Turkey: It's not just a bird

Does anyone object to my writing about Turkey in a blog called "Ari in Egypt"? If you don't mind, that's exactly what I will be doing in less than a week. :)

After finding out that I actually have a five day weekend for Egyptian armed forces day, I spontaneously planned an entire trip to Istanbul (not Constantinople) by myself. YES, by myself. Everyone should calm down, though, because my hotel has arranged for my airport pickup, and I will be touring the old city and going on a four-hour cruise on the Black Sea with a tour group. I will also be going to a Turkish bath (sounds sketchy, I know) to sit in a hot tub the day after I arrive. Getting away from Egypt and experiencing another culture will improve my morale and bolster my ability to get by for the next two and a half months in Egypt. Hopefully I will get there and back with no problems (worries which plague my restless mind).

Planning this escape was the highlight of my week, and now the complaining will commence:

The reason that I have not written a blog entry for a few days is that there have been rolling blackouts across the city. Somehow, the outages screwed up the server so that I was not able to get online until a few hours after the power went back on. Even the entire AUC campus was blacked out for two hours, which made it very difficult for me to retrieve an essay that I sent to myself by e-mail. Thus, I barely made the deadline. (The teacher for that class is a psycho, and she most likely would not have considered the blackouts an excuse.)

Lack of sleep has also been a problem for me, because I barely got to rest last weekend, and I have been subsisting on five to six hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks. I literally felt like I was going to pass out in class on Wednesday. Therefore, I made the decision to opt out of an excursion to Mt. Sinai and St. Catherine's monastery. I learned that we would be leaving Thursday night on an overnight bus trip that would then drop us off at St. Catherine's, and later at 2:00 am we would start the two to three hour hike up the mountain to see the sunrise. I was really looking forward to this trip. However, my health is most important to me, and I thought about the sleep that I have already lost, plus the two nights I probably would not sleep on that trip, plus the two days of school that would follow, and then add on the four days in Istanbul. Also, for those of you who know me, I am not a hiker and I was not ready to re-enact my own private version of Troop Beverly Hills in the middle of the night in the Egyptian desert. All of these factors were part of my decision, and I don't regret it. The timing was just not right, though it is disappointing that I couldn't go.

Other complaints that I will keep brief:

1) No hot water for the last week and half. Though this problem is undermined by the fact that the temperature continues to be in the upper 90's.

2) I ordered a lunch that I thought would be a platter of falafel, ful (refried beans), eggs, and french fries only to discover that the meal was all of those items squished into a pita. It was truly revolting.

3) My bus driver didn't feel like running the 2:00p.m. route from school, so I had to wait another hour to go home.

4) The travel office at AUC could not even help me figure out how to arrange transport from my apartment to the Cairo airport for Tuesday.

Highlights that are worth mentioning (to counterbalance the complaints):

1) At the CSA (expat community center) I enjoyed a pasta dinner with WINE on Wednesday. The wine was truly delicious, but then I remembered that I had to walk all the way back to my apartment in the heat. Perhaps it was not the best idea, but it was a little slice of heaven.

2) I am about to sign up for a Thanksgiving trip with the CSA to the Bahariya oasis (a resort area) and the White desert. According to the brochure, the trip includes a bedouin night, swimming, a Thanksgiving party, a safari in the desert, and watching the sunset on a mountain that I don't have to climb. The price is reasonable for a three day trip, so I think that I will sign up.

3) I'm a rockstar in my Arabic class. This is probably because I am one of the only people who does homework, but I feel good about outshining people from better ranked institutions. It just goes to show that it doesn't matter where you go to school, it's what you make of it. Also, it shows that Lawrence is a first class institution of higher education, even if it does not have a widespread reputation.

4) Egypt turns the clocks back for "fall back" on October 1st, so I gained an hour of sleep this weekend.

That's about it for now. I have assuaged my guilt about not keeping up my blog, and now I will go to sleep. Goodnight.