I bet there's rich folks eatin in a fancy dining car...

i need to find that car in cairo. that is my quest.

I SAW ABEER TODAY!!! (for those of you not insane enough to have locked yourself in middlebury all summer, she was my teacher. my adorable egyptian teacher :) ) but yes. i saw her today when i was walking down the stairs from my arabic class and she looks exactly the same. -hum of happiness- not that she should have changed in the past two weeks or anything...but middlebury feels like forever ago. my goodness where does the time go. im getting old.

speaking of, my arabic class is going to EAT MY LIFE. my teacher is this tiny little egyptian lady who really is probably the least intimidating woman ive ever met. however, she is very organized, and organization by itself can be a very frightening thing, especially when she is carefully organizing out your. entire. life. and i am SO behind in this class - 350 vocab words + grammer - so i definately anticipate my edible little life disappearing for the next little while. more likely, my sleep with disappear. damn you xtine for making that an option; before you i would have sacrificed everything from schoolwork to my pet hamster (its a hypothetical hamster ppl calm down) before i gave up sleep. now its just another way i waste time. ill sleep when im dead. ha. right. if i have options of what to do when im dead, i doubt ill choose sleep. unless the alternative is burning in the firey depths of hell.

soo yeah...i went on a falucca boat ride wednesday night! falucca boat rides are, well, boat rides. on the nile, specifically. it was a good time. cheap wine, funny people. they overcharged us, we undertipped them. the usual. we might make it a weekly event. lets see how long we can go before someone falls in.

thursday night we (dum da da dummmmmmmm) had guys in our apt for the first time. i know arent you excited? im actually excited for our guards. oh have i not mentioned them yet? we have guards. theyre not really here for our safety... well, not our physical safety anyway. moral safety perhaps. they are in charge of visitors - we have "male-visiting hours" between 4pm and 1am. they have to check in. we have to leave the door open. theyre only allowed into our front room, never into the back rooms. and the guards do check. oooh yes. but i understand, right? its hard work keeping us loose american women in check. although honestly the 4pm thing confuses me - i mean, ok. keep us chaste by making sure the guys dont spend the night. but before 4pm what exactly do they think we're doing? ill leave that up to you to decide.

as for the weekend... we went out. smoked a lot of hooka (ps cantalope hooka = gods gift to...me, i suppose), made drunken idiots out of ourselves at least once because, i mean, one must keep up appearances. lets just say -insert culturally diverse story here- and leave it at that, shall we?

so the one main problem with this lovely apartement arrangement is the whole food situation. and i dont mean 'whole foods' like the store. i dream about whole foods. my 'prince charming sweeps me off my feet' fantasy has been replaced by images of costco. mmm brand name products. grocery stores around here ... yeah. at least there are fixed prices. we think. now whether the fixed prices for idiot westerners are three times the fixed prices for normal egyptians is something id rather not think about. either way i could probably afford to buy most of these grocery stores in their entirety without my parents noticing a significant dent in the bank account. which is not, by the way, reassuring. the average store around here consists of a tiny hole-in-the-wall room with a few cartons of unrefrigerated juice, a box or two of cereal and fruit that you really want to buy but which you know eating would involve dying a painful death. oh and there are always a few random things that were obviously imported about 30 years ago and are still waiting to be bought. theyll sit in those straight-from-america boxes with mold growing on the corners on the top shelf in the store and remind you of the lovely consumer-based life of which you are now deprived. i saw an easy-bake oven once. that was fun. the stores are dark and probably look more dirty than they are, but the dark smears on the floor can only be ignored for so long. and the men working in them always feel the need to comment on what you're buying. or just comment on you. either way i miss the steril anonymity of american stores - who am i kidding: of american LIFE . i dont WANT ppl caring who i am or what i buy. dammit. i want to be ignored in a hygenic environment. is that so much to ask?

there is one grocery store called alpha mart on zamalek that at least tries. its sort of like the cairo version of walmart. meaning it sells more food than you would normally find in an american kitchen as well as the occasional household item including such necessities as champagne glasses and lacost shirts. so why is this grocery store not sufficient? well in theory it is - its going to have to be - but its a decent distance away and because we are shopping for 6 girls the amount of food we have to buy when we go, even if we only go once a week or something, is quite a lot. so it sort of turns into an extravaganza of shopping with a couple of shopping carts piled to the point of disaster (which i have experienced. twice.) and then of course none of us really know how to cook so we want to buy lots of things we can eat without preperation, or with as little preperation as possible. sadly enough, the american microwave dinner has not yet made it to egypt. i bemone its absense on a regular basis. not that i have a microwave. oh no that would be much too easy. so my general point is: we never have any food in the apartment. we order in. a lot. but what it boils down to is that in a pathetic attempt to feed myself lunch i just tried to cook 4 frozen fish-sticks (the only thing left in the refrigerator) and instead managed to spray myself with boiling oil, drop all the fish-sticks on the floor, and almost burn the building down. who knew that spatulas were so hard?

ok im going to go be productive. and listen to johnny cash. wish me luck.