“So, how’s Egypt?”

I planned, before I left the States, to count how many times I got that question, just for my own amusement.  This is not at all to say that it’s a bad question – it’s actually a perfectly reasonable question (just as I feel that it’s perfectly reasonable to ask friends “How’s New York?  Is it still standing?  Does it miss me?” even though I’m pretty sure I know the answers to all three questions), but the problem is, I’m never quite sure how to answer it, especially in the expected concise sentence or two. Here are my most recent attempts:

“Warm in the daytime, but cooler at night.”
“Old and sandy.”
“Riotous and sandy.”
“Frustrating and sandy.”
“Sandy.”
“I dunno, I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours sleeping.”  (That one’s true – I did in fact spend most of Friday asleep.)

Thing is, Cairo is Cairo, just as New York is New York.  It’s kinda hard to describe.  It’s big and yes, sandy and frustrating and traffic-filled (except early in the morning, “early” being a relative term) and welcoming and old and run-down and forbidding and interesting and full of people and lonely and intriguing and snarky and happy and loud and quiet and foggy and dry and desert-like and river-like and poor and rich and revolutionary and traditional and musical and harassing and peaceful and meditative and prayerful and drunken and caffeinated and dancelike and literary and beautiful and ugly and full of crap and verdant and odd and cobbled and truthful and falling-apart and built up and advertised and somnolent and insomniac and discreet and also discrete and…well, you get the point.  It’s kinda everything all at once, and what it is depends very much on my mood.

It’s kind of like those particles…electrons?  Maybe they’re not elections.  Whatever.  Anyway, those subatomic BITS that spin along whatever axis you happen to observe (read, pick an axis and it’s spinning along it).  A highly subjective experience, and also as simultaneously incomprehensible and poetic as quantum mechanics.

So what’s my subjective experience so far?

The traffic is mostly better than I remembered, but the driving is often worse.  My neighborhood is dustier than I thought it was, but the bugs aren’t as plentiful – perhaps a result of it being January.  I’d forgotten how weird it is to be blond and pale here…I thought I hadn’t forgotten and then realized that I had.  Learned the other day that wearing a hat helps a little, but it also makes me look like a thirteen-year-old wanna-be skateboarder…or a person wearing a yarn shower cap.  So we’ll see how long that lasts.  Maybe if it does last I can make some lacy cotton ones for the summer, or something.

This is a place where I am told that most pharmacists are Western-trained and speak perfectly good English, but my prior experiences suggest otherwise.  Getting aspirin instead of ibuprofen was ok, but getting a laxative instead of motion-sickness meds was not, so I’m a little afraid to see what they’ll give me if I ask for Theraflu…or any other cold med for that matter…and in any case, it’s been a week, so I guess I’ll hit up the campus clinic tomorrow.  We’ll see if they’re as efficient now as they were with the swine flu outbreak.  Efficiency remains, as ever, a relative term, here just the same as elsewhere.

The grocery store has more imported stuff than I remember, but the internet is sooo much slower…!  And the revolution has affected nothing in my path so far, except that it resulted in a really beautiful mural in the neighborhood.  Maybe I can get pictures later.  The buses are the same, and so is AUC.  The people that I met before are still nice.  The people that I’ve just met are also nice.  I remain incapable of remembering any names, but I don’t think that’s because it’s Cairo.  The bureaucracy of the university as a whole is just as inefficient as I remember, but individual people are so eager to help and happy to please that it feels more efficient than it ought…  And I think everything’s gotten more expensive.  If you do the conversions in your head, most prices are close to what they’d be in the States now – and a lot more than that if it involves something imported.  I’m *so* bringing my own bodywash next time…

But mostly I’m sort of in stasis right now, and so it feels like the city is too.  There aren’t formal classes at the uni right now, just this workshop Dad and I are doing and other things like it, so it’s quiet there.  And I’ve been staying home and feeling gross, so no interesting adventures on my part, either.  Even the apartment has been in stasis, waiting for the weekend so that we’ll all be home to unpack and set up – but then I slept through yesterday and so missed a bunch of that brouhaha.  Today we moved furniture and shopped a lot, and I finished yet another hat…I’m up to four now.  I need to request the other stuff I need from the university, which actually means that my parents need to request the other stuff *they* need from the university, which means that I may never have a desk (or a chair, or a bookcase…)

The workshop finishes tomorrow; then I start looking for summer programs and waiting for the stuff I shipped to come and waiting for the furniture we request to get here.  And maybe while I wait I can finally go have an adventure or five?  I’ll keep you posted.

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