Youm Al-Intikhabat (The Day of the Elections)

Dear readers, 

This is post #1 of the shorter entries that I'm going to write from now on, since I no longer have the time to write blog entries as long as the ones that I've posted so far.

The theme of this post is in the title. You readers have almost certainly heard that Mohammed Morsi has been elected president of Egypt, because his victory was, as Joe Biden might say (when censored), a Big Freaking Deal. What a time to be in Egypt, let alone in a city that I keep hearing referred to as "The Muslim Brotherhood Stronghold"! Needless to say, being in the center of the city when his victory was announced was absolutely insane.

My classes (which I'll talk about in a later post) go from 9am to 3pm, but on the day of the elections, we were told by the program coordinator to go home early, and then we were confined to the hotel, not allowed to go outside. (Our dinner was ordered for delivery from a shawarma place in the area.) Things were a little bit tense in our group before the results were announced; we didn't know whether violence would erupt, we didn't know if we'd be safe (though most of us were pretty sure we would be), and we knew that in the worst case scenario, we'd get sent back to a Georgetown campus, either in DC or in Qatar. One of the other students checked out a window about an hour before the results came in and said that there was absolutely no one on the street, which, for those who haven't been to a big Egyptian city, is like looking outside in New York and seeing no signs of life. Creepy. For two or three hours in the afternoon, we gathered around the TV to wait for news.

None of us were fluent enough to read the ticker, but we could at least read the relevant words: election, announcement, and the name of the eventual winner. When they announced it was Morsi, the noise from outside -- which is loud 24/7 anyway -- increased tenfold. Cheers rung out from outside. We started to hear fireworks. And for the rest of the day, we ignored our homework and watched the celebration from our hotel room balconies. The rejoicing (and noise) didn't calm down until about 3 or 4 in the morning.

Some of us (not including me) got photos of passers-by carrying a banner with Morsi’s face on it, down the Corniche. Others were able to capture some pretty interesting (and slightly creepy) effigies that the crowd made, of the judges who voted to dissolve Parliament. But I got this more celebratory photo, which gives you an okay idea of the mood on the street:

Imagine this, only with a flag on every car. Imagine a whole family of five or so people, piled onto the same motorcycle, riding towards the demonstrations by a nearby mosque. Imagine every single car on a busy city street, honking their horns in rhythm: dahh dahh da-da-dahh, one, two, three-and-four, over and over, all afternoon and into the wee hours of the morning. It was pretty incredible.

More views of the extreme (relative to usual Corniche) crowdedness, from a hotel balcony that night (keeping in mind that it's hard to know how what it was like unless you were there and could hear the noise too):

Now, I wouldn’t consider myself an obsessive person, but I definitely have obsessive tendencies, and because of that I had a hard time not getting angry at the outside noise that day. I tried to look at the big picture, at the amazing moment in this city, but for whatever reason my mind decided that this was the time to have my inevitable Study Abroad Freakout. “My classes are so hard! I haven’t finished a single assignment so far! I have to catch up, but it’s too loud in here to get any work done, and I can’t freaking leave, so what am I going to do?? Is every day going to be like this???" But now that it's done, I can think objectively, and look back on it for what it was: a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and one that I won't soon forget, that I am thankful to have seen. Something to tell my grandchildren about maybe. Inshallah, I'll also be able to tell them that Egypt became/remained a stable democracy after that.

More -- on daily life in Alexandria, my classes, the sights, cultural differences -- will come later. Thanks for reading, in the meantime. :)

Ma' as-Salaama,

Beth C-C

Beth Arrives in Alexandria and Writes Un-Poetically About It

Dear readers,

So I'm in Alexandria! And I'm exhausted, so I'll be quick (and I won't include photos because I took too few to warrant a photo post, and most of the pretty scenery today was after the sun set).

Amy and I got up very early so we could commute an hour and a half to get to Heathrow from the hostel, and then go through customs etc, and then find our way through the winding halls of the airport to our gate, and find some time in there to get breakfast. It ended up working out, but just barely.

When we got on the plane, I considered studying Arabic, but I was literally sitting between two native speakers, so I was too self-conscious, and ended up sleeping and reading an issue of "The Economist"... and talking to the guy next to me. Thank goodness I ended up talking with him, because he was a lifesaver later!

His name is Amir, he's maybe in his thirties, and he was traveling to Cairo from Los Angeles (where he works) to visit his family. When I told him that I didn't have an exact plan as to how to get to Alexandria, he told me that his brother was going to pick him up from the airport and when he got there, he'd ask him to help me out, and that Amy and I should find them in the lobby after going through customs. He gave me his brother's cell number "just in case", and I figured I wouldn't have to use it.

