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.