I've been here for almost a month and the time is most definitely going by way too fast.!
Well this past week and a half I have been going out, doing random things, meeting new people, and going to Resala. And getting juice of course. Although I've been thinking that my Arabic has barely improved, I realized today that it has probably improved more than I think. It's just been coming along slowly. Yesterday we finally started Arabic class! But we are starting from the very, very beginning and I already know those things... So we'll see what happens. But this way all 9 of our American group gets to take classes together so it's good :)
And on Sunday I also finally started actually teaching my English classes! At first I was kind of nervous about it, especially because all of my students are older than me, but once the class started it went well and I really enjoyed it. I'm excited to do fun creative learning activities in the classes. One con of teaching English is that the main rule in this course is that there is no Arabic allowed, so I don't learn any Arabic in return. But it's okay because I have about 6 people that I've made deals with for them to teach me Arabic and I will teach them English. And there are many people at Resala who are really enthusiastic about teaching me Arabic. In Resala when I am not teaching, I usually help out in the medicine department, and I sort donated medicine by type and expiration date. I hope soon I will start helping out in other departments as well.
Another big thing that happened this past week is that I moved in with my permanent host family! They are really wonderful and I love them very much :)
One thing I am getting used to here though is that now I live right next to a couple main roads and it's extremely loud. And it never stops being loud. Horns and sirens literally never stop. My apartment building is also right next to an elementary school and so there are also screaming children early in the morning. I will probably get used to the noise soon though and be able to tune it out.
One thing that I didn't realize I would miss so much is nature. Coming here has shown me that I'm definitely not a city girl at all. I like big cities for short periods of time, but I don't particularly like living in one. I would much rather prefer a small town with nature or a rural setting. But I also do not enjoy living in the suburbs. Being here has made me realize how beautiful South Park is though because there is so much nature... I just want to find a big field of grass and some woods, but I don't think that exists anywhere near here.
However, one really great thing about living in a big city is public transportation. There is a massive amount of buses and microbuses and taxis here. There are no bus stops or schedules or anything like that though; you pretty much stand on the side of the road and make the hand signal for where you want to go or yell out your destination and if the bus is going there, it will stop and let you on. Sometimes it doesn't stop, just slows down a lot. When I first started taking public transportation by myself I was nervous and scared, and before I came here one of the things that I was most afraid of was navigating a big unfamiliar city without knowing the language by myself. But the Egyptian "ma'alesh" culture has made me much more relaxed about it. "Ma'alesh" is a commonly-used word meaning "go with the flow" or "roll with it" or something of the sort. I've gotten lost the past two nights trying to find my new apartment building and I think it's pretty hilarious. And there are so many people in the street willing to help you out if you ever don't know where to go or how to get there. Monday night I came home after dark and the bus dropped me off on the other side of the street with a barrier, so I didn't recognize where I was and I was really confused, but a guy helped me out and then my host mom came to get me because I was like two blocks from the apartment. Then yesterday afternoon, trying to get from my Arabic class to my English class, I was waiting in the street for 15 minutes for a bus and I wasn't sure which one to get on, so I asked a girl and she was going to the same area and she helped me get there. She even took an extra bus with me to make sure I made it all the way to Resala. And now we're friends. :) Then last night a friend from my English course drove me home and we got lost for 2 hours because I had no clue where I was and I guess I wasn't able to communicate very well where I lived.
I think now I know where I live and maybe I won't get lost anymore coming home. I really need to get a map of Cairo... It makes me laugh a lot though when I get lost. I'm sure this won't be the last time though :P

Due to popular demand, I will be posting more often, insha'allah. This extremely common Arabic phrase means "god-willing", and gives you an excuse if something you say will happen does not happen, because God just didn't will it.

The days here are going by faster and faster and I can see how short these five months can really be. It gives me all the more reason to relish every moment here and never take it for granted. Oftentimes if I am on the melancholy side I will just remind myself that I'm actually here, in Egypt, and it's so fantastic and I feel incredibly lucky to just be here. Then I usually don't feel so melancholy. But I don't often feel very melancholy to being with, so it's all good.

So to get you up-to-date on my happenings in Egypt, last Saturday we had an AFS outing for the group of 9 kids I came here with. Even though we only met close to two weeks ago, I feel like I've known them way longer. We are totally BFF's.

