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This last Saturday I ran in a 5k race in a place just south of Cairo called Wadi Digla. It's a pretty cool place. It looks like a huge dry riverbed with sandstone cliffs all around it. It was my first time there, but I think I may have to go again some time. Anyway, the race was a fundraiser for a couple of local schools and I thought it was a worthy cause. So I went out there on Satuday morning and ran the race with about 150 other people. Long story short, I won the race and got an awesome plastic trophy! I was actually pretty surprised. A friend of mine was there and got a picture of me crossing the finish line. She's the editor for a local ex-pat magazine and has threatened to put my photo on the cover of next month's issue. Personally, I'm hoping she doesn't! But we'll see . . .
After the race, I wasn't feeling too hot. I thought I might be dehydrated, so I went home and drank some water. I still didn't feel well, so I drank some fruit juice. After that I decided that I'd been resting for long enough, so I went out to visit some Egyptian friends and buy a few things I needed to get. I went to chat with a friend's landlord, who I've gotten to know. He gave me some tea, and was chatting with me about his family. I'd only been there for a few minutes when I started to feel like I was going to toss my lunch. I told him really quickly that I had to go right away. I can't even remember which language I told him in. I kept thinking, don't make a mess in his house! I got two steps out of the door and . . . BLECH!!! All over the street! Yummy! The guy I'd been talking to came out and held my glasses for me. He wouldn't let me clean anything up. Just gave me some water and medicine and sent me on my way. I felt pretty bad. I kept trying to tell him that I'd been sick before I came over to his house. I didn't want him to feel bad or feel like it was his tea that had made me sick. I laughed about it later :)
Oh. I also learned something about running in the desert. For the next couple of days after you run, you find sand EVERYWHERE! It's awesome!
Things here have been going pretty well. Arabic's been going well and has actually been making sense for the last couple of days. I'm heading to Hurghada this weekend to check things out. It's a town on the Red Sea coast, just a little south of the tip of the Sinai penninsula. I'll be there for a couple of days and be back in time for class on Monday morning. Blessings!
Hey guys,So, our neighbor finally put a password on their wireless router, so now I've got to head over to a friend's house to use their wireless. Kind of a bummer, but I'm a little surprised that we've used it for the last few months without our neighbor noticing.We've started doing something cool in Arabic class lately called Community Based Learning. Every week on the first day of class I get a list of topics and questions that I'm supposed to go out and talk with Egyptians about. Then on the last day of the week we get together and go over what people have said. It's actually kind of cool. Mother's Day in Egypt was yesterday, so our topic for last week was to find out about Mother's Day customs and about local proverbs about mothers. My favorite proverb that I learned was "Paradise is under the mother's feet." What it basically means is that a mother's life is so hard that she should be allowed into paradise.
Okay, that's it for now . . .
These last few days have been fun in regards to language. Pretty much everything that I've learned how to say in Arabic so far has had an English equivalent. Basically, "this is how you say _______ in Arabic." It's been a lot of memorization, but not really all that bad.
But a few days ago we started to learn a new verb tense. It's called ism il'faAil. Well, that's the rough transliteration at least. I've been asking lots of questions about it, and still can't figure out what exactly it means. My teacher told me that it's a tense that doesn't exist in English, so most foreigners have a really hard time figuring out what it means and how to use it.
It's pretty strange. It's always conjugated the same way, but sometimes it means past tense, sometimes it means present tense, and other times it means future tense. It changes based on both the context and on the verb you use it with. When you put any verb into that tense it could mean two of the three other tenses (past, present, future). But each verb can only be two of the three. For example, the verb to travel can be either present or future tense in ism il'faAil, but never past tense. But the verb to feel can be either past or present tense in ism il'faAil. Strange, huh?
I've learned how to make the tense just fine, but just don't know what it means when I say it or hear it. I think today was one of the first time when I realized just how difficult learning another language is. It's more than just learning another set of vocabulary words. In some cases it entails learning how to think another way. I don't think I really understood that until today.
Okay, time to hear about the joys of my day today. I woke up at 6:30, went for a run with a friend, then came back home. So far so good, but here's where things went wrong. I went to the bathroom to take a shower, and noticed some water on the floor. I went and got my roommate to come look at it with me. We called a plumber, our landlord, and got our doorman. More water kept coming up from the floor. Not clean water, SEWAGE! We live on the second floor of a six story building. Every time someone on a floor above us used water, it wound up in our bathroom. By about lunchtime, we had three inches of sewage covering our entire apartment floor. Thank God we don't have carpet!
On top of all that, our doorman has a one year old son named Youssif. While he was out trying to borrow some tools for the plumber, I was holding Youssif. Youssif had been playing in the water, so I didn't really think it was strange that his pants were a little wet. But I started to notice a wonderful smell after a few minutes. Guess what . . . he peed on me! Not only did I have sewage all over my floor, I also had pee on my shirt. It was lovely! The funny thing is, it didn't really bug me that much. When there's poo on the floor, a little pee on the shirt isn't really that big a deal.
About the picture . . . No, the floor is not supposed to be that color! It's supposed to be the same color as the walls. You think it looks gross? It smelled even better!
But, everything's back to normal now. After about seven hours, the plumber managed to figure out what was going on and get it fixed. The sewer had backed up all the way from the street up to the second floor. I have never been so excited to see the floor in my life!
