Egypt Has A Lot of Everything

Ramadan is totally messing with my internal clock. I sleep in every day until around two PM, and everything gets going around 6:30 when people break the fast. I'm usually starving by that point, so I find a place to eat and then go walk around downtown. I spent last night walking by the Nile with Phil and Kiki and went to a sheesha bar afterwards that was a little overpriced, but still dirt cheap (150 LE, which is roughly 30 bucks total for the three of us).

The Nile is beautiful. We crossed the Qasr al-Nil, which is one of the main bridges that connects Zamalek to Downtown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qasr_al-Nil_Bridge). Each entry and exit to the bridge is flanked by two imposing lion statues, though the lions lack whiskers. Supposedly, the artist killed himself over this mistake, but it's an urban legend that is really hard to corroborate. Personally, I have my doubts, but it makes a good story.

I spent most of the day at the hostel (got my luggage, too). My Arabic is getting a lot better just from talking with the staff at the hostel, all of whom are native Egyptians. Egypt makes all of the Arabic classes in the US seem kind of useless, as the variety taught in classes, Modern Standard Arabic, is the purview of grammarians, Qur'anic scholars, and the media. 'Amiyya (the term for Arabic dialects) makes a little more sense than MSA sometimes, though the vocab is way different, particularly with verbs. I can still get by pretty well because there are enough commonalities, but a lot of pronouns or prepositions, for example, are different and take some getting used to. I went out for dinner with Phil (the bromance continues) and came back here, and I'll probably take it easy for the rest of the night.

Today I was asked by Ahmad, a friend of one of the hostel employees, what I thought of Egypt. I told him that I was starting to fall in love with it, to which he responded, "When people ask you what you think of Egypt, tell them it has a lot of everything. A lot of cars, a lot of people, a lot of emotions, a lot of rich people, a lot of poor people, a lot of buildings, and a lot of sand." So far this seems to make sense. It's definitely a land of extremes, and one that takes some getting used to. The city is filled with BMWs driving next to Yugos, and wealthy engineers walk past amputee beggars looking for a bit of Ramadan generosity. There isn't really much of an in between.