Monday I went to the pyramids! It was fantastic and I definitely want to go back and spend more time there next time. We went into a couple tombs that were outside of the pyramids, and for the first one we crawled through these tiny passage-ways only to end up in a small stone room that was extremely hot. So for the second one we were a little apprehensive about going in, but we did, and that ended up being a very good choice, as this tomb actually had interesting things like hieroglyphics on the walls. So after this we walked by the Sphinx on our way to the place where we were getting horses to ride into the desert. It was quite large. Then we rode horses into the desert! I'm pretty sure none of us had ever ridden a horse before, and the experience itself was something to talk about. It was pretty painful. And you bounce uncomfortably a lot. But once I got used to it, it was absolutely incredible. Then on our way back, I fell off the horse. They made me switch horses for some reason but didn't shorten the straps on my feet, so I lost my balance when the horse started galloping and I fell off. At the time it hurt pretty badly, but afterwards it was quite hilarious, and it still is. The day afterwards I was so sore I could barely move at one point. But it was an amazing experience and I'm so glad it happened.

A few other days this week was spent at my community service organization, Resala, giving placement tests for the English course I'm going to teach. Since I'll be speaking in all English, the students have to have at least some basis in English.

Then today was really fantastic, although equally tiring. We had another AFS outing and woke up at 6:30 to go to a place to get extensions for our visas. Then we did a lot of standing around, then went to the Egyptian museum, but we pretty much just stood around there too. None of us were really in a museum mood, even though it probably is the most fascinating museum I've ever been in. Then we ate some traditional Egyptian food, kosheri, which was delicious. Then we did what Egyptian teenagers do all the time, hangout in a cafe. After that came the real fun, when we took a feluca on the Nile! And of course had a dance party, but Egyptian-style, which included belly-dancing and some form of strange dancing from the guys.

It's been another wonderful week in Egypt, and insha'allah the computer will soon allow me to post pictures!

Wow, so much has happened since the last time I posted. I feel like I've been here for so much longer than a week. I'm starting to really feel that Egypt is my new home. So to catch you up on everything I've done since Sunday, Monday night I saw some authentic Egyptian music and bellydancing and it was really amazing. My host mom is a bellydance instructor! So I'll definitely be learning how to pretty soon. Oh yeah, and I also rode in a tooktook that day!!! It's my favorite form of transportation, it's so adorable! But it's probably the most unsafe too haha. It's this little carriage thing with three wheels and no doors or anything. My second-favorite form of transportation is the microbus, which is usually an old vw bus, and it crams as many people as possible in it and takes you places. For some reason a lot of microbuses and tooktooks and taxis here are all tricked out with cool lights. Like the headlights on some of them are blue and green and red or something, and in a lot of tooktooks there's a blacklight. It's pretty sweet.

So on Wednesday I got to go to my community service organization! It's called Resala and I absolutely love it there. My real "title" there is an English teacher, but they have so many other things going on and I can pretty much go in whenever and help out with anything. They have departments for the blind, the deaf and mute, the mentally challenged, the poor, and they pretty much do anything and everything you can imagine. It's really amazing. Everyone there is incredibly friendly and I feel so at home there already. I went to Resala again the next day and took the microbus by myself for the first time! I was so scared haha. But now I know I can do it. And then I went to Resala again yesterday to go with a group of people to this really poor city so that they can find poor people and evaluate their living conditions and whatnot and see who needs what the most. It was really intense, seeing the homes of some of these people. Some didn't even have floors, a lot didn't have beds, most didn't have more than two rooms. It really made me want to live with only the bare necessities and give the rest of my money or things to people who don't have those necessities. Some of the city was really beautiful though, in the parts that were just surrounded by palm trees. It was like a palm tree forest.

Anyways, some basics about my daily life are that I have to walk up a tooon of stairs to get to the apartment, we don't go to sleep until at least 1, usually 2 in the morning, even the little kids next door. I pretty much have two families because we're always with the family next door. We eat meals with them everyday, they come over here all the time, we go over there all the time; it's pretty adorable. I'm going to miss my new families a lot when I move in with my new host family, which should be very soon, although I don't know when. So for meals we eat on the ground, usually with a big plastic tablecloth, and there is no such thing as "double-dipping" here because everyone just shares everything. A lot of the time we only have 2 cups for 6 people. I'm so shocked I haven't gotten sick yet! I guess my body just loves Egyptian germs, yay. They have the best mango-flavored things here... I had mango ice cream the other day and it made me super happy.. and all the juice here is so delicious!!! None of the food has preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, partially-hydrogenated oils or whatever. It's really great.

Oh yeah, and everyone here calls me Hooley with their accents.

:)

The top two photos are from the poor city I went to with Resala, and the bottom picture is my host sister and I in a cafe.