So since the boys are leaving for 8 days, and then after that our schedules are so conflicting that we won't be able to hang out with them much, we decided to throw them a little fete before they go. Pasta night! My roomie Emily and I cooked up a bunch of pasta, beer bread, and I made a really good olive oil bread dip too, and we crowded our apt and had a great time.
Limassol is RUDE. The people were NOT all that friendly, except for in the clubs, when everyone is drunk and dancing and guys try to buy you drinks and tell you you're an angel, which is pretty much standard all over Cyprus. None of us enjoyed the company in Limassol much though. Every hotel worker was incredibly rude to us, the cab drivers tried to rip us all off, and pretty much everyone we talked to was just straight up rude.
The Carnival was awesome though. Pretty much a combination of Mardi Gras and Halloween (I can't really think of a better mix!). The parade was great, but I have to say, I think the first night there, when it was just all of us hanging out in the hotel room before hitting up the clubs (in costumes of course!) was the best part of the weekend. I think all of us are very glad that next weekend, for ONCE, we aren't going anywhere and can just relax.
...Except for the boys of course, who are leaving for 8 days.
So a whole bunch of us decided to go away for the weekend. You know, nothing fancy, just hang out... in Cairo.
We flew in late Thursday night and got driven to our hostel. The traffic is insane. Mom would have a heart attack-- it's as bad if not worse than Central America.
The people who worked at the hostel that we ended up hanging out with a lot, Mustafa and Ahab, were wicked fun, and the first night we were there, Mustafa showed us this very cute little restaurant in a back alley, where we had tea, hookah, and food that none of us will ever figure out the names of. Not a single night went by where I didn't have tea, so it was all good in my opinion.
Day one we did all the necessary Cairo things: I saw the pyramids and sphinx from the back of a camel (they smell REALLY bad, but they're so much fun, especially when they stand up or lay down-- neither of which mine was willing to do), and then I got to ride a horse as well, and one of the guides challenged me to go faster, so i walked over to where he was, spun my horse on its heels, and just barely touched its sides and we took off, racing across the desert and giggling like a schoolgirl. I don't know if I won, but I didn't really care, because that was the single greatest moment of my life. I wish someone had a picture of it, or a video. I apparently impressed the guide who was just watching (not the one I raced) because there was a horse I'd wanted to ride, but he'd been acting up, and after the race the guide came over and said "Okay, you're even a better rider than (the guide I raced), you could have handled that horse." and later at the hostel told all the other Egyptians about the race (in Arabic-- I sort of stumbled into the conversation and someone translated to me quietly).
Ahab was very sweet to all of us, setting everything up for us and even coming out to dinner with us once. He made me tea and when he found out I had studied a little Arabic, he went through just about everything I could remember, helping me with my pronounciation, and writing down a list of things I should know.
Mustafa was a riot. He also smokes hookah like a chimney-- I've never seen a person exhale that amount of smoke; he looked like a dragon. He hung out with us quite a bit.
The only recurring guide we had was Shareif (and yes, I'm well aware that I am probably butchering their names, but how do you write out Arabic names in English without having seen them?) and he was very amusing too, calling one of the blonde girls in our group "his angel" all the time, and flirting with her to the amusement of the rest of us.
We did go to the top of the Cairo tower and take a ton of pictures, but this website for some reason hasn't been letting me on, hasn't been letting me post, and has been rather obnoxious, so you'll have to look for the photos on facebook. We also went to the Egypt museum (and saw mummies of course!) and another little museum.
Oh, and did I mention I climbed up and then INSIDE one of the pyramids?
My roomie Regina is in a cultural architecture class, and the professor decided to take them all on a field trip into the city, to see the structures, culture, and all that stuff. ...at night.
Since Regina is the only American in that class (and because it sounded like fun) I went along.
Oh my god, it was soooo much fun. We all met up in the city at 10pm and for the first bit, there were about 10 or 12 students. We walked around the city, looking at the structure and the history and different points of interest, we got the street names explained to us and the professor pointed out the changes that have taken place even just in the past few years. It was incredibly interesting and informative, and a better, more chill version of a regular guided tour. Even though it was just an hour or two into the night and the trip was planned to go till 8am, a bunch of the kids ditched, and it was down to the prof, two guys, two other girls, and my roomie and I. The professor brought up a lot of interesting issues, like the proper use of public space, the idea of "squares" as cultural centers and places to pause in the middle of a bustling city, a building's structure being modernized so that it no longer has the same artistic integrity, and the tragedy of the demolition of works by famously talented architects, pointing out different buildings and examples as we walked.
Then things got very different from your average class trip. We went to a caberet show (to study the culture, don't judge us) and afterwards the other two girls ditched, leaving just the four of us and the prof. So for more culture, we went barcrawling... with the professor... who bought the first couple rounds.
After closing down two or three of the bars, we went back to touring the city, and ended up in this little street with a bunch of storage areas, one of which it turns out the professor owned and had used to host a New Years party, so we opened it up, pulled some stools out into the street, sat down and had some awesome conversation about the importance of culture and history, faith, life and everything (oddly enough, "42" was never mentioned). A couple hours later, we were some of the first people to scope out the fresh food market that was just setting up, where Regina bought some strange thing that we neither know what it is nor how to cook it (but that's half the fun) and I bought some kiwis for breakfast. Then, because it was 6:30am and the sun was up, we, like vampires, headed home and went to bed. Good times, good times.
