A Stroll Through Old Cairo

Yesterday, I travelled on the metro, through downtown, past the sea of swirly-twirly gum drops, and arrived in Old Cairo. My friends Sherif and Karim invited me along on a tour of what is also referred to as Islamic Cairo and we walked and walked and then walked around some more!

We started out in Khan al Khalili, the famous marketplace, and made our way to the original walls of Cairo. We saw mosques, theatres, grain houses, and cisterns. The Al Azhar mosque was quite large and very beautiful. Since it was Friday, we had to wait a bit to enter until the afternoon prayer had concluded.

We finished our tour at one of the doors to the city, aptly named Bab Zuela (Bab means door in Arabic, don’t ask me what Zuela means). We climbed to the top of the walls surrounding the entrance and were treated to a magnificent panorama of the city. The next call to prayer sounded while were were up there and the attached video shows what I saw and heard from that vantage point.

We also decided it was a grand idea to climb the tiny, narrow staircase of the minaret tower to get an even higher view. I’ll admit there were times when I thought that the really old tower would collapse on me and I’d be stuck forever, but we soldiered on and made it out unscathed, alhamdullilah!

Back to School

Seeing as how I haven’t updated since November and I also forgot I had a blog for a bit there; I thought it was time to update. The picture seen here is the view from my apartment window. That’s right, I moved off campus and into an apartment with my friends Lucy, Ben, and Johan! I am a skip and a hop away from the AUC bus stop, the metro station, and various restaurants. I am ignoring the fact that Cinnabon and McDonalds will deliver to your door because that would equal disaster in sooo many ways.

Classes began on the 31st. Our department was then informed that the first week of classes were cancelled so the MA TEFL students (that’s me) could attend the Nile TESOL conference being held downtown. So here I sit on a Thursday, making spicy tomato chicken soup and updating the blog, rather than taking the 40 minute bus ride to campus for some “edu-ma-cation”.

This semester should be action-packed and I’m super excited! I’m taking 3 courses, Discourse Analysis, Grammar, and Second-Language Acquisition. Only one class a day and none on Tuesday, which isn’t too shabby. I’d promise that I’d update more, but I don’t want to be a liar =)

Side note: Yes, those are some awesome, ancient pyramids in the background of the picture.