A Disorienting Orientation

Today was the first day of classes!  But, surprise, surprise, I’m behind.  Instead, have a couple of stories about orientation, and I’ll tell tales of classes once I sit through a few more of them…

The thing that everyone who ever wants to accomplish anything in Egypt needs to understand is that while individual people are as helpful and kind as can be, the system as a whole (no matter what system we’re talking about) is dramatically, frustratingly, and horrifyingly inefficient.  Doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do, whether you’re waiting in the check-out line at the grocery store, filling out forms for just about anything, or simply trying to cross a busy street, there’s no grand organizational scheme to be found, and you are essentially throwing yourself on the mercy of whatever (hopefully kind) people you happen to encounter.  This goes double when your Arabic is seriously limited, as you’re limited to the people who speak English and are willing to muddle through with you – you can’t talk your way to the head of the line if you don’t know how to talk!

Anyway, this horrible system is actually cyclical.  If you want to accomplish anything, it’s commonly accepted that you have to go in person to do it, and you have to talk to the right person at the right time, you have to fill out the right form, and sooner or later, you’ll probably pay some bribes.  You’ll need to be loud and cut in line and annoy people until they help you, and they’re basically helping you so that you’ll go away.  But because everyone is constantly trying to deal with these squeaky wheels, they never have the time to deal with the folks who aren’t standing there yelling in their faces, making a fuss and threatening to call their superiors, etc.  So God bless you if you want to do something the “regular” way, through “normal” or “usual” channels, without “making a fuss” – it’ll take a year for your form to even cross the desk of the poor, harassed bureaucrat who’s supposed to deal with it, and then it’ll probably get lost under the forms of the five loud people who are trying to get their things taken care of right that second or else.  In short, if you want to accomplish anything, you must become a squeaky wheel, and the inefficiency grinds onward…you see what I mean?

And so it was with AUC’s International Student Orientation.  Everything started and ended late.  Every attempt to get anything done took forever.  My orientation group (maybe ten students, with two “IPLs” – International Peer Leaders – to shepherd us about) only managed to accomplish, well, anything, when the IPLs or an administrative person elbowed their way to the front of the line and insisted that we get helped next.  In the first day, we managed to hear three sessions on various topics (marginally helpful) and enter our contact information into AUC’s system – and that was it.  No student IDs were gained, no bus passes acquired, no visas applied for.  We waited in line for student IDs and failed miserably in the quest.

I was lucky in that I tried to get as much of the necessary crap done ahead of time as possible – so I already had a student ID, I knew how to get my bus pass and was just waiting for the money to do it with, I’d picked my classes and just needed my registration appointment, my passport was already submitted for the student visa application process.  To this day, I have no idea how my fellow students made out (though presumably they were eventually given IDs, since I still see them around), because I skipped most of the rest of orientation.

Oops!

Well, to be fair, it was for a good cause.  Orientation started Sunday (see above).  I spent Monday recording audition tracks for my MIO app (a story for another, significantly whinier post).  Tuesday I went to the handful of orientation sessions but wound up going home early (a story I don’t particularly care to tell).  Wednesday we had off, as it was the one-year anniversary of the start of the Revolution.  Thursday was spent acquiring my bus pass (which took the vast majority of the afternoon), practicing piano (when I was waiting around for them to process my bus pass), waiting in line at the bank (to pay for my bus pass), and listening to a session hosted by the US Embassy (marginally useful).

Please note how much of Thursday was spent waiting.  Tuesday passed in a similar manner.  Sunday was almost nothing but waiting.  Registration today (another story for later) was similar.  I’m learning (or perhaps remembering) just how important it is to always have a book or score (or five) on hand…

The oddest thing for me about orientation, though, were the simultaneous realizations of how much I liked the people I was with and how little I had in common with them.  Most of the kids around me were undergrad.  (Technically, I’m not.)  Most of them were study-abroad.  (I’m not.)  Most came here knowing at least one other person from their home uni or their area.  (I’ve met one other New Yorker to date.)  Most are here just for the semester.  (At best, I’m here ’til December; at worst, ’til the December after that.)  Most are poly-sci, Arabic, international studies/relations, or Middle Eastern studies majors.  (I didn’t meet a single other serious musician – no musicians at all, in fact, with the exception of a single guitar player.)  And most of them, frankly, struck me as very young, though the majority of the people I met are around my age, and quite a few are older.  These are American kids who have money to come to AUC, who have money to travel in the area (everyone’s hobby is traveling – you go for long weekends all the time, and spring break means Lebanon or Syria or whatever – you being them, not me).  They’re used to having things their way.  They’re used to being the smartest person in any given situation, or the most linguistically gifted, or the most well-traveled, or the most cosmopolitan.  It reminded me in some ways of orientation at Columbia, only somewhere around day two of NSOP, you could see it dawning on the faces of the people around you that everyone was valedictorian, class president, with a four-point-oh and twenty extracurriculars and big-name scholarships and their dad probably had more money than your dad.  Problem is, I didn’t hang around ISO here long enough to see the dawning stage (and in some kids, it still hasn’t seemed to hit them, alas).

But at the same time, it felt very nice to be out of the house with a purpose, to be meeting other people, to talk and get stuff done and trade stories.  I’m probably never going to see most of those kids again – they’re all in the same ALI (Arabic Language Institute) classes, and none of them seemed to be signing up for anything musical (I certainly haven’t seen many of them around the department, and none in Chamber Choir, alas).  Oh, well.

So that was orientation:  lots of new faces, lots of waiting around, lots of people-watching. Lovely if a tad ordinary.  Onward, I say!

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