Felucca Ride, the Zoo, and another field trip.

Shawn's birthday was Sunday so we went out on a felucca with a bunch of people. It was really fun. There were ipod speakers so we could listen to music. All of the buildings along the Nile looked pretty cool at night. I didn't bring my camera, but when people put pictures up on facebook I'll steal some of them.

Yesterday Shawn and I went to the Zoo. That was definitely an experience. It only costs a pound to get in (roughly 18 cents) so there were tons of people just hanging out. I think most families were there more to have a picnic than so see the animals. Which makes sense, since the animals weren't that impressive. The cages were pretty small and there were a lot of deer like animals and birds and not a lot of the "cool" animals. But from talking to people who had gone to the zoo before us, we knew that if we paid the handler we could hold the baby lions. So for less than $3 Shawn and I got to hold a lion cub. I was dumb and let the zoo's photo guy take the pictures with my camera and he didn't do a very good job, but regardless, I have now held a lion.

Speaking of pictures, when Shawn and I were looking at the map a little girl came up and tapped me and said something in Arabic, but all I caught of it was "I want" so I didn't do anything, but she tapped me again and said the same thing and her mom made the camera motion. I thought she wanted me to take a picture of her, since kids do that sometimes so I took her picture but then I figured out she wanted a picture with me. So I crouched down and she put her arm around me and then a couple of other kids came over too. Shawn took a couple of pictures and all the parents pulled out their phones and took pictures. I'm thinking this happened because I was the only white person in the entire zoo (Shawn's Indian). No hyperbole, I didn't see another white person, making me more of an exotic creature than the zebras or elephants. haha.

It's interesting standing out so much, since at GW and especially Great Valley I did not stand out at all. A lot of preteen girls at the zoo came up to me asked where I was from and what my name was. On the street people just look at me a lot. I was talking to one of my Egyptian friends about it and he said that would happen since I had blonde hair and white skin. To which I was said "I don't have blonde hair" and he told me it was blonde relative to what most people have here. I've been here for 4 weeks now and overall the harassment on the street is not that bad. Maybe because people warned me a lot or because I spend most of my time in a pretty nice part of Cairo, but it's mostly pretty harmless stuff.

I had my second field trip this morning. We visited 2 mosques and 2 gates from a big wall that used to surround the royal city that existed about a thousand years ago. I took a ton of pictures and I'm putting them up online right now. The first mosque was really pretty. It had marble flooring and cool hanging lights. The stone engraving on all the buildings is amazing.

Also, the weather is beautiful here. Even when it's a little chillier (like 60 degrees) it's still sunny and clear skies every day. There have maybe been 2 overcast days in the 4 weeks I've been here, and one of those was a day last week where we had a mini-sandstorm (later in the semester we'll have a whole week of sandstorms...). It's a nice change from rainy and cold DC.

Ok now I need to do some homework!