First Day of Class!

PSYCH! So today was supposed to be my first day of class...

Since I'm still a little jetlagged, I've been waking up at like 5:30 every morning. No big, I usually sit in bed and read or watch a movie, then take a walk around 10ish before it starts getting REALLY hot. After my walk I usually pick up something quick for lunch at the kushk (corner market thing) by my apartment. Whilst I was eating my ramen, I got a call from my orientation buddy Nedda, who wanted to meet up downtown before class. So, I left the apartment around 2pm, took the metro downtown, and then Nedda and I went to a cafe for shisha and crepes in Zamalek. We sat there for hours and just hung out, talked, and had a very good time. I tried a "lemon mint" drink, with lemon, cilantro, and mint. They say that mint takes the edge off cilantro, and it REALLY does work, though you can definitely still taste the cilantro.

So, when it came time for class, we headed over to campus. As we talked to our classmates outside, we learned that section 1 of Intro to Humanitarian Law was canceled for that day. Canceled? Yes. Canceled. I schlepped my ass out of Ma'adi for class to be canceled? At least I got a wonderful afternoon of shisha and conversation. So- I headed home (mind you, this is at around 8pm, so I spent all afternoon hanging out downtown). I traveled this time with a girl named Valentina from Croatia, who has been working at a German/Egyptian marketing agency in Cairo for the past year and decided she may as well get a masters while shes here. She lives in Zamalek and was going to Ma'adi to meet up with some friends. But apparently she has lots of parties.

As soon as I got home (after climbing 11 flights of stairs because BOTH elevators were broken), I checked my email to find that at 2:10, an email arrived containing a syllabus and a note that class was canceled today.

Overall, it was a very good day. I'm not too surprised that this happened, and to be honest I was kind of expecting something like this to happen. Ohhh well. Tomorrow I have International Law. Hopefully won't be canceled.

In other news, the picture uploader still isn't working for me, so you'll have to wait on the apartment pics. Speaking of the apartment.... I want to move. Ma'adi is nice and everything, and its great fun living with Jenny. But there's nothing IN Ma'adi. I live in the middle of a maze of apartment blocks, so even though its only a short walk to cafe's and what not, there's still not a whole lot going on. I want the hustle and bustle, I want the vibrancy, I want a commute that's less than 45 minutes. Ma'adi is like a suburb, and I don't want to be in a suburb. So I'm going to start looking for people that want to live in Zamalek, where I hung out today. Its a 5 minute, 7LE cab ride to campus, lots of cafes, lots of students, lots of LIFE. Zamalek seems to be where its at.

Also, sidenote- I went to a party on a houseboat on the Nile. So cool, but SOOOO janky.