Bonding

Let me preface this by stating that I’ve started meeting new people at AUC. Its very nice. I decided that in order to truly mend into a more regular Egyptian mode, I still need to meet some people. Basically, since we don’t live in the dorms, we have a lot of perks. There are no rules about gender mixing, noise, I get a bedroom, and a kitchen, and I can come back whenever I want. Oh, and its cheaper. The only problem is that the big perk of the dorms is all of the students in a very confined space. If you want to meet lots of cool people, the dorm is the place to live.

So. Living in Maadi, especially, there is a tendency for people to be unable to find each other since most students live in the downtown or Zamalak. Basically its rather lonely over in Maadi. Nice, quiet, but rather lonely. So its hard to meet new people. IDK what people in Cairo do to meet new people, but there aren’t shows, so IDK how it works. So I’ve decided to join basically every student club I think I can possibly enjoy even a little. That way I can meet people, both Egyptian and Western, and make some new friends.

The first club I joined was the Arab American Bond group. Basically there is a problem at the University where the American kids tend to hang out around other American kids, and the Egyptian kids hang out with themselves. Its hard, because although the classes are all in English, during the lunch break all the kids speak with themselves in Arabic. It makes it hard to make friends at school because its really intimidating to just walk up to to a group of much better looking women speaking in a different language. So they started this group to make it easier to facilitate the conversation that was lacking. We took a great trip to Khana Khalili.

While I had already been there, we still saw some new stuff, and I got to go to some new Mosques, and we actually got to go in this time (because it wasn’t Ramadan).

There was this one Mosque that was HUGE. Maybe the size of two super walmarts. It was huge. The inside had these huge columns arches that never ended. Remember the underground city in the Lord of the Rings under the Mountain? That huge old Dwarf city that got taken over by the goblins and the Balroug. It looked like that. In the middle there was a never ending marble floor. Maybe 200 yards long and 200 wide. Nothing but the night sky above it. Then more of the never ending columns.

I made some friends, and I got some numbers that I lost when they took my phone.