With that out of the way, I feel pretty good. The last few days have been weird. My roommate has been in Greece so I’ve kinda been by myself for a while. Everyone else is apparently traveling and having fun elsewhere. I stayed back because there was a perspective new roommate coming to check out the digs. His name is Pat, and he decided to grab an apartment downtown, but we’ve been hanging out regardless. He’s been in Cairo for 2 years in the past, so his arabic is passible. He also knows a bunch of cool spots downtown. Basically thats what I’ve been doing, just going downtown and running around.
I’ve had very little motivation to write. Thats for sure. I’m not exactly sure why.
This isn't my picture btw. Thanks flikr.
Anyways, my Cairo experience is changi
ng a lot. I think people have just been cranky because they were fasting everyday. All of a sudden people are just being nice. I’m not sure what happened, but there were a couple of cool things that happened.
The first, is that I was on the subway going into downtown. It was totally packed, and we’re stuck at stop I guess waiting for the train ahead of us to get father away. Well, there are like 1000 guys crammed on this car, and out of the quiet comes a faint piano wafting over the hushed din of random people on the subway. It comes almost like a dream. Then a voice, lighting the train car like a mist, and I reconginze it as if out of a dream… “How can you see into my eyes, like open doors”…
Then the electric guitars kick in. Yes, on the Hayedek El Maadi Subway stop “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence is playing from somewhere. I smile to myself, and I can’t help feeling really really really happy. It was awesome. All these old guys in the traditional dress were casting death glares looks over to two boys probably 12-14 (though I’ve heard that Arabic boys/men hit puberty later than in the states) who had their cell phones whipped out listening to tunes. Nice. So that made me really happy.
We finally get to the Sadat downtown subway stop and its super busy. Everyone around me starts to shout, and its easy to tell that we are all teammates. Here is what happens. The doors open at the subway, and they only stay open for a limited time, but a TON of people need to get in and out, which of course means that there is a war. Inside the train there are about 50 people trying to get out of our door, and another 30 wanting to get in, and the crowd outside crowds the door. So on the inside, everyone gets together like team A, everyone is patting shoulders, and giving smiles all around, like we were some sort of High School Basketball team. The doors open and everyone yells push at the same time, and together, the 50 of us push against 30 people on the other side. Its like a war cry. It was so awesome. See… and then its only a matter of time until the other side starts to fill in from one side or the other. Of course some people get cut in the cross fire. They can’t move forward, or back, and are stuck. They eventually get out, but its kinda funny for a while, especially if its a woman in a burka, and she’s trying to get out of the slip stream, but she can’t push hard enough.
Anyways, that subway ticket was the best 17 cents I ever spent.
Then on the way back I got to talking in mostly broken arabic and some broken english with a couple of high school boys. Wow, they are actually pretty tool-ish and immature, like most of the guys here (flirting here at the AUC usually has not moved past the “i hit you because I love you stage” for guys here, idk when they grow out of it). But, it was still nice to talk to some people for a change. We exchanged numbers. Some dude actually bought my subway ticket too, i was like “cool”.
Then I walked home at midnight from the subway station to my house and got totally lost somewhere in Maadi, but managed to get home. It was awesome.
Anyways, my Cairo experience is changi
ng a lot. I think people have just been cranky because they were fasting everyday. All of a sudden people are just being nice. I’m not sure what happened, but there were a couple of cool things that happened.The first, is that I was on the subway going into downtown. It was totally packed, and we’re stuck at stop I guess waiting for the train ahead of us to get father away. Well, there are like 1000 guys crammed on this car, and out of the quiet comes a faint piano wafting over the hushed din of random people on the subway. It comes almost like a dream. Then a voice, lighting the train car like a mist, and I reconginze it as if out of a dream… “How can you see into my eyes, like open doors”…
Then the electric guitars kick in. Yes, on the Hayedek El Maadi Subway stop “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence is playing from somewhere. I smile to myself, and I can’t help feeling really really really happy. It was awesome. All these old guys in the traditional dress were casting death glares looks over to two boys probably 12-14 (though I’ve heard that Arabic boys/men hit puberty later than in the states) who had their cell phones whipped out listening to tunes. Nice. So that made me really happy.
We finally get to the Sadat downtown subway stop and its super busy. Everyone around me starts to shout, and its easy to tell that we are all teammates. Here is what happens. The doors open at the subway, and they only stay open for a limited time, but a TON of people need to get in and out, which of course means that there is a war. Inside the train there are about 50 people trying to get out of our door, and another 30 wanting to get in, and the crowd outside crowds the door. So on the inside, everyone gets together like team A, everyone is patting shoulders, and giving smiles all around, like we were some sort of High School Basketball team. The doors open and everyone yells push at the same time, and together, the 50 of us push against 30 people on the other side. Its like a war cry. It was so awesome. See… and then its only a matter of time until the other side starts to fill in from one side or the other. Of course some people get cut in the cross fire. They can’t move forward, or back, and are stuck. They eventually get out, but its kinda funny for a while, especially if its a woman in a burka, and she’s trying to get out of the slip stream, but she can’t push hard enough.
Anyways, that subway ticket was the best 17 cents I ever spent.
Then on the way back I got to talking in mostly broken arabic and some broken english with a couple of high school boys. Wow, they are actually pretty tool-ish and immature, like most of the guys here (flirting here at the AUC usually has not moved past the “i hit you because I love you stage” for guys here, idk when they grow out of it). But, it was still nice to talk to some people for a change. We exchanged numbers. Some dude actually bought my subway ticket too, i was like “cool”.
Then I walked home at midnight from the subway station to my house and got totally lost somewhere in Maadi, but managed to get home. It was awesome.
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