Day Seven

January 27th

Today was a good day. First of all, I woke up to find that Barack Obama had won the South Caroline Primary. I shouldn't say won, he crushed clinton. This was especially awesome because the Clinton's were attacking Obama all week long. Also, I finally dealt with my final class. I found out a few days ago that my professor for International Relations of the Mideast was one of the worst professors at AUC. So I had to switch out of it and into another class. This was difficult because now every other student was dealing with their registration problems. I solved the problem by basically strong-arming my way into another class and getting ahead of all the other kids. It helped that they had opened another section for Comparative Politics of the Middle-East, which is the final class I got into. So I am taking 15 credits.
Tomorrow Survival Arabic starts. This is basically the introduction to the Colloquial Arabic. Hopefully it will help with the language barrier.
Today we also went wondering through new parts of Cairo. We went looking for the Abdeen Palace, which used to be where the living quarters of the king and presidents. But now Mubarak moved to a safer, newer location, and this thing has been transformed into a Military Museum. This military museum was like nothing I had ever seen before. All it had were just cases of cases of guns and daggers. My favorite weapons included a leatherman's that also included a pistol and a breast plate that had 19 barrels adhered to the front of it. This way you could just walk into a group pull the switch on your armor and unless 19 bullets. Absolutely made zero tactical sense. I took a picture.
My other experience today came with watching Attonement at an Arabic movie theater. The theater was really nice and the movie was in English with Arabic and French. However, the theater experience was quite different then American ones. First of all, people answered their cellphone during the film and talked to whoever called them. Second, they had an intermission. Third, they cut all the war, sex, and profanity out of the movie making it only last about an hour and half. It made the movie really lame and I feel asleep.
Finally as we wandering through the city, I got to see more of Cairo. I refrain from calling it the real Cairo because there are so many different parts of Cairo and they are all different and unique parts of Cairo and I should really appreciate each section for how it is. I should enjoy the ritzy European Zamalek and touristy Midan Tahrir and the slums that comprise most of Cairo. The city is really dirty, really crowded and really needs to works on water drainage. There were sections of the road covered in 8 inches of water for what looked like 50 feet. It really didn't even rain that much.