Nan on the Nile

“All the good for the American image that was done by Obama’s speech has been undone by Swine Flu” - my roommate’s boss While I’ve been fortunate enough not to fall victim to earth’s trendiest new pandemic, swine flu has taken on a special new importance in my life. For those of you not voraciously following Egyptian news, there have been 7 cases of swine flu diagnosed in Cairo (actually, now it's up to 26, but it started with 7) - all of them foreign students newly arrived at the AUC dorms near downtown, in Zamalek (an upper-class island neighborhood in the Nile, in the middle of Cairo) to take summer courses. This, predictably, ignited a sort of latent frenzy that is so ill-conceived it borders on the hilarious. There is no rioting in the streets, ... read more

Bahariyya Oasis is a teardrop-shaped cluster of date palms, rock, hot springs and flowers about 400 kilometers southwest of Cairo. It’s linked by a slender little wedge of green to Farafra Oasis, and surrounding all of this are massive sheets of desert stretching for hours on all sides. The main “city” in Bahariyya is called Bawiti, a bright, ancient, eerily peaceful little town, which is the place towards which, several weeks ago, my friends and I found ourselves barreling on a rickety Egyptian bus, to go camping and hiking in the desert for 4 days. The ride took 5 dusty hours, which wasn’t actually so bad. Once we arrived, we met a Bedouin man called Gareeb who had agreed to take us into the desert. He was pretty young, as it turned out. I had him ... read more

Now, I’m just as eager to debunk stereotypes as the next girl, but in the words of my father, “What kind of a trip to Egypt doesn’t have camels?” So, I thought I’d come through in the camel department and tell you about the Birqash Camel Market. There isn’t a beaten path for getting to Birqash (pronounced Bur-ausch), a village about an hour and a half outside of Cairo. To get to this small, sun-baked corner of Egypt, the most convenient thing to do is just to hire a taxi for the day to take you out there. Of course, my comerades and I decided to choose the more cost-efficient and decidedly less reliable (but oh so much more thrilling) option of taking a minibus. I should note that taking a bus here is nothing like ... read more

The Search for an Apartment Apartment-hunting here is something of an art. It takes talent. It takes intuition and charm. It takes a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that I resoundingly don’t have. Three friends I’ve met at orientation and my hostel have decided to try and find a place together, which has been frustrating and unfruitful and has used up more of my brain cells than I care to imagine. You have a few options on how to find an apartment, all of which we have tried: you can go to a broker, hope that what they show you isn’t overpriced or secretly full of ants (actually, the bug-in-apartment issue here is practically nonexistent compared with places like New York) and hope that the finders fee they charge you isn’t too exorbitant. Technically, you shouldn’t even pay the ... read more

Somebody told me over the summer that the population of Egypt is so concentrated around the Nile that it’s like taking 1/3 of the US population and stuffing them into New Jersey. I sort of shrugged it off at the time, but now that I’m in Cairo, I can completely see the truth of that statement. Cairo. Is. Packed. For the first week or so, I'm staying in a hostel until I can find an apartment, which I'm (naively?) hoping won't be too difficult. The hostel that I’m staying in is in the heart of downtown, on a road called Shari'a Talaat Harb, and at any given hour of the day or night the street is teeming with people and cars. I arrived here at night, when things are the most crowded, and it was just ... read more