Two weeks gone...

So two weeks gone and finally settling in properly...

It seems I’ve developed a nasty form of insomnia... I get tired, I go to bed, I lie for hours (seriously last night I went to bed at 9.30pm and didn’t sleep till after 3am), and I never fall asleep... I spoke to a couple of the girls here and they said its normal. Apparently the pollution/air quality is so bad it messes with your sleep, the girls said it takes about 6 weeks to get used to it. Which is half my time here – so by the time I get to sleeping properly I’ll be going home... I started exercising (walking regularly ( in an attempt to get my body super tired for sleep), but as yet it hasn’t worked. I just come home coughing and sneezing blackness – super gross!

Yesterday I took my first microbus. It looks like this:

And normally there is about 20 or more people crammed into what is a space only meant for 14 including the driver and his mates! Al-hamdoulillah the one we managed to hop on was only half full so we got seats. Tonight however was a completely different story. We decided we would go to Ma’adi (an area close to the Nile – about 20km from home) for dinner, and to get there we would take a micro to the station and get the train. All up such a trip would cost each of us 3 ganayh (less than A$1) rather than the taxi that is 25 ganayh (if you bargain well enough to get the basic “foreigner” fare for the trip). Anyway the micros were all so full that we didn’t even want to contemplate wedging ourselves into the sea of bodies that flowed out the door of the bus even while in motion. In fact one guy almost died in front of our eyes as he rode the micro hanging out of the door – his hand slipped and he was hanging on by the other trying not to let his legs hit the road. Somehow he managed to balance and someone stuck their hand through the window from the inside to hold him so he didn’t fall again. Scary. Anyway, after seeing multiple full micros we decided we’d rather grab a taxi and pay the extra. So we arrived in Ma’adi but the taxi driver dropped us off at the wrong place so we had to walk some to find my flatties sister. Finally we got to where we were meant to be. We purchased out Britta Bottle (those water purifier things), had dinner, had ice cream (baskin robins) and headed home – to tired to be bothered with bargaining, we paid far to much but got home in one piece (surprisingly considering the way the driver was negotiating the road). Really the purpose of the trip was the purifier, but we decided dinner was a necessity and I spotted the ice cream joint out the window of the restaurant... Good food.

So I have class in the morning. Its going well. I do 3.5 hours a day four days a week, but am increasing it to 5hours a day (possibly 5 days a week) from this week or next week insha’Allah. All my classes here are one-on-one and conducted entirely in Arabic since my teachers know next-to-no English...but of a change. I’ve realised how little I can communicate and comprehend. My teacher laughs when I give her a detailed grammatical analysis of a sentence (about the only thing I can do coherently in Arabic) but can’t tell her what it means... I really need to work on my vocabulary – but that’s nothing I didn’t know already..

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Still not used to being without internet at home – but I am replacing the time I would spend on it with tv. Not good. TV here is different to home... very different. Here you see everything, when people die the news doesn’t show you the sanitised shot of a bunch of people covered by white sheets, instead you see the bloodied, burnt, twisted and mutilated bodies. Nothing is sanitised. From the half severed heads hanging to bodies by a sliver of skin shown close-up to the little children with arms/legs missing, blood gushing and snapped bones visible. It’s sickening. Often I can’t watch the news, it’s just too painful. If the rest of the world saw what you see here on the news, there’s no way people would allow what is going on to continue. In the “West” we treat our pets better. Subhan’Allah it is really insanity.

Other than the news and the insomnia I’m loving Egypt – such a difference from Jordan, subhan’Allah.

Hope you are all well.

Much love and Ma’a salama