Day 1

I'm finally here! After 5 hours of waiting at JFK to meet up with the other students from my program, an 11 hour flight to Egypt (complete with the latest Twilight film with Arabic subtitles), and an extremely traffic-packed drive through downtown Cairo, I am all settled in my apartment in Garden City, just east of the Nile. The apartment itself is incredible - it has 5 bedrooms, which are each the same size as my dorm room from last semester, a huge living room, and a dining room with a built-in china cabinet, in addition to the bathrooms and kitchen. We did a little bit of walking around in Garden City, stopping to buy adapters and bottled water and snacks, but now we're finally relaxing before dinner.

The craziest lesson I learned today was about traffic and parking in Cairo. Of course, I know that not all drivers behave the same way as those in America do, so I was expecting increased amounts of swerving and honking and yelling, but I still couldn't believe the mildly senseless way that traffic laws work. For example, on our drive to the apartment, our police escort (which we picked up at the airport for some reason - they insisted they accompany us) directed some drivers to back up so we could drive the wrong way down a one-way street. Later, our professor told us from the front of the bus, "When you park your car, you should just put it in neutral, in case someone needs to move it out of the way." This happened, in fact, when we couldn't get down a narrow street where cars were double parked, and some friendly pedestrians pushed one of the cars aside to make room for us. I should probably also mention that I watched all this from a bus bedecked with an oriental rug down the aisle.