First Day of School!

I started Arabic classes today. It's an incredibly hard language, and I don't want to be presumptuous, but I might be good at it, people. The conversational teacher thinks so. She appreciates that I am willing to make mistakes in oral conversation, which has really always distinguished me as a language learner: my ability to make mistakes. But I have learned to say "I am not Egyptian" in Arabic. In case anyone thought I was trying to pass.

And so the second phrase I'd like to learn is "Back the f**k off" which until now I've had to use in English, and I feel it would be so much more effective to communicate with people in their native tongue. Because we are DAWs (see post below), some people were trying to get a little handsy in the bazaar yesterday. I ignored it when it was just people stroking my hair and even when someone grabbed my thigh, mostly because I couldn't see who it was, but when someone pinched me from behind, I said "F**K OFF" very loudly. (The asterisks are for my dad, folks, he likes to believe I don't use words like this and I like to humor him.) And it seemed to do the trick.

Egypt was partially redeemed, though, when we took a boat ride on the Nile and ate mangoes and apricots. I have to say I geeked out a little. Everyone thought it was cool, because it's the Nile, but they'd have thought the Amazon was just as cool, whereas I was like "This is where the baby Moses drifted! This was all blood once! Those reeds could have been where Miriam hid to watch him!" Yeah, I Bible-geeked on these poor people, who basically humor me without really knowing what I'm going on about. Except for one guy who is doing his grad work at Baylor and also grew up Southern Baptist and between the two of us we can name all the books of the Bible, the 10 plagues of Egypt (that one was all me--we were stuck until I remembered boils), the Old Testament kings, and we were both sword drill champs as kids. I don't think I need to tell you we've really established ourselves as the cool kids in this set.

Cairo is wild and chaotic and energetic, it sounds like a block party every night, with horns honking and people yelling and music playing, and it's great. I can't get over how different it is from my travel in South Africa, though--we are not encouraged to mix with locals, we have a security guard with us at all times, they won't let us out of the building where we study during our lunch break--in fact they won't even let us linger on the stoop--and we have to let someone know where we are at all times. We are the State Department's delicate desert flowers, apparently, but I'm sure my parents aren't the only ones breathing a sigh of relief.

Oh, and our Fourth of July celebration is--wait for it--at the British International School! Could it be any more perfect that Independence Day is being celebrated with the Brits?! Apparently the American Embassy is being reupholstered or something, there's some reason it's not there this year, so the Brits kindly offered their facility. We're going because we're fiercely patriotic and, you know, free booze.