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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!
So, I got to go to the pyramids for free today. I've been running in the morning with a couple of friends for the last month or so. Last week I found out about a foot-race that a German school was putting on as a fundraiser. It only cost a couple bucks, so I thought I'd run. It was at the pyramids this morning. We had to be there by eight in the morning. Because we were running, they didn't charge me any money to get into the pyramids. It was a really cool time. About a thousand people ran, and I got 21st place. I was pretty excited!
The cool part was that there was a sandstorm right at the end of the race. We were on the border of the desert, and it got really windy right at the end. It was like swimming through sand, but cool nonetheless.
No pictures though, sorry . . .
Hey guysI just got back from Marsa Shagra, a small place on the coast by the Red Sea. It's a strange little town. It basically exists because of scuba divers. Almost everyone who lives there works in the tourist industry. So much so that the price for everything is given in Euros instead of Egyptian Pounds. The picture is of me and a friend WAY out in the desert with some nomads and camels.I had a strange discovery while I was there about freedom. I know I'm hardly an impartial person when it comes to freedom. I'm an American, and we tend to idolize freedom. It's one of our most valued possessions. So much so that we wrote it into our Constitution. I think being raised in that environment, I tend to assume that I'm free unless I come across convincing evidence that I'm not. Anyway, I had finished my time there and was getting ready to head back. In order to catch the bus back to Cairo, I first had to take a taxi in the other direction to a town that has a bus station. It was about 20 kilometers (12 miles for you Americans) away from the place where I'd been staying. There were two buses in the afternoon, one at 3:00 and the other at 6:00. I got to the station at about 2:30 and planned to hang out for a few hours and take the later bus. I thought it would be nice to have a glass of tea and see the town. But when I got to the bus station, the taxi driver wouldn't let me get out of the taxi. Apparently the hotel had called the authorities and told them that I was leaving. They were instructed to send someone along with me so that I wouldn't be alone. I told the guy that it was okay, I would be fine on my own, but he told me that I couldn't be alone. He was going to go anywhere that I was going to go. I decided it wasn't worth hanging out if I was going to have someone following me all the time, so I decided to take the earlier bus instead. It was a strange feeling, realizing that I wasn't free. Suddenly I wasn't able to go where I wanted to go or do what I wanted to do. It was kind of a surreal feeling. It was like being a child all over again. Having to ask permission to do things and stuff like that.Anyway, I had a great time while I was down there. I wish I'd been able to stay a little bit longer, but the time that I was able to spend there was nice. I think I'll try to get back there some time in the future. But in the meantime, there's a few other places that I'd like to visit first.So, tomorrow is my first day of teaching English and getting back to studying Arabic. Funny thing . . . I was looking at my visa while I was in Kenya. Stamped really big on the bottom is the phrase "not eligible for work." I'd been praying about it a little bit, and felt like God told me that I needed to be a man of my word. So I went by the school today and talked to the administrator. I told her that I was happy to teach, but that I wasn't going to take any money for it. I feel a little silly teaching for free. But God's been speaking to me a lot lately about being a man of my word and not making small compromises. So, no salary for me . . .
Just a quick update. I made it back from Kenya safe and sound. No problems going through customs or anything like that. The meeting was a really good time. I found out a lot of information that would have taken me a really long time to figure out on my own. I also had a really neat last night in Nairobi. I got to eat ostrich and crocodile, which was pretty cool. The picture is me waiting for my flight back to Cairo from Nairobi.I got back to Cairo yesterday morning, hung out for the day, and am about to get on a bus to head down to Marsa Alam. It's a town on the Red Sea coast. I'm planning to spend a couple of days there, then come back and start classes again on Monday. Should be a good time. I've got to find some time to study though before classes start. Wish me luck . . .
