January 6, 2005

I have been bad about keeping the blog up-to-date, but there hasn't been too much going on. We hate to disappoint, but our New Year's in Cairo was pretty simple. We had a couple of offers, but in the end we went out to eat and spent the rest of the evening at home. We were okay with that. Our friend Kelly went to a big party at a hotel. She saw the big Egyptian singer, Amr Diab, and the most famous belly dancer. Of course, she went to this party at Egyptian time, midnight, and left at 6 am. We didn't mind that we didn't do that. Maybe we're getting old.

For Joe's birthday, we didn't do that much either. My students keep giving me a hard time because I didn't buy him anything. I keep telling them, we went on a trip to Prague for our birthdays, but they insist that I should have bought him something. I made him cream puffs, though!

We have been very busy getting ready for midterm tests and finishing our grades. Now, that those things are done, we are watching the days go by until break. We have a three day weekend, so today was a day off. Tomorrow is Christmas for the Coptic Christians in Cairo.

Today, Joe and I went down to Coptic Cairo to buy some more black and white Egyptian photos. They are these really cool photos of scenes of Cairo from the early 1900s. We took the metro down which is always entertaining. There are so many men on the metro; it's hard for me to find a place to look without meeting someone's eyes. At least it wasn't as packed as it was last time. Last time we were pressed face-to-face and body-to-body. Not fun, let me tell you.

After we got our pictures, we tried to go to the tentmakers section. It was definitely an adventure. Our first taxi dropped us off somewhere near the tentmakers area, but he didn't really know where we were. We got into the next taxi and a man was driving, but then he got out and a boy got in that looked about thirteen years old. He drove us around, not knowing where to go either. Eventually, we made it, but we were disappointed because the tentmaker's section was full of the typical Egyptian fabrics. We were looking for a tapestry, but we didn't see anything that struck as interesting. Oh well, we definitely saw the vibrant Cairo life. We made it back even though our next taxi driver didn't believe that we knew where we were going. Life in Cairo, always interesting!