Be Aggressive. Be-e Aggressive.

After Arabic class this morning, I walked to this phenomenal sandwich shop a few blocks away from our apartment with another girl from my program. This place is legit - they serve tamaya (falafel), ful (beans), and potato sandwiches (it's literally a pita stuffed with fries and salad... simple but amazing), and the prices are ridiculous. 1 Egyptian pound for tamaya or ful and 1.5 for potato. For those unfamiliar with the current exchange rate between Egypt and the US, that is less than 20 (or 30) cents per sandwich. Unbelievable. There is a bit of a catch though - you have to be fairly aggressive to actually place your order. After you pay, you get a little slip of paper that says how much money you paid, then you have to fight your way up to a counter which is only a few inches shorter than me, attract the attention of the guy behind it, and yell your order over the noise of the huge pot where falafel is frying 6 inches to the right. To be honest, it isn't all that difficult for me to get the guy's attention - I stand out as generally the only white girl in the cramped shop, but the whole pushing and shoving and line-cutting is a bit different than the orderly and chill lines that I'm used to at Subway.

Yet another thing I'm not used to - sandstorms. This evening I headed out to a coffee shop called Cilantro to use their WiFi and do some work (I technically don't have internet in the apartment yet; we sketchily borrow from some of our neighbors), and on the way the wind picked up, blowing dust everywhere. I was wearing my gigantic sunglasses (even though the sun was setting) and had my hands cupped around them, and I still ended up with dust in my eyes and everywhere else. When I got out of the shower I found a bit in my ears that I had missed... gross. This wasn't my first sandstorm in Cairo; we actually flew into the city during one. It was really strange, I was looking out the window, trying to find the pyramids, and everything was really cloudy, so I figured we were descending through some huge clouds (colored funny because of pollution)... and then we landed. The whole city was in a kind of haze, and it made me feel dirty just to stand outside and wait for the bus. According to a few people we know in Cairo, that day was the worst dust storm they could remember, and it hasn't been nearly as disgusting since then (seriously today wasn't even close, though it was still bad). Hopefully tomorrow will be sandstorm free, since I'll be spending the morning truly out in the desert (i.e. not on the fertile banks of the Nile) at Ana Al-Misri. Masa al-khair!