Life as I Know It

I have not written very much about what's going on here in my life other than to post a few pictures of my apartment.  Just about a month and a half have passed since my arrival, and I'm almost done with the first term, albeit the shortest one, of CASA.  CASA being the program in which I am enrolled right now, which includes about 4 hours of Arabic class a day.  We have one week left, and then I have a month in which I'm planning to finally catch up on reviewing grammar and vocabulary accumulated from the past few months/years.  I'm also hoping to read a few novels and other assorted reading materials I have with me.  Then Anya and I are off to some coastal vacation before I plunge into the fall.

So....  I live in Maadi, which is about half an hour south of central Cairo and Tahrir Square by train, which is also where class happens to be.  Fortunately, I live very, very close to the metro line, which also means I live in the "less nice" area of Maadi.   "Less nice" for Maadi still means very nice by Cairo standards.  There are trees, and the upscale shops are a short walk away.   Maadi is a region known as being an enclave for expats and Egyptians who live very American-style upper class lifestyles.   Owning a dog, for instance, would be a sort of unthinkable act for most ordinary and middle class Egyptians, but I have seen more than a few dog-owners or dog-walkers giving their large St. Bernards and German Shepherds walks.  Dogs in Egypt are much too closely associated with dumpster-diving street-animals... and animals in general are treated pretty poorly in the streets here.

Anyhow, there is a divide between "those who live closer to the metro line" and "those who live closer to the ring road."  I feel like this is roughly transcribable to "those who must take public transportation" and "those who think taking public transportation in below them."  Believe me, these people do exist.  Taking the metro costs 1 Guinea, which is a little less than an American quarter dollar.  It is supplemented by a dizzying array of mini-buses, micro-buses, buses, shared cars, and the like that are entirely the subject of local knowledge.  That is, there are no published routes or fares that I have seen, but the information is known.

Nevertheless, we live very close to Street 9, which is one of the "cool places" in Maadi.  It has the foreign coffee shops, nice restaurants, and the like.  There is another street with good shops that is near the ring road end of Maadi called Street 233 where I just ate decent Tex Mex food.  All the streets in Maadi are numbered in a way that might lead you to think that there is some sort of order or coherence to the way they have been numbered.  If there is, I have not discovered it.  There is a rough attempt at bunching numbers and making adjacent numbers run parallel, but there is no larger scheme that I can discern.

If all this seems a big insane and hard to get your head around, you're getting an idea of Cairo.  I've taken a few cabs in the past couple of days with drivers who complain about the busy streets, lack of order, and general difficulty of getting around without something getting in your way.  After awkwardly sympathizing (it seems relatively impolite as a foreigner to join in Cairo bashing with Cairenes in earshot), I always ask:  "So, where are you from originally."  All of them have said, with pride, somewhere other than Cairo.  Whether it is Aswan, Sa'id, or the Delta, they explain that people there are nicer and things there are much calmer.

Most of my days, I get up and grab the metro just before 8 AM when it is already hot enough that I find shade to stand in while waiting for the metro.  Then 2 hours of standard Arabic, then 2 hours of dialect, and then I get the cheapest pasta or bean-sandwich lunch I can get my hands on at the local places downtown.  Then back to Maadi for homework, dinner and watching a show or something with Anya, and then maybe a coffee shop.  I'm looking forward to the break when I can just relax a bit more, read and write, and let the hottest month of the year roll past in the most air-conditioned room possible.