I Drank The Water

I have decided to be ambitious, stomach-wise, and start myself on a regime that will lead to a magical ability to drink tap water. To that end, I put a bit of tap water in my bottle this morning. I have yet to explode or turn any colors (except red red red, as is to be expected in the heat heat heat). Someday I may be able to drink from the handy drinking fountains which I now find too confusing. Are they tap water? Are they cold?

The cups provided those without bottles to fill are a nice touch, especially these:

Do you suppose that the red is for women and the blue for men, or does that color-coding exist only in Western imaginations? I wouldn't want to have it wrong and receive scalding looks and/or catch man cooties.

There's plenty of people about who like to dole out strange looks and also to give instructions that I quite often don't understand. For instance, I tried to take a picture of my building's exterior and this dude in a suit hissed at me and waved his finger in a "no" fashion. Why can't I take a photo of my own building? Why was suit dude idling on the street corner? Doesn't he have somewhere to be? I guess if you want to see the exterior of this building you'll just have to come to Cairo.

Today was, basically, a holiday. None of the offices I needed to visit were open (I need to schedule an Arabic placement test and this was, supposedly, meant to happen before my advising session on Monday. Oh well). It's amazing how crowded the streets are at all times with both pedestrians and cars. When do all these folks go to work? I know some work must be done: there's offices in my building that give the impression of being open, and noisy construction has been going on next door since I've been here.

My roommate and I explored a bit more of campus and discovered the magnificent looking library.

Here it is, looking stripey on the other side of this lovely green space.

There are three (or more?) different areas of campus and I think the library's area is called Greek but I wouldn't swear to it. I saw no evidence of Grecian decor or atria or urns, but I did see many a scrawny street cat lazing in the shadows.


Then we took the school's shuttle to the main dorm way out in Zamalek. This is an island in the Nile to which we walked yesterday, and on which are, supposedly, the best restaurants. I haven't been to any sit down restaurants yet but I did visit a lovely store whose three stories offer everything I could ever need. Groceries on the first floor, kitchenware and bathroom stuff and the like on the second, and then electronic and exercise equipment and clothing and what not on the third. They even sell bikinis, which struck me as a bit odd: where are women supposed to wear them?

If I lived closer to that store, I'd go every day. Unfortunately, today, after another satisfying shopping experience, we got lost trying to branch out and find a new way home. We found a nice bridge across the river:



Here's the view from it. But we couldn't figure whether this was the right direction to get home and no passerby could or would help until one gentleman told us to walk that way and then turn left and then right.





So, more marching in the heat. Zamalek is very pretty and tree-lined. We passed various interesting looking embassies (Nigeria, Brazil, Libya), but saw nothing familiar enough to ensure we were walking in the correct direction. (Maybe you're wondering why we didn't just look at a map? Well, I don't have one so much. I figured it wouldn't be difficult to just pick one up here. I figured wrong. Where's AAA when you need it? The AUC bookstore has been closed every day so far, and so I've been wandering lost.)

Then we came across a gate with the word Aquarium on it. This was very exciting; who doesn't love fish and air conditioning?

But it was not an aquarium like I've ever visited. Rather than displaying various fish species in glass cases inside a controlled environment, this was a large park with bizarre cave-like structures made of cement. It seems to be a date place: every dark crevice held a couple chatting each other up and I kept accidentally interrupting whatever it was they were up to. Sorry guys, I wanted to say, I'm just looking for some freaking fish!

In the mean time, I became impressed with this round building towering over the park:


Pretty nice, huh?


Finally, we found about three tanks with some uninspiring brown fish in them and then went about our way. Only after accosting various Egyptians for directions, we got no more of a clue and were at a loss until an actual British gentleman gave perfect directions which convinced us to quit walking and grab a cab.



Then I had my first falafel of the trip. Very exciting.

Isn't it pretty? I had a hard time ordering it, however, despite my Egyptian Arabic class. The place was this tiny hole in the wall around the corner from my apartment. No menus in English, no waiters, just a counter - my kind of place. But when I asked for falafel, I was faced with all these follow up questions that were completely confounding. How many do I want? I thought I wanted only one, but apparently this wasn't a satisfactory answer and a customer tried to come to my rescue. He could barely speak English either, but he asked for something that worked effectively enough and he had a very warm smile. You can't see it in the picture, but in addition to the falafel sandwich I also got a pita full of fool, which is the best I can spell the Egyptian hummus-like food made of fava beans. And all that for the low low price of 2 Egyptian pounds.

I could live on these. And hopefully I will someday be able to order on my own.

And also, hopefully, that lettuce I ate (another guidebook no-no) won't disagree with me. It was good.