So things in Egypt aren’t quite like things in the US. For instance, our internet stopped working a few days ago in our apartment. At first, we thought that our cheap landlord did not pay the bill or cancelled it. We were wrong. It wasn’t just our internet that stopped working, most subscribers to our […]

This weekend we went to Sharm Al-Sheikh, a beach resort city on the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula on the Red Sea in Egypt. According to our bus drivers, it’s in Asia, but I’m not quite so sure about that. Getting to Sharm is a hefty car ride. We shoved 14 people (12 of […]

So today I spent a lot of money. In Egypt, everything is so cheap that when I spend money, I just about cringe. Today we visited the American University in Cairo bookstore and I spent 445LE (~$85). I bought a bunch of books: The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz, The Thief and the Dogs by […]

I’ve been in Cairo about a month now and I still haven’t written much about the students I teach. So here we go… Our group of DukeEngagers works with Somali unaccompanied minors (youth aged 13-21 in Cairo without parents/guardians). These young men and women are in Cairo without their parents for a variety of reasons: […]

I got really sick yesterday and I ended up in the hospital. I had severe food poisoning which caused dehydration. That was fun (not really). I thought I was okay until the point where I couldn’t keep down water or Cipro pills. (Cipro is the “miracle drug” that Duke Student Health gave us in case […]

Well, it seems that I have my third round of food poisoning this week. I ate at the American restaurant Chili’s last night. We even had a birthday celebration there for Uncle Sam. They brought us a cake and sang some weird version of Happy Birthday. (One of the guys in our group said his […]

I realize that I sometimes sugarcoat the details of my life here in Cairo. And given my lovely (read: not so great) day today (due to food poisoning), I think I should outline the lowdown of our life here. Things that are/were broken in our apartment: – Electricity in half our apartment …including my bedroom… […]

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been very busy. This week we had the usual stuff: teaching English and learning Arabic. Plus, we visited more tourist sites in Cairo (Coptic Christian Cairo, Al-Azhar University/Mosque, Al-Hussein Mosque, Khan al-Khalili, etc…). Also, I went to Resala (an orphanage) and taught a First Aid course to […]

Cairo is unlike anywhere I’ve ever been. There are just a few facts of life here that are very different from what I am used to. 1. Real time is not Cairo time. When someone says, “Let’s meet at 10am,” he really means “Let’s meet at 11 or later.” In Cairo, time is more subjective […]

Today we went on a window shopping expedition! Brooke (a professor from AUC) led us to the best, nearly-impossible-to-find merchants. In the Khan, it’s easy to be dragged into the tourist trap, but Brooke knew exactly where to take us, and we avoided nearly all hassles by salespeople. If you want anything at all from […]