Tom in Egypt // توم في مصر

Wow, I can't believe that it's only been a week since I arrived in Alex, many apologies for a lack of communication - I really didn't want to post without being able to put up a few pics of here and Cairo and the internet has been fairly scarce thus far (at the moment I'm stealing some bandwidth from some unsuspecting neighbour). There are really too many stories to tell, so I'll just give a brief idea of things here and then hopefully in future posts I can embellish more on various experiences.

So, on Thursday 30th we arrived in Cairo to the Berlin Hotel, which was more Hostel than Hotel, but it served it's purpose as we had a wander round downtown Cairo acclimatising before we trained up to Alex on the Friday. On arrival, after a truly terrifying taxi ride, we found the Swiss Canal Hotel, which is a somewhat humorous mistransliteration of the Arabic for the Suez Canal and led to a funny incident with some slightly confused German tourists who thought they may find some German speaking compatriots. We were all fairly eager to find apartments ASAP, so flathunting started in earnest on the Sunday and we found our penthouse in the diplomatic quarter fairly quickly. I use the term penthouse loosely, we're on the top floor and there are no other apartments, but on arrival we had no working toilet, washing machine, fridge or A/C. Actually I would have posted last night but for a flood of biblical proportions caused by our washer emptying itself on our kitchen and bathroom floor - nightmare!

Here I am, happily moved in with Big Tom and Daniel, we've just got back from a nice day at the nice beach (as opposed to the awful day at the awful beach with lots of harrasement) and I'm looking forward to starting uni tomorrow. Today we met the staff from the TAFL centre and the students from the other universities, who all seemed very pleasant and enthusiastic about the year ahead.


Following are a few initial impressions and difficulties I have found in Egypt:

1) Taxi drivers. Where to start? Driving here is absolute madness, when we arrived in Cairo our driver somehow managed to stack all our bags onto the roof and then "secured" them with a something he insisted was rope, but believe me there was nothing secure about the whole affair. Up here in Alex another common problem is that no taxi driver seems to have the faintest idea where he's going, but they won't let you know that until you're in the car and halfway to your intended destination. This is immensely frustrating and takes a lot of time trying to direct people who've lived in a city for 20 or more years round somewhere you've been for about 20 minutes. The other night I also had a somewhat bizarre experience (attention John P) when, after a night at a bar called the Portuguese Club, I jumped in a taxi on my own and subsequently had my leg stroked by the taxi driver whilst he said "Anta hilw awee" - literally translated as "You're very sweet". I made me digust clear. Finally, they all seem out to rip you off (a general problem over here) with people thinking you'll be happy to pay three or four times the going rate just because you're white and you're Arabic is shaky, which brings me onto point no2:

2) Egyptian Arabic. Having studied Arabic at uni for two years now, I would hope that I could have a fair conversation with your standard Egyptian, and make myself fairly well understood. Not so. For those of you not au fait with the nuances of the Arabic language, what is generally taught in UK universities is Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which genuinely bears almost no resemblance to what is spoken by everyone here in Egypt. The last week has been a steep learning curve in this new colloquial language, and I feel I still have a long way to go, although listening to someone speak in MSA today and understanding nearly everything gave me some encouragement. All in all, an amazing first week and I feel very at home here already.

That's all for now, hopefully I'll post soon if I can get back on this person's wireless. Let me know how everyone is and what's going on, my email is thomas.trewinnard@student.manchester.ac.uk, or you can use the ol' Comment function.

Tx


NB. Photos currently taking an age to upload, more to follow, these just prove I'm actually here and not hiding somewhere in the UK.