When I told Amy about this new development, she was pretty excited and relieved -- and so was I, until we got through customs, and there were about two hundred people in the lobby, fifty of whom were determined to harass us into accepting their help in getting a hotel room and a cab (and baksheesh (tips)). Finally, I told one of those guys about my situation, he offered to let me use his phone, and I proceeded to call Amir's brother (who didn't know I existed before then), and yell at him into the phone until we finally found him, and until Amir showed up later. They succeeded in getting us a car, with a driver they knew personally, and they gave us a receipt for 350 Egyptian pounds, encouraging us to tip him VERY well because he was "doing them a favor" by giving us a ride.

Our plane had left two hours late, and we arrived at the hotel even later because our driver took quite the leisurely drive down to Alexandria! And by "leisurely drive", I mean "extremely fast except when he wants to treat us to tea and fava beans and a walk down the Corniche (the last of which we refused)". He was very, very nice, the tea was delicious, the beans were absolutely SWIMMING in vinegar but did the job (since we never got a chance to eat dinner), and we tipped him between 20 and 30 percent. We got to the hotel at about 11:30pm.

Needless to say... it's been a long day.

We just started unpacking in our (fairly quirky) hotel suite, and as soon as I removed everything from my suitcase, I went to the lobby, socialized with the other people in the program (a few of whom I'd never met because they're from other schools, namely Harvard and Columbia), told my parents I'm alive, and started blogging.

Tomorrow morning marks the official start of the program; not sure what we're doing besides touring the city, but all I can say at this point is that I hope most of the day involves speaking English, I hope the food is good and filling, and I hope I will go through the day feeling well-rested.

More news, in more detail, later!

- Beth C-C

p.s. One thing I should mention is that the driver spoke essentially no English. I had a moderate degree of success communicating with him in broken Arabic, and for the most part we understood each other, which at the time was extremely satisfying, but by the end of the 4-hour drive, I was just drained. Hopefully -- inshallah! -- speaking Arabic will stop being so exhausting within the next week or two? We'll see what happens.

p.s.s. I will also make time at some later date to talk about my last day in London, which was freaking AWESOME and totally worth its own post.

Escapades in London, Days 1 and 2

-->

Dear readers,

I tried to write a blog entry yesterday… and then I started falling asleep, so I gave up and went to bed. It was 8pm. I slept for 12 hours. Result: ZERO jet lag today! I’m still a little skeptical of this apparent miracle, because maybe I’ll feel jet-lagged tomorrow? But all in all, the 7-hour time difference travel change felt less like a sudden shift in my internal clock, and more like the day after a horrible all-nighter writing a paper for a class. (Which I have experienced many a time, so I know what I’m talking about.)

So! I’ll update you all on the past two days in this entry. Prepare for many epic pictures of food!

The 17th (Sunday):

I got up at 5:30am and left Missoula for Chicago at 7:15am. Then I had a 4-hour layover, had my final meal in America (hot dog and pretzel!), and after that, I left for London from Chicago, and got there at 6am local time. That airport is snazzy! I love all the glass. And I love that it was raining when I got there. Very true to the spirit of London, from what I hear. I literally couldn’t see the ground at all (due to the clouds), until the plane was 30 feet from the ground.

I was able to meet up with Amy at the airport (thank god, since that was something I’d been worried about), and we took the tube straight to Queensway, which is where our hostel (Royal Bayswater Hostel) is located. We dropped our stuff off, then had lunch at the Royal Bayswater Café (which is located directly next to the hostel; they even have an inside doorway connecting the two of them). I went for the “continental breakfast”, which was two croissants, and some toast (with either jam or cheese; I chose jam). I emailed my parents on the not-so-free hostel wi-fi, then we went sightseeing!

 

We wandered around the area where the hostel is (i.e. Bayswater), we saw lots of memorials in the area of the Wellington Arch.

 

From there, we went around Piccadilly Circus and Cambridge Circus, and saw Trafalgar Square (which I did not see for what it was until my second walk through it, later that day). 

 

The two things that we enjoyed most as we were wandering about, were definitely

1) the patriotism (due to the Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee)!

and 2) the double-decker buses!

They are very handy, very fun, and VERY common. They’re everywhere! And how cool is it to ride on the upper level of a double-decker bus? (Correct answer: Pretty damn cool. It hasn't gotten old yet!)

When we were in Trafalgar Square, we stopped randomly by this nice Anglican church, St. Martin In The Fields:

which had a portrait photography exhibit in its crypt, and an excellent choir rehearsing upstairs.

