Life in Zamalek

The days have been passing by much quicker than I ever would have expected. Right now we are already in our second week of classes. So let's talk about what's been going on in Zamalek up until now.

I have to say, I'm so happy living in Zamalek. The way we were prepared, I expected so much worse from Egypt and I'm glad to be underwhelmed. The area is a perfect place to experience culture, while still being extremely safe. So starting off in Zamalek, I was assigned my new roommate, Diana! Crazy girl, I must say. As you can see from the picture I put up from her one woman photo shoot with my camera. Haha. She's a great person to explore Egypt with because she's pretty much up for anything. Our first day of classes turned out to be a lot of fun. I am in love with my arabic teacher Syonara. She's such a great person and I'm glad to be able to spend so much time with her. After classes ended on the first day, we went to our orientation for the service learning part of the trip. We learned that our mission was to lend our help to a community called Establ Antar, and illegal community in Cairo that has limited resources and a very low standard of living. Our jobs would be to help in the workshops that our NGO has set up for Establ Antar, including knitting centers and a carpet training company. There is also an option to help a man's glassblowing company located in Establ Antar.
On Tuesday, May 13 we were all able to visit the knitting workshop in Muqattam and the carpet company. Muqattam seemed like a great place for women - widowed and married - to work on making things that could be turned into profit. The workshop had an array of kitchen knit wear as well as some clothes. I thought that it would be a really great place to help out. We also went to the carpet factory which ended up being extremely awkward for most of us. We were shown around
the factory where children and adults alike work on creating these beautiful carpets. Once the tour was over, most of us were wondering what we would be able to contribute to this company which seemed to be well established. The woman that showed us around simply answered that she was looking for "new markets and clientele". That didn't sound like service learning to me! So we were all a little taken aback by this.

After the visits and the response that most of us gave, Cynthia and Prof. Sullivan had to take some time to re-evaluate the projects and decide if all of them would be worthwhile and worthy of some sort of grade. By the end of the week we found out that there would be three groups, one working in the knitting workshop, and one in the glassblowing home where we could help take pictures of products and put them on a designed website so that these places could begin to market their inventory. We weren't sure what the people at the carpet place would be doing, but that group just played it by year.

In the mean time, I was having a really big problem - lack of clothing! I know that the simple solution to this problem would be to do laundry, but HA!, that turned out to be a lot harder than it sounds. Of course there's no real place for us to do our own laundry, and looking at the hotel list, doing laundry with them would be very expense with the amount that I had piled up. So what did Diana and I decide to do, being the smart and innovative college kids that we are.. oh just look:

Oh yes, that's right.. laundry in the bathtub! It seemed like an AMAZING idea at the time, until we were left with a huge pile of soaking laundry and no place to put it! So you can imagine what our bathroom has looked like with all sorts of clothes hanging from everywhere, the cleaning people probably think we are NUTS! But things are starting to dry, so we should be all set very soon! Haha

The next couple days we had more classes with Syonara, and I was soooo excited that I can actually read and write arabic script now! It's definitely a good feeling. I wanted to call my mom right up in the middle of class and tell her how proud I was of myself! Haha

After the entire week of 4 hour classes per day, we got some time on the weekend to relax and lay low. A lot of my time was spent lounging and catching up on sleep since getting up at 7:45 AM is something I haven't done in quite some time, probably around first semester. We did go to the City Stars Mall, which is the largest mall in the Middle East. It was so americanized, I mean it was no King of Prussia, but all of seven floors of it was pretty nice. We got to meet Diana's friend Maureen who lives here in Egypt and has been for the last 6 or 7 years. Just walking around the mall and exploring turned out to be a lot of fun. And Saturday we got to relax even more and have a great dinner at Abduh and Hayaam's house were Hayaam made us koshari, southern fried chicken, french fries, pita, etc, etc.. all of which was SOOO good! I couldn't stop eating, especially since one of my absolute favorite foods is chicken cutlets and that's basically what Hayaam had made! After that meal, I was ready to take on more classes on Sunday! That's so weird to say, classes on Sunday, Sunday in Egypt no longer = weekend. :-(

After finishing classes and everything Sunday, we started our first service learning on Monday. I decided to help the knitting workshop in Muquttam. Our plan was to split our group in two, so that half focused on the products and descriptions that we needed to incorporate onto the website and the other group was focused on interviewing and gathering information about the workshop in order to describe it on the website for the viewers. I was pretty much in charge of taking all of the pictures, so we had to set up each product to be photographed as well as all the different swatches of fabrics that the product could come in. All of the things they make there are absolutely beautiful, and I can't wait to go back when I have money and buy everything up. We made a great friend there, Fadwa, who helped us with all the products and was an overall great person to be around. A very big help! :-)



Fadwa wanted to take all sorts of pictures with us, and we were more than happy to get into some photos!

On our way out we also talked with a group of young boys that were hanging around the workshop, they were also there to greet us when we first got there. Two of them were wearing New York Yankees' hats so Alyssa and April, the New Yorker's, were super excited. Even though I don't think the boys even knew what they were really wearing. But nonetheless they were absolutely adorable and fun.
Overall, the first days in Zamalek have turned out to be a blast! Between visiting the people at longchamps, going out to local places, meeting egyptians, and exploring the city, things have been going pretty great.

Last night we attended a "Dialogue" at the Fulbright Commission where we were able to talk with Egyptian students about an array of topics. The conversation started out a little slow in the groups, especially because a big topic was Foreign Policy, which I didn't have much to contribute to. But things started to pick up, and by the end of it we were all exchanging phone numbers and facebook names. We're supposed to go out with our new friend Lyna on Wednesday, so that should be awesome!

Things are shaping up pretty good in Zamalek! :]