I'm a savage!

I think I scored some man points today. I'd been talking to a friend yesterday, and he said the he knew where we could buy a rabbit. So we decided to buy a rabbit for dinner. But when we went to the market today, it turned out that the rabbits were more expensive than we thought (about $10). So we bought a chicken instead. I got some great looks carrying a live chicken through the streets of Cairo!

I took it back to a friend's house, killed it, cleaned it, then made dinner for my friends. It was a pretty cool evening. It was nice to take a meal all the way through from butchering to eating. And the food definitely tastes better when you get to kill it yourself (sorry vegetarians . . .).

I'd planned to name the chicken before killing it, then give it it's last rites, but I forgot to. I've been reading "Angela's Ashes" lately, and there's a part where the main character finds out that the proper name for last rites in the Catholic church is called "Extreme Unction." I thought it would be cool to be able to say that I performed extreme unction on a chicken, but got too involved in the butchering to remember to do it.

Enjoy the pic, guy . . .

Victory Banana!

Hey guys!

I'm sitting in my room listening to "The Show Must Go On" by Queen, mooching internet from my neighbor, and playing with Rasheed (my pet turtle). Rasheed's definitely got more personality than Francis.

This has been an eventful week. Lots of studying, victory bananas, accidental stalkings, and new glasses. I learned two new verb tenses this week, so I feel like my vocabulary just doubled. I know about sixty verbs. Four tenses for each verb, and each verb has eight forms in each tense. So yes, that's a lot of words. I'm not sure I can count that high, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot!

I remember that when I was in school as a kid, sometimes I got a gold star or a piece of candy if I got the answer to a question right. Or sometimes I just got to be the teacher's pet for the day. Well, today I did a great job in Arabic class and was rewarded with a banana. It was delicious and much more satisfying than a gold star, but definitely the most unusual reward that I've gotten in a classroom.

Small confession . . . I stalked somebody by accident this week. You know how people from different cultures walk differently? If you don't know this, you should pay attention to some people this week. Folks who aren't from the States walk differently than we do. I'm not sure how to describe it, but they just do. Anyway, back to the story. I was walking to a friend's house a couple of nights ago, and noticed a woman a hundred feet or so ahead of me in the street. I noticed that she was walking like an American, so I decided to catch up with her and talk. I started walking a bit faster so that I would catch up with her. I had just about caught up with her when I realized something. "I'm stalking this lady! This is not okay!" So I just walked by her and didn't say anything. I felt kind of silly!

I also bought some new glasses this week. All of the dust here was really bugging my contacts, so I went back to glasses. I got my last pair of glasses right after I graduated from college, a LONG time ago. Thus, new glasses. Sorry, no picture of the glasses right now. I had to recruit some friends to help me pick out frames. Sometimes a little fashion advice comes in handy! :)

All in all, a pretty eventful week. Talk to you guys later . . .

Back to childhood

Hey guys. Welcome to my blog!

I've been in Cairo for a little over two months now, and feel like I'm finally getting settled in. It's a strange thing, being a foreigner in another country. Coming here to visit and coming here to live have been totally different experiences. It's funny. Sometimes I feel like Iike Cairo is my home, and that I've been here forever. And at other times I have a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that I live here. I can start to understand why God has so much to say about the treatment of foreigners in the Bible. And I can also understand why so many of the immigrant communities in the States are so tight-knit. It's a really comforting thing to be around people that think and act the way that you do.

I think the most recent noteworthy event is that I bought a pet last week. There's a place in my part of town (Hadayik el Maadi) called road 9. It's a pretty neat place with a lot of neat shops and fruit stands. I found a small pet store, and went in with some friends. Long story short, I bought two small turtles. Rasheed and Francis. So they're keeping me company in the flat right now. They've been fun to have around.

Today's the last day of my weekend, so it's back to class tomorrow. I can't remember which class I have tomorrow, so I did the homework for all of my classes just in case!