a productive day (complete with ice cream and jedi)

I was productive today. On a Friday. Something is clearly amiss.
I went to Coffee Bean in the morning, and wrote half my paper and outlined the other half, while enjoying a terribly delicious breakfast of a chai latte and a croissant. The fact that Coffee Bean has no internet is simultaneously extremely frustrating and extremely helpful to my productivity. I think that's why I keep going back. That and the chai. So good.
When I got back to the dorms, I started to watch some tv online, read some blogs, then realized I really had nothing better to do than to finish my paper. So I did.
I ended up downstairs in the courtyard, which was good, because it meant I got to hang out with friends all afternoon and evening and night, with pretty much all of us being productive, sort of.
I say sort of because I was already done with my essay, so I was just reading a book I bought at the campus book fair a few days ago. Oh, Dean Koontz. No other author rivals your ability to write thoroughly engrossing terrible books. This one was about a dog of alarming intelligence, a phrase which I took it upon myself to say as often as I could throughout the day. 'What's your book about?' people asked. 'Oh, not much. Just a dog of alarming intelligence,' I replied.
The best part of the silly book was the setting: Southern California from Orange County to Santa Barbara. Pretty sweet. My favorite bit was when I caught Dean Koontz out in an obvious lack of research: when the evil monster slaughtered a police officer in the hills behind Yorba Linda, he had the 'Yorba Linda Police' go to investigate. Silly Dean Koontz. We don't have our own police force, we just borrow Brea's!
We vacillated about ordering in or eating out, then failed terribly to come to a consensus and ended up eating at the cafeteria. A while after dinner, one friend pointed out that it was now 'time for dessert!' so we headed out with cupcakes in mind. The cupcake store was completely empty of anything but ginger cookies, so we went to the grocery store for ice cream bars, which turned out to be really melty and gross. So we headed over to Mandarine for good ice cream, which was delicious. I had caramel&hazelnut, and the other two had lemon&strawberrylemon and hazelnut&darkchocolatewithweirdpossiblypeachsaucewethinkmaybe.
Then we went back to the dorms and sat in the courtyard freezing until one by one we finished all the work that was going to get done tonight and headed upstairs.
[One friend, I have to mention, was writing an Arabic essay all day, very diligently. Her topic? A summary and explanation of Star Wars. She had all the vocabulary she needed from her media Arabic class: rebel, explosion, alliance, empire. How perfect. The main problem, which we kept cracking up over, seemed to be how to correctly put 'Jedi' into the dual form. Jedi-iin?]

super-soaker adventures

My morning started off really well, with a squirt gun shot of water straight to the eyes while I was walking to the bus, courtesy of some drive-by Egyptian teenage boys. I don't know why it happened, but it wasn't just me. And it totally sucked.
After that, my day couldn't really get worse, so I guess it got better. Classes were interesting, I had delicious koshary for lunch, and then I got to come home semi on time. Party.
My friends and I walked to a restaurant called Cook-Door (or if you're me, Food-Stop) for dinner tonight. It seemed pretty creepy on the inside, with pictures of Charlie Chaplin, as well as some Salvadore Dali works.

why charlie chaplin?
what's wrong with a nice norman rockwell?

epically empty creeper restaurant

The food was good, though, so that's okay. We'll probably just get it delivered next time, to avoid the long walk and the creepiness. On the way back, though, we got Baskin Robbins, and saw this poster, which was amazing:

which package will you choose?

Back at the dorms, I returned to my room to find that someone had broken in and left their possessions scattered about! Oh, never mind. It was just my roommate, who finally showed up. She's very nice, although she wants me to clean my desk and doesn't really approve of my haircut for some reason. I think we can still be friends though, so I'll do my best to make that happen.
Tomorrow morning I leave for Alexandria for all of Friday and Saturday, which means I get to transcribe another AFK blog, just when I thought I was done with that for a while. Whoopee. Actually, I'm really looking forward to seeing Alexandria, so I don't mind that much. I probably will mind a lot if I don't get my homework done on the trip though! (Our itinerary states that we will be back in Zamalek by 6 pm on Saturday, but my estimate is more like 10 pm. We'll see then if I'm starting to develop a sense for Egyptian time or not. (Please, please let me be wrong about that!)