Thursday, March 31

Ah, a short week. Gotta love 'em. The weekend is here again. We spent the evening moving from coffee shop to coffee shop. Joe and I have become quite the coffee shop connoisseurs. That's pretty much all people do here. You go out, drink a coffee or fruit juice for an hour, two hours, maybe even three, and you talk. When we first moved here, it was very difficult for us to sit over a drink or a meal for a long while. We were used to getting waited on immediately, getting our food as quickly as possible, and then paying the bill as soon as we finished. However, Egypt is more European in style. You lounge. No one tries to get you out the door so that they may have a free table to seat more customers. They don't even care if all you order is one drink. I suppose we've gotten used to it, and now we enjoy hanging out and simply talking. We won't be able to adjust to the rush of the U.S.!

The funny thing is, that we find ourselves hanging out with a lot of teenagers. That's what they do here on the weekends. They (and the cell phones that are perpetually attached to them) hang out at cafes. They sit around and talk. I'm telling you, they are so much more innocent here. We know that there are some "bad" things that teenagers do here, but that boils down to boys drinking or smoking some hashish. We've never seen any of this, though. For the most part, we've decided they are much more wholesome than the average American teen.

Another interesting anecdote from our outing tonight. We've become regulars at a cafe just around the corner called the Grand Royal. The menu there cracks me up. They have a "cafe latex" (aka cafe latte), a "clobe sandwich" (aka club sandwich), and other interesting items. You really do see a lot of interesting spellings in this town. There's something to be said for phonetic spelling. The thing is that when they translate Arabic words into English, they may spell them a variety of ways. There's no clear spelling because in Arabic they don't usually write vowels, so when they go to write it in English, the vowels (and sometimes the consonants) are up for grabs. You'll see a street spelled, "Sawra, thawra, thowra" or a different street - "nozha, nuzha" etc. Maybe this is only interesting to me, as an English teacher. You'll forgive me, I'm sure. My caffeine is beginning to wear off, so I'll have to be off to bed.