(The acoustics were wonderful too. I was surprised.)

We also crossed the Golden Jubilee Bridge, and got some nice photos:

And we saw the festive town-fair-ish area around the London Eye, but the Eye itself was extremely expensive (35 pounds-ish?), and the area around it, in Amy’s and my opinion, was pretty creepy. So we left. By then it was about 1:00, and we were really hungry and our jet lag was getting increasingly bad.

So! We went from there to Chinatown, which was also bedecked with symbols of its (bi-)national pride:

and we had delicious food, which I photographed even though I didn’t remember to photograph breakfast or dinner that day:

The above is (or, rather, was) a huge but inexpensive plate of Singapore Noodles, and a pot of green tea. (Amy had sweet and sour chicken.) Fun fact: Chinese restaurants are essentially exactly the same in London as they are anywhere in America.

After lunch, we went to the British Museum, which was pretty cool.

I thought Tipu’s Tiger was there, because I think I had read in a book that it was a nationalist tool when it was in the British Museum. So, for whatever reason, I assumed that it was still there. But evidently it wasn’t, because I had a pretty embarrassing exchange with two people who worked at the museum, one of whom had never heard of Tipu’s Tiger, and the other of whom told me that it was back in India. Double Facepalm.

I had lots of fun there, though. I especially enjoyed the North American plant exhibit.

(I was very entertained by this, especially the subject of that last picture!)

We left after a couple of hours to go back to the hostel, make ourselves eat dinner at the café next door, and then find free wi-fi somewhere to email and use Facebook. I was going to post the blog that night, but was so tired that I went to bed instead.

The 18th (Monday)

After 12 hours of sleep, I officially defeated my jet lag. I woke up feeling like a stone statue that had been magically granted the ability to walk, but after another continental breakfast (this one provided free at the hotel), I felt refreshed.

Amy and I went straight from there to the Palace:

...where we saw the changing of the guard, which was (surprisingly) worth it, despite being an obvious tourist trap. Why? Because despite all of this pomp…

… it was hilariously casual. No, these serious soldiers in their ginormous hats were not playing Sousa. They were playing the Bee-Gees. And the soundtrack to “Grease”. Also entertaining was the fact that only the Americans in the audience (i.e. me and Amy and a group of American women next to us) seemed particularly shocked by this.

Yes, these men DO enjoy rockin’ to the oldies.

It was a lot of fun, though. A full concert, outdoors, for free. I paid the price later that day (with a huge sunburn on my chest and face and forearms), but it was worth it.

After that, Amy and I got lunch at a sandwich shop. She got a cold sandwich and I got a Cornish pasty:

… which was SO delicious. It was really difficult to find a trash can (or rather, rubbish bin), because we were near a lot of government buildings. We ended up having to give it to a trash collector/janitor at a tube station.

We would have gone to the Churchill War Rooms, or to Westminster Abbey, but both of those charged exorbitant entry fees, so we stayed out. We would have checked out the outside of the Prime Minister’s residence on Downing street, but it was blocked off. So we ended up spending a lot of time taking photos of the outsides of those buildings:

and also visiting the parks in the area.

We also stumbled upon a miniature parade, for soldiers who just got back from Afghanistan:

(You can see the soldiers walking behind the guards, in their fatigues.)

Finally, at 4:30, we went into Westminster Abbey, where I was not allowed to take photos of the inside, even though I took plenty of pics of the outside:

And we went to Evensong. We thought we could stop in and stop out, but it was impossible to leave without attracting the attention (and disgust) of the entire room, since the exit went directly between the two rows of choristers. So… even though I had somewhere to be, it lasted 45 minutes, and I ended up being half an hour late for my engagement. (That ended up working out, though.) But needless to say, the service was gorgeous; the acoustics were wonderful, they sang one of my all-time favorite anthems (“I Sat Down Under His Shadow”). My only complaint, besides that I couldn’t leave early, was that we had terrible seats, so we couldn’t see the choir at all. Ah well!

Once I got back (as I said, half an hour late), I met up with the two people I had the engagement with: my two friends Clarissa and Simone. We ate dinner at a pretty good Indian restaurant, and then walked around through Hyde Park, where we saw loads of pretty statues:

and I saw a swan! (which I shouldn’t have been so excited about, except that I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a swan up close before. We don’t really get swans in Montana, as far as I know. We get Canada geese.)

