Today was our first full day in Egypt! No pictures from today, but we had quite a lot of fun. I'll try and get pictures from other people in the group and put them up. Woke up at 5:50 thinking it was 6:50 am and almost got into the shower but my roommate woke up and reminded me of the time change, thankfully! Another girl actually got up at that time and showered and got ready, THEN realized it was too early. We had a bunch of time to walk around so we found a cute coffee shop down the street and had muffins and mochas! Mmmm. At 9 we had our orientation for AUC, and we learned about the Arab revolt and all the events leading up to it, as well as the current situation today. We read after class about the protest at the US embassy in Cairo today and although it shook us up a bit, we've been assured that Zamalek is probably the most safe place in Cairo because it is filled with international students, although we still should be careful. We've heard that the Egyptians respect students from abroad. After orientation we were free to roam the island (Zamalek is surrounded by the Nile!) and we found all sorts of shops and fun places to check out later. For lunch we had shaweras, which are sandwiches made by a man on the side of the road who shaves chicken off of a large chunk on a skewer. They were delicious! The streets of Egypt are CRAZY. Cars are parked everywhere, some even on the sidewalk, and you have to do a lot of coordination of looking up to see where you're going, looking down to see the bumps and cracks in the sidewalk, and dodging around cars as well as looking for cars coming your way. It's fun. At 1 pm we had a crash course in Arabic, and it was so overwhelming I thought my head would explode. Too much to learn!
After all of this we took a trip to the grocery store to stock up on Arabic jelly and peanut butter (interesting) for lunches, and then I went for a run in the exercise room. At 7:30 the whole campus put on a party, and it was huge! Everyone from the Zamalek dorms was there, along with students from off-campus apartments and people living at the other AUC campuses. There were twinkling lights, music, and traditional Egyptian food that I don't know the name of. A special show was put on for us as well; a 10-year old Egyptian boy came in with this traditional dress on and started dancing. He would spin and spin for what seemed like fifteen minutes and while doing this he used props. First he had glittery hoops he positioned around his head, then he pulled scarves from his costume and swirled them around. THEN, he started pulling the costume off itself! One layer of his skirt came off and went around his shoulders (creating a two-level skirt display) and then he held it over his head. Then the second layer of skirt came off and a smaller skirt was underneath. He would spin it and do all sorts of tricks with it. I was amazed. After the performance he invited audience members to come try, and they looked ridiculous, only adding to my amazement that a 10-year old had made it look so easy to spin for that long. After he left, they left the music running and all of a sudden everyone was dancing to Egyptian pop songs. It was so funny, and totally different from American dancing, especially since the guys were the ones being goofy and wanting the spotlight when usually American guys are shy on the dance floor. These Egyptians didn't hold anything back and they were hilarious. We all danced for a while and then everyone trickled on up to bed. What a night!