Classes Begin and Pyramids

Hello everyone! Quite a bit has happened since my last post, but I'll just try to go over some of the highlights. First, last Sunday Egypt beat Ghana 1-0 to win their third straight African Cup of Nations. Unfortunately I missed most of the match because of crowded traffic on the commute from school, but I was able to catch the last ten minutes and the only goal of the game. Of course the streets were crazy afterwards, especially if you left the island of Zamalek and went into Downtown or Mohandissen on the west side of the Nile. The Egyptians would have preferred to carry this momentum into the World Cup this summer, but it does make a nice consolation prize for missing out on world's biggest sporting event.

Sunday was also the first day of classes, which I'm mostly happy about. I think my Arabic will improve a lot, since I have a very good (and patient) teacher, class four days a week, and plenty of opportunities to practice. My Islamic Art and Architecture professor is great, he's an Irishman who backpacked around the Middle East in his twenties and fell in love with its art, and never looked back. I also have interesting courses on Sufism, Islamic Law, and Middle Eastern history between 1500 and 1800 or so. My history teacher actually went to school in Lebanon with one of my Notre Dame professors, so I guess it's a small world, at least for American academic expats. My only real complaint is that I have to get up at around 6:00 AM every school day, in order to catch the 7:00 AM bus to campus. It gets there around 7:40, which is still 50 minutes before my first class, but the next bus doesn't leave until 8:30.

We don't have any classes on Tuesday, so that is the designated day for exploring Cairo and its immediate surroundings. This week I finally visited what is probably the biggest must-see in Egypt, the Pyramids. Like the Mayan ruins, seeing them in person had an impact that no picture could convey. The two biggest ones, of Khufu and Khafre, are mind-bogglingly huge, especially when you consider that they were completed around 2500 B.C. We were able to go inside the Great Pyramid (Khufu) and the interior chamber still had completely smooth walls. After seeing those two we wandered around the area for a bit, and scrambled up one of the smaller pyramids nearby before the police caught us. It was unfortunate, but there were no real repercussions. Finally we took a loop through the desert and ended at the Sphinx. Unlike the Pyramids, which are bigger than I imagined, the Sphinx is smaller. It was, nonetheless, impressive, but by then we were ready to find some food and rest our feet for a bit.