I was sad when we ended up parting ways, but we had a wonderful time. I had met Clarissa and Simone through an online forum that I’ve frequented for four or five years, and they’re the first two other forum members that I’ve ever met in real life. They’re great people! (I’d post the cute photo of the three of us, but I don’t think Simone would want me to.) On a broader note, I loved meeting them because it meant that the forum is made up of other real people, besides myself. I mean, obviously I knew that before, but there was always a disconnect. And I appreciated having that disconnect become connected, for lack of a better word. I would love to visit London again even if it was just to have dinner with the two of them again. Maybe that should be part of my post-graduation vacation plan!

Okay, this blog post took way longer than I thought it would. I'll have to figure out how to shorten these, later in the trip. I can't afford this kind of time-suck when I'm in Egypt! Ah well, I hope you all enjoyed it :)

More later!

- Beth C-C

Prelude to the Escapades

Dear Readers,

Now would be when I introduce myself, but 99% of readers know me personally, and the rest of you can read the little snippet to the right of this post, so I'll skip the intro except to say... I'm Beth, I'm a first-time blogger, and I'm happy to be here! :)

I’ve never had any interest in blogging, because my life hasn’t been interesting enough to warrant a blog. But three days from now, my life will be much more interesting; I’ll be spending three days in London to sightsee, and then studying abroad for eight weeks in Alexandria, Egypt. Needless to say, these two months are probably going to be the most interesting of my life. It’ll be not only my first time living outside of the U.S., but also my first time setting foot outside of the Americas. Hopefully, I’ll be spending the majority of my time thinking, speaking, living, and breathing Arabic instead of English – which will also be a huge change, because I’m monolingual. And by the end of the two months, I’ll have a full year’s worth of intensive advanced Arabic under my belt, so I'll be able to call myself "proficient"-- which will be awesome for many reasons, including but not limited to: 1) I've always wanted to be bilingual, and 2) future employers will love it!

I’ve known that I’d be studying abroad over a summer in Alexandria ever since I transferred to Georgetown from the University of Montana two years ago. Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service requires that before its students graduate, they must become proficient in a second language. Lots of people I know were able to quickly and easily pass this test due to being bilingual or trilingual already, or having taken many years of a language in high school. I, on the other hand, had forgotten most of my high school French and had only taken a year of non-intensive Arabic at the University of Montana – so, as a sophomore, I had to start Arabic all over again at Georgetown, putting me a year behind. I knew I’d have to make up that lost year over a summer, and when I had to choose between 1) a summer in DC, taking a class on the Georgetown campus; 2) a summer in Middlebury, speaking nothing but Arabic and not being able to communicate with friends or family for three months; or 3) this trip to Alexandria; It was an easy choice. I wanted to study abroad, I wanted to learn more about Middle Eastern culture, and I wanted to be able to talk to my friends and family in America while I was there.  So, here I am, on the verge of leaving the Americas for the first time… and it still hasn’t sunk in.

It’s going to be stressful, but not for all that long; I’ve heard from friends and family that when you move abroad and/or when you immerse yourself in a foreign language, the first couple of weeks are the hardest. Therefore, the part of this trip that I’m most looking forward to is the latter six weeks. By then, I’ll be more comfortable with the language, less self-conscious, more adjusted to cultural differences, and more accustomed to the ridiculous amount of homework I’m going to have. By then, I won’t be worrying about embarrassing myself in front of native Arabic speakers anymore. By then, I won’t be homesick.

In the meantime, I’ll be focusing on the details: packing, last-minute studying, seeing my friends one last time before I go, dealing with the logistics of my trip to London. I especially like focusing on London; there may be plenty of loose ends and potential complications in Egypt (e.g. the election drama that’s going on over there right now), but in London, I have everything planned. My friend Amy – another Georgetown student who is studying in Alexandria -- is meeting me in London, and we’re going to see the sights, eat great food, and deal with jet lag as best we can (with caffeine and loads of sleep). We initially planned the trip on a whim, just to spend time somewhere fun and low-stress in a time zone close to Egypt. But I’m so glad that we planned it that way. I already know that it’s one of the best spontaneous decisions I’ve ever made. (Not to brag or anything!)

So, I’d better get back to studying, packing, and being generally productive. Expect many more of these! I will be using them as study breaks in Egypt. I hope you all enjoy the blog; after all, you are the reason I’m starting it. I want to update you, my friends and family, on how the trip is going, and to constantly reassure you that yes, I’m still alive; no, I haven’t been sold into human slavery, so you won’t have to send Liam Neeson to rescue me; and yes, I’m having a good time.

In short: Excellent escapades await me – and they vicariously await you too! Keep checking for updates, and please, post as many comments/questions as you like. :)

Tally-ho and ma’a as-salaama,

Beth C-C