way you are expected to interact with people is much different from in a country where they speak your language. In London I'll just be dealing with mostly American girls (who I will distrust and think poorly of, due to the fact that they chose to do their study abroad experience in London...this is a terrible thing, I know, but it is basically going to be one element of triple-reverse-culture shock, and I've accepted it so that I can be prepared and head off any overtly obnoxious I-just-came-from-AFRICA behaviour on my part) and then with British girls, who will assume that I am American, and then I will have to impress upon them that no no, I'm British! And then I will have to deal with why I don't have an accent and legitimizing myself to them. Maybe I will pick up an Egyptian accent and insist on speaking English like Egyptian girls do, all throwing the Arabic equivalents of "like" and "um" and "then" into my everyday speech! I am seriously not going to know what to do there. I probably won't like living in a dorm, and I definitely won't like spending so much freaking money all the time. I know I'll probably lose Egyptian customs pretty quickly but I really don't want to! I sort of want to be the person who, in March, is still walking in the street instead of the sidewalk, and who answers every question with, "well, when I was in Egypt....".

I'm going to miss Egyptian food! I don't know what I'm going to do without Egyptian yoghurt, cheese, falafel, koshary, assorted strange salad items, and especially the bread. Mummy, the bread is absurd. I wonder if I could somehow find some fantastic country bread and bring it home still fresh-ish for you? This bread, you can only get on the street or in homes or in the country or in some similar situation. We got it the whole time we were camping in the desert. It is like pita, but not. It is chewier, and grainier, and just totally indescribable. A friend and I were talking about this the other day, about how we're going to miss all the sketchy Egyptian foods and their amazing pricing. I mean, in terms of drinks, you can get a bottle of Egyptian beer here that is pretty much 22 oz for 8 LE. It is the main Egyptian brand, and it is actually quite tasty. It is what people drink everywhere, and you always find yourself roped into going out for one. And since it is 22 oz, you are totally fine just having one! And it is 8 LE......which is over 88 British pounds.........I am going to be awful to go out with next semester! I'll be out with the study abroad people, trying to make friends, going into clubs, all, "man, in AFRICA I could get this entire menu for less than a pound!". I may consider seeking out Muslim neighborhoods and just hanging about, muttering in Arabic and staring and non-Arabs. (I pretty much already do that here, save the muttering part. Seriously, I'm almost as bad as the Egyptians! Everytime I see someone who I have never seen before and who is not Arab, I stare terribly and wonder, very seriously, what on earth they are doing here!)

I don't know what to do with myself. My last (a little over) 3 weeks here are going to be a total blur, I know it. It's so sad! I feel like I sort of slept through a lot of time here, and now I feel like I never got the chance to just go out and sort of wander around enough. Ugh. What am I doing. I was going to do some of that this weekend, but then of course I am a terrible student and cannot even commit to writing a damn paper or getting anything done at all except eating. What the heck. But! My dad is coming on Wednesday, and despite how i have tons of work to do that will not get done (not to mention classes that will not be gone to) while he is here, and not to mention that he is here for far too short a time, DESPITE all this, we will have a fantastic time. I am sure of it. We are sort of planing on going to: all the Pyramids possible, Jerusalem (random, right???), Luxor. You know what this means? Plenty of 10 hour train and bus rides! Yaaay.

I pretty much spent my last hour reading some blogs from various AIESECers who've been to Cairo. They've all led such interesting lives!!! Seriously, they all just finished up school recently, but they've already been to so many places and gotten so involved in AIESEC....I can only hope to be sort of somewhere close to how awesome they are. Here's hoping that this next semester carries with it a wealth of AIESEC opportunities....(international conferences, here I come! Faci-ing at any random conferences that will have me, here I come!!!). ANYWAY.

Gosh, I need to go to sleep or go to the bathroom or do something productive. Or, you know, work on my freaking paper! Or, work on my source list that is also due Wednesday...or work on my study abroad forms that are due Saturday...or book my ticket to London that is due Wednesday....man! It is time for me to chill out and attempt to get down with livin the dream (yes I may have just watched the intro video for my first and their last traineeship power hour from this past SSC.....).

Love and kisses, and I hope that Thanksgiving found everyone happy, stuffed, and right where they wanted to be. Ma'asalaama!