Shopping and Food Delicacies

Today in my Ancient Egypt class, I had a map quiz. We were given a map of Egypt and had to label about 40 key sites. It wasn't too bad, however the map the teacher chose was poorly drawn and it was difficult to decipher the reference points.

My Colloquial Arabic class was fun today. After repeating after the teacher for most of the class, our teacher made us go out and find an Egyptian to talk to in Arabic and practice our greetings and situational responses and have the other student correct us. I met an Egyptian girl named Rikhena who was really nice and helpful. She found some of the things we were saying/and learning to be very entertaining haha. We agreed that I would help her with her English classes if she helped me with my Arabic classes.

The food on campus gets very old very quickly. Because of this, we decided that since none of us had that much homework, we'd go downtown into Cairo to eat and walk around. We walked around for a bit and window-shopped. We found a beautiful bookstore that sold both American and Arabic books. The store is called Alif, which is the first letter of the Arabic alphabet and makes an "a" sound. I've been wanting to buy a Qur'an in Arabic for a while, and the bookstore had a great selection. The books are intricately decorated and gorgeous. For around $10 I got a beautiful Qur'an in green with gold, green, and rose designs all over it. The bookstore also had some cute arabic children's books, which are on our level with Arabic reading, haha. One of my friends got a copy of Harry Potter in Arabic, which certainly maked a great suvenior.

After shopping, we went to eat at this crepe place called "Munchies" that we'd heard about. It was so good!!! I had the banana bahama crepe, which consisted of a crepe filled with chocolate, bananas, and topped with cinnamon. It was so delicious. The place had sweet and savoury crepes and is definitely worth a second visit :)

Nothing much else happening here. The Egyptians are happy the Celtics won :) and also that Algeria lost its first soccer game (Algeria is responsible for keeping Egypt out of the World cup). Other news, apparently in Alexandria, there are a bunch of protests because someone allegedly caught police dealing or buying drugs and posted it on the internet. This person was then beaten by the cops, and now students and other citizens are rising up.