First few messy impressions...

Nehad Heliel, the director of our program in Alexandria, describes Egyptian culture as "a chaotic culture." My flatmate and friend Caitlin calls it 'functional chaos.' So far...and this may just be the impression of any foreigner who finds herself having to put together a new life in a new place...that seems to exactly fit my general impression first in Cairo, and then in Alexandria. Even if there is a method to the life around me, it is all so new that it seems like chaos. Even things that aren't new are less clear, either because I don't understand all of what the people around me are saying, or because people treat us like crazy westerners/foreigners and just allow us to do stupid things instead of telling us what's really going on. I don't know if the last is true, but I've suspected it a few times.

Life doesn't exactly move quickly; lateness is almost expected (from Egyptians...woe to us if we arrive late to our classes!), and conversation, friendliness, helpfulness, hospitality, and anything that could be construed as one of the above all seem to come before time commitments. But while life doesn't move quickly, or necessarily on time, it is definitely always moving. There is always, always noise coming from the streets and schools outside our apartment building, and if New York could see Alexandria's (let alone Cairo's!) cafes at night, they would quickly give up their title as the "City That Never Sleeps". On the other hand, I guess a lot of people do sleep in the middle of the day...

My point in mentioning the chaos, however, was to say that right now there is just so much going on around me that I feel that all I am trying to do is to function amid what seems--right now--like chaos. Our victories are small, like crossing the street smoothly in between cars (yes, that's how you do it here...I feel all those video-game fans must have an advantage), managing to arrive at a new destination without asking for directions (or understanding directions when we ask), and getting our grocery shopping done at the local supermarket before it closes for Friday prayers.

Sometimes the chaos is invigorating. On the way to Alexandria, my friend Baher (who was driving me there), joked that "In America, you're not allowed to talk on the phone while you're driving, right? And you have to drive inside the lanes....ah," he shook his head, "In Egypt, we're free." There certainly seem to be a lot less rules....sometimes. Other times there are more, for example the wall around our campus has different doors for all the different colleges, and we are only allowed to enter the door for our college, even though all the doors lead to the same place, and once inside you can exit through any one of them (we think....Caitlin and I once exited through 'Faculty of Education' and the guy in front of us tried to close the door behind him).

That is the tip of the Egyptian bureaucracy iceberg. Anyone who knows me knows how much trouble I have with bureacracy in general, but the beautiful thing about Egyptian bureacracy is that apparently with the right connections (or, even, perhaps, the right tone of voice?) you can easily circumvent it. And as with the doors, you can sometimes ignore it entirely. During our Orientation week, Nehad carried a stack of business cards around with her everywhere we went. These cards got us free admission, special services, and entrance to all kinds of places.

I am now convinced that the reason I was allowed to bring my notebooks *and* my laptop into the Alexandria Library (while my friends who came later were not), was because I had lost so much of my patience that morning that I actually argued with the guard (like six feet tall) about the no bags rule. Maybe it works like bargaining...? More on the Alexandria library later...

There is so much more to write about (and hopefully I will stop expressing myself in generalizations which I am sure to disprove later), but it is late. More coming soon....