We got to sleep in a little, went on a walking tour of Zamalek, bought faulty international phones, ate lunch at a restaurant called No Big Deal, got evaluated for our proficiency level in Arabic, ate dinner at Cafe Noir (where Nick had an interesting encounter with sweaty spaghetti bolognese AND there was some Arabic karaoke going on upstairs), visited the rooms of the Arabic students staying at the other hotel (the Flamenco) and then went back to the phone store to try and fix the problem with them (using Jamieson and Jimmy's good cop/bad cop routine), then stayed up until 2am finishing a paper on The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit.
1. TRAFFIC: rule #1: there are no rules. rule #2: dodge pedestrians while slowing down as little as possible. rule #3: you decide where the traffic lanes are. rule #4: don't be nice, honk your horn. It just might save your life.
2. "Americans don't like contracts": this is what Jimmy told the guys working at the phone store when we were told that we had to open a contract in order for our international phones to work. I guess what he said is true; when we finally got our phones fixed the next day (WITHOUT signing any contract), it was oddly fulfilling to know I was leaving that phone store with no strings attached.
3. Arabic???: so... that evaluation didn't go so hot. we took a written test which was pretty brutal, and then our teacher (Hasna) had us go around the room and answer some questions out loud. I think we really succeeded in setting the bar pretty low. We were all jet-lagged, exhausted from staying up to write our papers, and fumbled over every word pretty badly. It's only been a couple of weeks since our Arabic final, but I feel like the whole language is rapidly seeping out of m brain. Hopefully we'll be able to pick it back up once we get going in this class.
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