Long time gone…

You know, mate… It’s all about swings and roundabouts…
- My friend Mohamed

Off in the night, while you live it up, I’m off to sleep
waging wars to shape the poet and the beat

I hope it’s going to make you notice…
I hope it’s going to make you notice…

Someone like me…

Use Somebody – Cover by Kina Grannis

Well this is certainly a long time coming It’s been awhile since I put a blog post up and a lot has happened in the last month and a half since I arrived in Egypt. To be frank, most of it has been bad. I truly wouldn’t have gotten through it without the love and support of my family and my friends, both old and new, who i am sure i stretched to the limit dealing with my sadness and sometimes full blown craziness…

I love every single one of you dearly… Thank you.

So, what has been happening? What hasn’t been… It’s been a whirlwind. But i think i’m finally coming out the other end of it now. It’s easier to write and talk

Me, uploading this right now

about it when you have finally hit bottom and begun to pick the pieces back up. So, here comes the laundry list, not listed out of anger or for sympathy, but because it just makes such a great damn story that it has to be told…

When I arrived in Cairo it took about a week and a half for my camera to be stolen. I’m pretty sure it was lifted right out of my backpack on the metro. Probably. At any rate, when I’m on the metro my backpack is sitting squarely between my feet…

My apartment flooded. Twice. The water doesn’t work in the apartment in the morning and the faucet had been left in the on position. The drains also didnt work so the water quickly escaped the sink and began flooding the bathroom. The first time it wasn’t too bad, flooded bathroom. The second time managed to flood the whole apartment. My roommate slept blissfully through all of it.

The bowwab (somewhere between a doorman, cleaner, handyman, jack of all trades) came up and cleaned it and eventually we had a bunch of plumbing replaced.

Shower is currently broken. It’s been broken for over two weeks now. My roommate, whose apartment this is, doesn’t seem inclined to get it fixed. I’ve been showering at a friends place and at the gym at the university.

My bed is broken. It basically consists of some wooden slats laid down over a frame, but the slats don’t actually fit so they break and fall through all the time. A few pieces of cardboard have been laid down to try and pick up the slack, but it’s a pretty rough sleep!

My laptop broke after the second or third week. Just died. I took it to a guy here and he seems to think it was the motherboard. It’s technically under warranty so he suggested that I try to get it fixed when I came back to the US for christmas.

In the meantime, I needed a laptop for school and contacting family.
I located a woman through an expat website and checked out a laptop she was selling. It seemed legit and I paid for it. It turned out to be a lemon and I asked for my money back. She refused. I was ripped off, sadly. I resold it for a pretty big loss and had to purchase a small new ‘netbook’.

Throughout all of this I have been having many many problems getting access to my money from AUC. I’ve been more or less out of money here in Egypt for awhile and it was down to the 11th hour when I finally found the right person at the university to harass about getting access to my loan money. But in the meantime, it took them over a month and a half to get it to me during which I’ve been eating bread and yogurt.

I got a serious case of food poisoning/stomach nastiness and had to go see a doctor. They loaded me up with 4 types of medication and didn’t really bother telling me what it was they were giving me, despite my requests. I went online and checked them out myself. They love the heavy antibiotics!

I was hit by a car, twice. Nothing bad but it was pretty much the last straw after the laptop broke and I was ripped off. When the car hit my side it broke the prayer beads that I wear. I bought them at Meiji Jingu in Tokyo and it was my constant reminder of Japan. Broken. Hundreds of pieces all over the street.

This was, in my head, my breaking point. I had hit bottom. I didn’t have anything else to lose.

When I go to the main campus out in the desert I have to catch a charter bus down the street from my house. Usually you buy tickets or have a bus pass. I haven’t been able to buy a bus pass yet, so i just had some extra tickets I purchased. Midway through the ride a ticket checker decided he didn’t like the way my ticket looked and kept questioning me on it. He eventually stopped the bus and ordered me to get off it.

The Egyptian government cancelled all classes due to concerns over swine flu outbreaks. Classes finally started back up again a few weeks ago and we are all scrambling to make up the lost material…

That’s the list so far. I’m sure there are a few things that are escaping me right now, I’m trying to keep a list going for when this is all over and I can add it to a book or something… But it hasn’t been all bad…

I really love my program. The international human rights law program is everything I hoped it would be. I really think that if it had failed to live up to my expectations I would have packed my bags and called it a day… I’ve also made a good group of friends in my neighborhood. My friend Mohamed lives just a few blocks down the street. He’s a professor at AUC and we usually grab beers on the weekend, or tea during the week. I also have Paul and Jessica. Jessica is in my program and bizarrly our parents or her grandparents have some mutual connections and they told us both to keep an eye open for each other… I though, yea right. what are the odds… But we ran into each other on a train in Cairo and started chatting…. then realized we had been told about each other. They live just a few blocks down the street and we study together or, like last night, we all went over to Mohamed’s and he made us dinner… It was pretty terrific. So, the good and the bad. So far, the bad has been pretty bad. But it looks like it’s finally shaping up…

I miss Seattle with a fierceness… and all my friends and family. I think it was compounded pretty hard by all the nonsense and money problems over the last month and a half… It’s been prompting some pretty serious soul searching and self analysis… I find myself wondering if this is the kind of work I really want to do… Am I cut out for it? Did I make the right choice coming here? They aren’t really easy questions and the answers… well… I have a feeling i’ll have to ‘make’ the answers, I don’t think an actual right one exists…

Well, that’s about all i have right now… It’s almost 11pm Cairo time. I’m sitting outside at a cafe procrastinating on some research. I miss you all

Some pictures a friend snapped:)

Some of the Human Rights Law gang

Jessica and Paul

Evan, Fawziah, myself. Looking a little haggard.

Video on pollution in Cairo during the Fall from the BBC…

~ by tokyocityblues on October 26, 2009.