I was actually productive first thing in the morning, and wrote about half of my anthro paper before stopping to go on an adventure.
Geoff had mentioned to me that he'd had really good pomegranate juice from a fruit juice stand downtown, or somewhere, and I decided that that sounded really delicious. So, we set out from the dorms to walk to 26th of July street for some pomegranate juice and lunch. The juice stand we ended up at was pretty nice, although, like all the other juice stands I've visited or walked past, it smelled a little bit like rotting fruit. The man behind the counter served us our juice in small glass tumblers, and we stood by the counter to drink it. I'm pretty sure it had had some (probably a lot) of sugar added to it, because it was way sweeter than any pomegranate I've ever tasted. Definitely delicious, though. I even managed not to spill any on my shirt, so yay for that. After we'd overpaid for our juice (because we're Americans, most likely, we went next door to get lunch from a falafel stand. Geoff had a chips sandwich (potato chips in pita) and kofta, and I just had kofta. The man who made our lunches was really nice, and smiled the whole time. He spoke a little bit of English, which was apparent as soon as we'd walked up. I said "What are you going to get?" and Geoff replied "I dunno," and the falafel man laughed and said something along the lines of "Ana mish arif kemen!" which means "I don't know either!" in Arabic. He was very nice, and while my kofta was cooking, we chatted about where we were from (America/USA), and whether we lived here (yes). His reply to us saying we lived in Cairo was to laugh and say "Enta talib!" ("You're a student!") God knows there's no other reason we'd be living in Cairo. We finally got our food and paid (less than a dollar for lunch, which was about the same price as the pomegranate juice), and he said goodbye to us when we left, "maa salaama!" So that was awesome.
On our way back to the dorm, we stopped and bought whole pomegranates from a fruit store for 5.5 pounds a kilo (so much cheaper than at home!), and although I don't know exactly how I'm going to manage to eat mine yet, it looks delicious.
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| happy halloween! |
The rest of the day wasn't very exciting at all, except for my discovery when doing my Arabic homework that I have managed to memorize Maha's second dialog from Al-Kitaab, along with her first. Good for me. I'm sure my newfound skill at being able to inform people that my father works at the UN and my mother works at a university and I am truly lonely will come in quite handy one day.
Geoff and I met up again for dinner, planning to order onion rings from Cook Door but being stymied by the fact that nothing else on their menu looked remotely good. We ended up getting onion rings and burgers from Hardee's, and while the food was good, I expected the family size onion rings box to be less disappointing. Shame on you, Hardee's, shame.
Tomorrow, I may or may not have a midterm in Egyptian Lit. If I am lucky, the professor will still be sick, but I hope she's not, because she is an old lady, and that's just mean. Still, I hope the midterm is another day.
