Evan had to be up and out the door earlier than myself this morning. He was up before 8 while I enjoyed sleeping in till 10. I finally rolled out of bed and got dressed. Once ready I headed to the bus stop to go to campus. Got there around ten thirty and left shortly thereafter. Arrived around 11:30 and went to the library to find Evan. Hung out with him and some other students while they waited to get their ID’s. Nothing too interesting just the normal chit chat about Egypt and being abroad.
After Evan got his ID, he and I proceeded to the ALI office to take our oral placement tests. After being sent back and forth we finally found the correct offices where they were administering the test. We got admitted at the same time and entered two rooms next to each other. My test was administered by an elderly woman who asked me where I was from, where my parents lived, how big my family was, why I studied Arabic, and what I had eaten… pretty basic stuff. I left feeling pretty good about it. Evan got out shortly after me and had similar feelings. There wasn’t another bus leaving for awhile so we went back to the library to research some apartments. We emailed few people and left for the bus stop.
At the bus stop we ran into two girls we had met the day before through Nour and discovered they were going to meet another broker when they got back into Cairo. They invited us to come along and we agreed. According to them the broker fee given to us by Nour was a bit pricey but not out of line… So maybe we weren’t being cheated. We later confirmed this with the owner of the hostel and Kevin’s GF’s dad.
We arrived in Cairo after the hour long bus ride and headed off to meet the broker whose name was Honi (pronounced honey). He had his office near Tahriir Sqaure. There we exchanged information and told him what we were looking for. We left and walked back to our place to get some dinner. We stopped by the hostel to drop our stuff and asked one of the managers where we could find a dish called koshri.
Following the managers direction we ended up near the fool place and got koshri. Koshri is an Arabic pasta dish. In it is macaroni noodles, spaghetti noodles, rice, beans, ground beef, and a tomato based sauce. It was really good especially when you added the hot sauce. We decided to walk around some more and ended up at a local outdoor coffee shop. We sat down, ordered some tea, and started to converse in Arabic. Soon we were drawing stares from the locals who couldn’t believe there were two white guys sitting on a bench speaking their language.
Soon we were surrounded by 1 waiter, a family of 3, and a couple. The topic of choice was again Ramadan and religion. We got grilled on what we knew about Muslims and the Muslim faith. Another question we are often asked early on is our religion. So far everyone has been fine with me being Christian. However, because Evan claims no religion he quickly becomes a target for conversion. I think we spent the next 30 minutes drinking tea and being told about Allah and Mohamed.
After some time the crowd dwindled leaving just Evan, myself, and two older gentlemen. The more businessman looking of the two was Hassan and the older one was named Saeed. We talked about religion, politics, Egypt, America, and the differences between the two. I’ll be honest I felt way out of my league. My head felt like it was going to explode as they quickly threw questions our way. Luckily for me Evan was able to quickly understand and translate what I didn’t understand. He truly shined and I was happy to have him there because he definitely has a wider vocabulary than me. Inspires me to study some more. I feel the hardest part was keeping up with the pace. I understood 80-90 percent of what was being said just the pace felt like just short of a blitz whereas my speaking comes allitle slower and with some processing.
Either way I managed to communicate and it was a great learning experience for both Evan and I. After about two hours of conversation we got a call from Honi, asking if we could meet and look at a place nearby. We thanked Saeed and Hassan for the conversation and prepared to leave. However, both were so happy to meet Americans that spoke Arabic that they asked for our numbers so we could meet again. We even got invited to share Fattar with Saeed tomorrow. We gladly accepted.
We arrived at the meeting place after a few misdirection’s and headed to the apartment. It was a flat locatged near Tahriir Square. It was decently sized with a balcony and all the normal amenities. However, the owner was asking for 3,500 which we decided was more than we wanted to pay.
We went back to Honi’s office and had some tea. He introduced us to some Nubian music which reminded me of regae. Kinda, weird hanging out with him because his body language seems very stiff and its clear we are only business to him. Not at all like hanging out with Saeed and Hassan earlier. We left after making an appointment to come back to Honi’s office tomorrow at noon.
We walked back to our hostel and both Evan and myself passed out soon thereafter (around 2).
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