Cairo-Week 7: Settling in Again!

Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 10:32am

I am finally settled into my new place. I am happy to say that there is not a roach problem and I am praying that it stays that way. We do have big red ants, although it doesn’t seem like a complete infestation at this point, just an ant here and there. My roommate has fumigated her room twice now because something is biting her in her bed. She has red marks all over her feet arms and some on her back. At first she thought it was the ants but she says she never sees what is biting her and I think if it were ants she would have been definitely able to see them. I am afraid she might have bed bugs. Whatever it is I hope it has died from all the spraying because I don’t want any part of it. I am coming to see that dealing with creepy crawlers is just an unfortunate reality here.

Other than that the apartment is fine. I no longer have to walk up five flights of stairs to get to the apartment. I am now on the first floor so it makes going in and out and getting groceries much easier. There is a washing machine here but my roommate doesn’t know how to use it and neither do I. The washing machine looks like a big cylinder there is a hose for water and there is an electrical cord attached to it, however, it isn’t hooked up to anything. It is just sitting in the bathroom taking up space. This past weekend I washed my clothes in the tub by hand and then hung them out to dry on a clothes line that is below my waist. So basically, I had to fold all of my long wet clothes up and then put them on the line b/c otherwise they would drag. I didn’t do this right the first time so some of my clothes had dirt on them right after I just washed them. Al- hamdulilah (Praise God) the clothes dried fast even though they were folded.

I found out that one of the girls that I met from Britain will be going home at the end of this month. I don’t know exactly why she has to leave but she wants to come back because she didn’t get as far as she liked in her Arabic program. I am taking this as a reminder to learn as much as I can as fast as I can because I never know when I will have to leave. I think I am going to sign-up for a private Arabic session soon. The class cost more that way but the teacher covers 1.5 levels in the 5week period as opposed to 1 level in 5 weeks. I figure if I have a private teacher for two 5 week sessions then I can be on level 6 by June, which means half-way through the program.

Final exams are next week so I will have to study, study, study. There are two parts to the exam: a written exam and then an oral exam. I am not too confident about the oral portion but I think I might practice talking to myself!

All-in-all things are going well. I think I will start giving updates when there is something interesting going on. At this point if I write every week you might start reading about what I ate for dinner.